A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 4, Dec. 1810-Dec. 1811

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

THE SECOND BRITISH SIEGE OF BADAJOZ.
MAY-JUNE 1811

The short ten-day campaign of Fuentes de Oñoro had not been without important results, but it had left the general strategical aspect of affairs in the Peninsula unaltered. Almeida had fallen, and it had been demonstrated that the French Army of Portugal was not strong enough to force back Wellington from the frontier, where he had taken post. On the other hand, it was equally clear that Wellington was far too weak to dream of taking the offensive in the valley of the Douro, or marching on Salamanca. Such a movement would have brought 20,000 men from the Army of the North to the aid of the Army of Portugal, and the allied army on the northern frontier was barely superior in numbers to the latter alone, even when the 9th Corps had departed for Andalusia. To provoke the enemy to concentrate would have been insane; if he were left alone, however, it was improbable that he would prove dangerous for many a day. Marmont had to complete the reorganization of the army which he had just taken over from Masséna; it would be some months before he could replace the lost cavalry and artillery, fill up his magazines, and finish the reclothing of his tattered regiments. Bessières was so much occupied with the guerrilleros that he would not draw his troops together, unless he were obliged to do so by an advance of the Allies towards his territory. He had, moreover, to keep covering forces out to north and west, in order to watch Abadia’s Galician army, and Longa and Porlier, who still made head against him in the Cantabrian Mountains. It was probable, therefore, that the French in Leon and Old Castile would keep quiet for some time unless they were provoked. Wellington resolved to leave them unmolested, and to endeavour to strike a blow in the south.

On the day when the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro was fought, Beresford, with the 20,000 men who had been detached to Estremadura, was, as Wellington knew, just about to commence the siege of Badajoz. It was certain that this enterprise would bring Soult and his Army of Andalusia to the succour of the fortress. The line of conduct which Beresford was to pursue when Soult should appear had been already settled—he was to fight if the enemy were weak, to retire behind the Guadiana if he were strong[505]. But meanwhile it was now possible to reinforce Beresford with 10,000 men, since Marmont and Bessières would be out of the game for many weeks. Leaving nearly 30,000 men on the Dos Casas and the Coa, to protect the Portuguese frontier and to guard the repairing of Almeida, Wellington could march to join the Army of Estremadura with the balance of his army. He thought that two divisions could be spared, and chose the 3rd and the 7th. If he marched rapidly across the Beira with this force, he might arrive in time to join Beresford for the battle against Soult which was inevitable. It might take place south of the Guadiana, if the French Marshal had delayed his advance, or north of it, if he had come up in great force and had compelled Beresford to give back toward Elvas, and to abandon the siege of Badajoz. But in either case Beresford’s army, reinforced by 10,000 men, would be strong enough to beat Soult. The only possible contingency to be feared was that the Duke of Dalmatia might abandon Granada and the Lines before Cadiz, concentrate 50,000 men, and let Andalusia shift for itself while he marched on Badajoz. Wellington judged, and rightly, that it was most improbable that he would make this desperate move, and evacuate three-fourths of his viceroyalty, in order to make certain of saving Badajoz. Knowing the strength of Beresford and Castaños, he would come with the 20,000 or 25,000 men that he could collect without disgarrisoning any points of primary importance. In such a case, supposing that he came with the higher figure, Beresford had 20,000 Anglo-Portuguese, 10,000 more were coming down from the Beira, and there were the Spaniards of Blake and of Castaños to be taken into consideration. Soult would find himself faced by 45,000 men, and could not possibly prevent the siege of Badajoz from proceeding. If the place could be taken promptly, there would be no time for reinforcements to reach the Marshal from the Army of Portugal or the Army of the Centre: and should he finally resolve to draw up further forces from Andalusia, he must abandon either the kingdom of Granada or the Cadiz lines, or both. To force him to give up his grasp on either of these points would be a great end in itself, and a sufficient reward for a successful campaign.

But everything depended on swift movement and the economy of time. Should Soult refuse to fight, and resolve to appeal for help to the other French armies, it was certain that 50,000 men might be gathered to his aid within a month or five weeks. All the Anglo-Portuguese troops combined, supposing that every man were drawn in from the north to join Beresford, would not make up over 60,000 sabres and bayonets. On the other hand, a junction between the Armies of Andalusia and Portugal, with aid lent by Bessières and the Army of the Centre, could certainly produce 80,000 men, perhaps more. Wherefore it might be argued that if Badajoz could be taken in a month a great success might be scored. But if the siege were to linger on over that time, the enemy would be able to concentrate in such force that the enterprise might become impracticable. The game was worth trying.

Wellington’s dispatches to Lord Liverpool and other correspondents between the 14th and the 25th of May make it perfectly clear that these were his views. ‘Fortunately for me,’ he wrote, ‘the French armies have no communications, and one army has no knowledge of the position or of the circumstances in which the others are placed, whereas I have a knowledge of all that passes on all sides. From this knowledge I think I may draw troops from Beira for my operations against Badajoz. But I cannot venture further south till I shall get Ciudad Rodrigo, without exposing all to ruin[506].’ Again, ‘I do not think it possible for me to undertake more in the south, under existing circumstances, than the siege of Badajoz. I cannot, by any effort I can make, increase the British and Portuguese [in that quarter] beyond 30,000 men, to which the Spanish force may add 8,000 or 10,000 more[507].’ He was perfectly aware that a concentration against him was possible, but that it would take a long time to come about. ‘I do not know when Marmont can be ready to co-operate with Soult; however, as the siege of Badajoz can be raised with ease and without loss, whenever it may be necessary, I have thought it best to lose no time, and to adopt every means to get that place, if I can, before the enemy’s troops can join. If I cannot get it, I may raise the siege and fight a battle or not, as I may find most proper, according to the state of our respective forces[508].’ It is clear, then, that Wellington’s utmost ambition was to take Badajoz, and that he foresaw that he must take it within a limited time, under penalty of seeing the scheme fail owing to the concentration of the enemy. His letters show that he knew that Drouet and the 9th Corps had started for Andalusia immediately after Fuentes de Oñoro, and in calculating Soult’s utmost available force in June he takes Drouet into account[509], though he somewhat under-values his numerical strength.

The garrison of Almeida had made its escape on the night of May 10th-11th; the French army had drawn back beyond Ciudad Rodrigo, and dispersed itself into cantonments, on May 12th. As early as the morning of May 14th the column destined for Estremadura set out upon its march. It consisted, as has been already mentioned, of the 3rd and 7th Divisions, with the artillery attached to them. For the purpose of providing cavalry for scouting and exploration, the 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion were attached. This corps was the first cavalry reinforcement that Wellington had received for more than a year. It had landed at Lisbon in April[510], and had marched up to Celorico; from thence it was ordered to strike across country, to join the column marching for the valley of the Guadiana, and to place itself at the disposition of Picton, its senior officer. They met at Belmonte, and went on their southward way in company. The route lay through Castello Branco, the boat-bridge of Villa Velha, Niza, and Portalegre. Picton reached Campo Mayor, in the immediate vicinity of Badajoz, on May 24th, having taken ten days only to cross the roughest and most thinly peopled corner of Portugal. The average of marching had been fifteen miles a day, an excellent rate when the character of the roads is taken into consideration.

Wellington himself started from Villar Formoso two days after the departure of the troops, on May 16th, and riding with his accustomed headlong speed reached Elvas on the afternoon of May 19th[511]. He had passed Picton between Sabugal and Belmonte. Before quitting the line of the Agueda, he drew up elaborate instructions for Sir Brent Spencer, who was left, as usual, in charge of the army on the northern frontier. The force entrusted to Spencer consisted of the 1st, 5th, 6th, and Light Divisions, Pack’s and Ashworth’s Portuguese brigades, and the cavalry of Slade, Arentschildt, and Barbaçena, altogether about 26,000 foot and 1,800 horse. The directions left were much the same as those which had been issued during Wellington’s earlier visit to Estremadura in April. ‘It is probable that some time will elapse before the French army in this part of Spain will be capable of making any movement against the Allies.’ Yet the unexpected might happen, and Spencer was told that, while so large a detachment was absent in the south, he must adopt a purely defensive attitude in the unlikely event of Marmont’s taking the field against him. For the present he was to hold the line of the Azava, facing Ciudad Rodrigo, with his advanced posts. The divisions were to be cantoned between Almeida and Nava de Aver, so that they could be concentrated in a single day. If the enemy should advance with a large force, as if intending a serious invasion, Almeida was to be evacuated, since it would be impossible that the repairs to its ruined ramparts should have got far enough to render the place tenable. The army was to fall back, not westward towards Almeida and Guarda, but southwards, firstly to the position before Alfayates which had already been marked out in April, then to a second position at Aldea Velha and Rendo, then to a third beyond the Coa. In case Marmont should push even further, the line of retreat was to be from Sabugal to Belmonte, and finally by the mountain road of the Estrada Nova towards the Zezere. ‘But the strong country between Belmonte and the Zezere must not be given up in a hurry[512].’ All this was pure precaution against the improbable: Wellington was convinced, and quite rightly, that Marmont would be incapable for some weeks, probably for some months, of any serious offensive action against Portugal. To invade the Beira he would have to collect a store of provisions such as the exhausted kingdom of Leon could not possibly give him. His magazines were known to have been empty after Fuentes de Oñoro, and his troops had been dispersed because there was no possibility of feeding them while they were concentrated. Spencer could be in no possible danger for many a day; so strongly did Wellington feel this, that when he reached Elvas he wrote back to his lieutenant on May 24th that he intended to borrow from him Howard’s British and Ashworth’s Portuguese brigades, and thought that this could be done without any risk. But if, ‘notwithstanding my expectations to the contrary,’ Marmont seemed to be on the move, the brigades might be stopped[513].

Just before starting on his ride from Villar Formoso to Elvas Wellington received Beresford’s dispatches of May 12, which informed him that Soult (as had been expected) was on the march from Seville to relieve Badajoz, and that, according to the instructions that had been given, the allied army of Estremadura would fight him, if he were not too strong to be meddled with. It was the news that battle was impending which made the Commander-in-Chief quicken his pace to fifty miles a day, in hopes that he might be in time to take charge of the troops in person. He galloped ahead, and on the morning of the 19th heard, between Niza and Elvas, that there had been a pitched battle on the 16th, and that Soult had been repulsed. The details met him at Elvas, where Arbuthnot, Beresford’s aide-de-camp, handed him the Albuera dispatch. He read it through, and struck out some paragraphs before sending it on to the Ministry at home. The reason for these erasures was that he considered that Beresford’s tone was a little too desponding, and that he had laid too much stress on the terrible loss of the British troops, and too little on the complete check to Soult’s designs[514]. He wrote to the Marshal to hearten him up, to tell him that the result achieved had been worth the cost. ‘You could not be successful in such an action without a large loss, and we must make up our mind to affairs of this kind sometimes—or give up the game[515].’

With the military situation that he found in existence on May 19th Wellington professed himself satisfied. Hamilton’s Portuguese division had reinvested Badajoz on the preceding day. Soult was in full retreat, with the allied cavalry in pursuit of him. It was uncertain whether he would fall back on Seville or halt at the line of the Sierra Morena; but at any rate his bolt was shot: he could give no trouble for some weeks, and would only become dangerous if he strengthened his army by calling up Sebastiani and Victor, and evacuating the Cadiz Lines and Granada. This Wellington rightly believed that he would not think of doing. He would rather cry for aid to his neighbours, and it would take a long time for reinforcements to reach him from the Army of Portugal or from Madrid. There was a month in hand, and Badajoz must be captured if possible within that space.

The first thing necessary was to push Soult as far back as he would go, and from the 20th to the 26th Beresford was engaged in following him up. At first only the cavalry was available for pursuit: Hamilton’s division had been sent back to Badajoz; the 2nd and 4th were allowed five days of repose on the battlefield of Albuera. Not only were they absolutely exhausted, but all their transport was engaged in the heart-rending task of forwarding to Elvas convoy after convoy of British wounded. The French, of whom the last were not collected till three days after the battle, were packed in an extemporized hospital at Albuera village, where they suffered much for lack of surgeons. It would have been possible to send Blake’s army to support the British cavalry if he had possessed provisions, but he reported that his men were starving, and that he must disperse them to procure food; accordingly they were sent to Almendral, Barcarrota, and the neighbouring villages, to gather stores as best they might.

Soult meanwhile gave back slowly, being hampered by his immense convoys of wounded. On the 20th he retired from Solana to Almendralejo and Azeuchal, on the 21st to Villafranca and Fuente del Maestre; on the 22nd he was in march for Usagre and Llerena, so that it was evident that he was retiring on the Sierra Morena by the Llerena and not by the Monasterio road. It was only on this last day that Beresford’s infantry were able to start in support of the cavalry advanced guard, which had been cautiously following on Soult’s track. The Albuera divisions were sad wrecks of their former selves; the 2nd had but 2,500 bayonets in its three brigades, the 4th about 2,200 British and 2,500 Portuguese; Alten’s German brigade was less than 1,000 strong, so that the whole did not make up much more than 8,000 men. But Blake was requested to move on Feria and Zafra, parallel to the advance of the British column, and did so, having collected a few days’ provisions in his cantonments. The whole force was sufficient to move Soult back, since his troops were in a despondent humour, and did not amount to more than 13,000 or 14,000 men, for he had been forced to detach a brigade under Gazan to escort his immense train of wounded back to Seville. But the allied infantry never came up with the retreating French; by the time that it had reached Villalba and Fuente del Maestre Soult was at Llerena, thirty miles ahead.

The last day of his retreat was marked by a vigorous cavalry action, the most satisfactory of its kind that the British horse in the Peninsula had been engaged in since the combats of Sahagun and Benavente. Having reached Llerena, where he intended to stop if he were allowed, Soult determined to find out what was the force which was pursuing him, and more especially if it were accompanied by infantry. He instructed Latour-Maubourg to turn back, to attack the allied horse, and to drive it in upon its supports. Accordingly the French cavalry general took the four brigades of Bron, Bouvier des Éclats, Vinot, and Briche[516], some 3,000 sabres in all, and began to advance along the high-road. He found in Villa Garcia the enemy’s advanced vedettes, composed of Penne Villemur’s Spaniards, drove them out, and pursued them for five miles, till he came to the town of Usagre, where he caught a glimpse of supports in position. He had run against the main body of the allied horse, though he could not make out either its strength or its intentions.

General Lumley, who was thus thrown upon the defensive, had with him his three original British cavalry regiments (3rd Dragoon Guards, 4th Dragoons, 13th Light Dragoons), four small regiments of Madden’s and Otway’s Portuguese[517], and a detachment of Penne Villemur’s Spanish horse under General Loy[518], about 2,200 sabres in all, so that his position was a dangerous one. But the fighting-ground was propitious. Usagre lies on the south bank of the stream, which flows in a well-marked ravine; on the north bank there are two rolling heights a few hundred yards back from the water, with a definite sky-line. Troops placed behind them were invisible to an enemy coming up from the town, and the French, if they wished to attack, would have to defile on a narrow front, first through the main street of Usagre, and then across the bridge.

On hearing of Latour-Maubourg’s approach, Lumley sent the 13th Light Dragoons and Otway’s Portuguese across the ravine to the left of the town, and Madden’s Portuguese in like manner on the right, each using a ford which had been previously discovered and sounded. The heavy dragoons remained facing the town, behind the sky-line, with Lefebure’s battery, guarding the high-road. Both the flanking forces reported that the enemy was coming up the road in great strength—Lumley was told that thirteen regiments had been counted, though there were really only ten. Wherefore he ordered Otway and Madden to recross the stream by their fords, which they did without loss, and to watch these passages, while keeping well under cover behind the sky-line.

Latour-Maubourg could not make out the force or the intentions of the Allies; he had seen clearly only the Spanish vedettes which he had driven out of Usagre; but Madden’s and Otway’s squadrons had not escaped notice altogether, though they retired early, so that he was aware that a hostile force of some strength was lying behind the heights. He therefore resolved not to debouch from Usagre along the high-road with his main body, across the defile at the bridge, till he had got a flanking force across the stream, to threaten and turn Lumley, if he were intending to defend the line along the water. Briche’s brigade of light horse was told off for this purpose, with orders to go to the right, down-stream, and to pass the river at the ford which Otway’s Portuguese had been seen to use in their retreat. Meanwhile the other three French brigades waited in Usagre, deferring their advance till the chasseurs should have time to get on Lumley’s flank.

The two forces did not keep touch. Briche went for a mile along the river, and found the ford; but Otway was guarding it, and he did not like to try the passage of a steep ravine in face of an enemy in position. Wherefore he moved further off, looking for a more practicable and unguarded crossing; but the banks grew steeper and steeper as he rode northward, and he found that he was losing time. He was long absent, and apparently committed the inexcusable fault of omitting to send any report explaining his long delay. After waiting for more than an hour Latour-Maubourg became impatient, and fell into an equally grave military error. Taking it for granted that the chasseurs must now be in their destined position, he ordered his division of dragoons to debouche from the town and cross the stream and the defile. Bron’s brigade led; the two regiments in front, the 4th and 20th, trotted over the bridge, and deployed on the other side, on an ascending slope, to cover the passage of the remainder of the division. The third regiment of the brigade, the 26th, was just crossing the bridge, when suddenly the whole sky-line in front was covered with a long line of horsemen charging downwards. Lumley had waited till the propitious moment, and had caught his enemy in a trap, with one-third of his force across the water, and the remainder jammed in the defile of bridge and street. The 4th Dragoons charged Bron straight in front, the 3rd Dragoon Guards took him somewhat in flank, while Madden’s Portuguese supported on the right, and Penne Villemur’s Spaniards on the left. The two deployed French regiments were hurled back on the third, at the bridge-foot, and all three fell into most lamentable confusion. The Allies penetrated into the mass, and broke it to pieces, with great slaughter. The survivors, unable to pass the encumbered bridge, dispersed right and left, far along the banks of the stream, where they were pursued and hunted down in detail. Latour-Maubourg could do no more than dismount the leading regiment of his second brigade and set them to fire from the houses along the water-side, while four horse artillery guns opened upon the enemy’s main body. But the guns were promptly silenced by Lefebure’s battery, which Lumley had put in action on the slope above, and Latour-Maubourg had to watch the destruction of Bron’s brigade without being able to give effective help. More than 250 dragoons were killed or wounded, and 6 officers, including the colonel of the 4th, with 72 men were led away prisoners[519]. The British loss was insignificant—not twenty troopers—for the enemy had been caught in a position in which they could offer no effective resistance. Lumley made no attempt to attack Usagre town, which would indeed have been insane, and drew off at leisure with his prisoners. Latour-Maubourg sent to recall Briche, and remained halted on his own side of the stream till evening.

At Usagre the two armies drew their line of demarcation for nearly a month. Soult stopped at Llerena, since he found that he was not to be pressed; his advanced cavalry continued to hold Usagre and Monasterio, on the two roads from Badajoz and Seville. Beresford, by Wellington’s orders, did not move further forward: it was not intended that Andalusia should be invaded, or a second battle with Soult risked. The cavalry formed a line from Hinojosa to Fuente Cantos, facing the French, the Anglo-Portuguese forming the left, the Spanish the right of the screen. Some of Blake’s infantry moved up to Zafra in support, but the main body remained further to the rear, about Santa Marta and Barcarrota. The British 2nd and 4th Divisions were placed further back, at Almendralejo and the neighbouring villages, with the bulk of Lumley’s cavalry in front of them at Ribera, in support of the left half of the screen, which its advanced squadrons supplied. On the 27th May Beresford relinquished the command of the separate army of Estremadura, which had been merged in a larger unit when the 3rd and 7th Divisions came up to Campo Mayor on the 24th. Wellington had announced his intention of assuming permanent charge of the force in the south, which was henceforth considered as the main army, and the seat of head quarters, while Spencer’s four divisions on the frontier of Leon were now to be regarded as the subsidiary force.

In his letters home Wellington spoke of Beresford’s removal from active command in the field as necessary because of the unsatisfactory state into which the Portuguese army had fallen during his absence; his strong and methodical hand had been much missed, and matters of detail had all gone wrong. But there can be no doubt that this was a secondary consideration; the real cause of his supersession was that his chief had not been satisfied with his conduct of the Estremaduran campaign in March and April. Though there were excuses and explanations to be found for each one of his individual acts, yet the general effect of his leadership had not been happy. The best commentary on it was that every one, from Wellington to the simplest soldier in the ranks, was delighted to hear that Rowland Hill had landed at Lisbon on May 24, and was on his way to the front to resume command of the 2nd Division. He was at once placed in the same position that he had held in 1810, i. e. entrusted with the command not only of his own division but of the whole wing of the army which was detached to the south. The force put at his disposition to observe Soult and cover the leaguer of Badajoz, consisted of precisely the same units that had formed Beresford’s Albuera army—with the exception that Hamilton’s and Collins’s Portuguese had been drawn off to the siege operations. Hill had charge of the 2nd and 4th Divisions, Alten’s detached German brigade, and De Grey’s and Madden’s cavalry, the whole about 10,000 strong. When he arrived at Elvas on May 31st, and then went forward to establish himself at Almendralejo, Wellington felt a degree of security that he had not known for months. It was certain that nothing would be risked, that there would be neither delays nor mistakes, while this kindly, cheerful, and resolute old soldier, the idol of his troops, who called him in affection ‘Daddy Hill,’ was in charge of the covering corps.

Meanwhile Wellington himself took the siege operations in hand, and employed in them the troops he had brought from the Beira, the 3rd and 7th Divisions, together with Hamilton’s and Collins’s Portuguese. The whole, including about 700 British and Portuguese artillerymen, mainly the same companies that had served in Beresford’s siege, made up about 14,000 men—a force even smaller than that with which Soult had attacked Badajoz in January; but the French Marshal had had to deal with a garrison of 9,000 men, while General Phillipon, the resourceful governor now in charge of the place, had but a little over 3,000—a difference which made Wellington’s position much more advantageous than Soult’s had been. The cavalry which had come down from the Beira along with Picton, the 2nd Hussars of the K. G. L.[520], was sent to join the rest of the horse, and went to form a new brigade, being added to the 13th Light Dragoons, a regiment hitherto unbrigaded. By June 1st there was another mounted corps to hand—the 11th Light Dragoons,[521] which also went to join Lumley, so that the British cavalry in Estremadura rose from three to six regiments during the summer.

There were two deficiencies, however, which made Wellington’s task in besieging Badajoz a hard, nay an almost hopeless one. His artillery material, if not so ludicrously inadequate as that of Beresford during the first siege, was still utterly insufficient. And to this we must add that his engineer officers were still both few and unpractised in their art. They repeated the same mistakes that had been seen in the early days of May. Of trained rank and file in the engineering branch there were practically none—only twenty-five ‘royal military artificers.’ The home authorities apparently grudged sending out to Portugal men of this small and highly trained corps, and preferred to keep them in England. It is impossible to speak with patience of the fact that there was not even one company of them in the Peninsula, after the war had been going on for three years[522]!

It was the miscalculations of the engineers—Colonel Fletcher was presumably the responsible person, as Wellington’s chief technical adviser—rather than the deplorable weakness of the artillery resources—which made the second British siege of Badajoz as disastrous as the first. Untaught by the experiences of the first week in May, the engineers advised Wellington to direct his efforts against the two strongest points in the defences, the rocky hill crowned by the fort of San Cristobal on one bank of the Guadiana, and the Castle on its steep slope upon the other. The arguments used seem to have been the same as before—time being limited, it was necessary to strike at the most decisive points. If either San Cristobal or the Castle could be breached and stormed, the rest of the fortress would be dominated and would become untenable. If, on the other hand, one of the southern fronts, where the French had made their attack, were to be chosen as the objective, the Castle and San Cristobal, forming independent defences, might hold out long after the enceinte had been pierced and carried. Moreover, it was urged, San Cristobal was an isolated fort, so placed that it could get no help from the flank fires of other works, save from a few guns on the Castle; its other neighbour, the fort at the bridge-head, was too low-lying to be of any help.

Practically the only difference between the engineers’ plans for the first[523] and the second siege of Badajoz was that in the latter more attention was paid to the attack on the south side, and the whole force of the besiegers was not concentrated on San Cristobal, as it had been in early May. A serious attempt was made to breach the Castle, not a mere demonstration or false attack. Yet, as matters turned out, all the stress of the work once more fell upon the San Cristobal front, where two desperate assaults were made and repulsed, while on the Castle front matters never got to the point of an attempted storm. Summing up the siege in the words of D’Urban, Beresford’s chief of the staff, who watched it ruefully, we can only echo his conclusion ‘that the fact is that the engineers began upon the wrong side[524].’ Two geological peculiarities of the ground were fatal to success: the first was that on San Cristobal the soil is so shallow—three inches only on top of the hard rock—that it was impossible to construct proper trenches. The second was that the Castle hill is composed of a clay-slate which does not crumble, however much battered, and that the wall there was simply a facing to the native soil. Its stones might be battered down, but the hillside stood firm when the stones had fallen, and remained perpendicular and inaccessible. The latter fact could not be known to Wellington’s engineers; but the former was fully within their cognizance, owing to their experience in the first siege. There can be no doubt that they ought to have selected for battering the south front—either the point where Soult worked during February, or still better the walls nearer the river, by the bastion of San Vincente, where the ground is equally favourable and there is no flanking external defence like the Pardaleras fort. If every gun had been concentrated on this section, and every available man set to trench-work against it, there can be little doubt that Wellington would have got Badajoz within the scant four weeks that were at his disposal.

Though the blockade had been resumed on May 18th, the actual siege did not recommence for some days later, since the troops from the Beira, who were to conduct it, did not get up till a week had passed. On May 25th Houston’s division arrived from Campo Mayor, and took position on the heights beyond San Cristobal; they were there joined by the 17th Portuguese from the garrison of Elvas, and two regiments of Algarve Militia (Tavira and Lagos) were assigned for transport and convoy duty between the trenches and Elvas. Picton and the 3rd Division came up two days later (May 27th), crossed the Guadiana by the ford above the city, and joined Hamilton’s Portuguese on the southern bank. An earlier arrival of the Beira divisions would have been of no great use, since it was only on the 29th that Colonel Alexander Dickson, who had once more been entrusted with the artillery arrangements, had sent off his great convoy of guns from Elvas. This time that indefatigable officer had collected a siege-train twice as large as that which he had prepared for Beresford four weeks earlier—there were forty-six guns in all[525] instead of twenty-three. But unhappily the pieces were the same as those used in the first siege, or their equals in age and defects. The large majority were the old brass 24-pounders of the seventeenth century which had already given so much trouble from their irregularity of calibre, their tendency to droop at the muzzle when much used, and their tiresome habit of ‘unbushing’ (i. e. blowing out their vent fitting). Six iron ship-guns, ordered up from Lisbon, only arrived when the siege was far advanced, and were the sole weapons of real efficiency with which Dickson was provided. It is clear that head quarters might have done something in the way of ordering up better guns early in May, the moment that the first siege had shown the deficiencies of the Elvas museum of artillery antiquities. The gunners, like the guns, were about doubled in number since Beresford’s fiasco: there were now over 500 Portuguese, and one company of British (Raynsford’s), 110 strong, who arrived from Lisbon on the 30th, riding on mules which had been provided at Estremos to give them a rapid journey. To aid the twenty-one engineers on the spot, eleven officers from line battalions had been taken on as assistant engineers, while the twenty-five military artificers had to train 250 rank and file, selected from the 3rd and 7th Divisions, to act as carpenters, miners, and sappers. The work of these amateurs was, as might have been expected, not very satisfactory, and the make of their gabions and fascines left much to be desired.

On May 29th the siege work began, by the opening up of the old trenches opposite the Pardaleras fort, which the French had filled in on the day of Albuera. This was merely done to draw the attention of the garrison away from the real points of attack, for there was no intention of approaching the place from the south. It would have been better for the Allies had this been a genuine operation, and if the Castle and San Cristobal attacks had been false! It attracted, as was intended, much notice from the garrison.

On the night of the 30th the serious work began. On the Castle side 1,600 men from the 3rd Division commenced at dusk a long trench, on the same ground that had been dug over during the first siege, and three zigzag approaches to it from the rear. This trench, the first parallel, was no less than 800 yards from the Castle. The attention of the enemy was so much drawn to other points, and the soil was so soft, that by daybreak there had been formed a trench 1,100 yards long, with a parapet three feet high, and a depth of three feet in the ground: the approaches were also well advanced. On San Cristobal, at the other attack, everything went very differently. The ground chosen for the first parallel was, owing to the exigencies of the contour of the hill, only 400 yards from the fort. The working parties were discovered at once, and a heavy fire was directed on them, not only from San Cristobal, but from the Castle, across the river. It was found that there was no soil to dig in—what little once existed had been used in building the old trenches of the first siege, and the French governor, during his days of respite, May 15-18, had ingeniously ordered that all this earth should be carted away, and thrown down the steep towards the river. All that could be done was to place a row of gabions along the intended line of trench, and to begin to bring up earth from below to stuff them. At daylight there was not more than two feet of earth thrown up along the more important points in the parallel, where it was intended that three batteries should be placed. The enemy’s fire soon knocked over the gabions, and the working parties had to be withdrawn from a great part of the front. Practically nothing had been accomplished, and there had been many casualties.

Things continued to go on in the same fashion during the succeeding days. The parallel opposite the Castle was easily completed with little loss; a great battery for twenty guns was thrown up in the middle of it, and received its pieces, sixteen brass 24-pounders and four howitzers, on the night of the 2nd-3rd. No attempt was made to begin a second parallel nearer the Castle, from which it could be battered at short range. On the other hand the San Cristobal attack encountered heart-rending difficulties from the want of soil; the screen of gabions was knocked about, the two batteries opposite the fort made little progress, and the only thing completed was a third battery, at the extreme edge of the hill, which was far enough away to escape destruction, but also too far away (1,200 yards) to do much damage. It seemed so hopeless to work on the bare rock that Wellington ordered £400 worth of wool-packs to be bought in Elvas, and when these were brought up on June 2 they proved impermeable to shot, and a solid start could be made for the parapets of the batteries. But the enemy kept dropping shells, from mortars in the Castle, among the working parties, with great accuracy, and the casualties were many. On June 2nd two small batteries, for five and eight guns respectively, had at last been erected about 450 yards from the fort, and a third behind them, in support, for four more guns, which were to shoot over the parallel.

At half-past nine in the morning of June 3rd the batteries on both fronts began to play on their chosen objectives. The fire was at first wild, owing to the eccentric behaviour of the old seventeenth-century brass guns, every one of which had its tricks and deficiencies. As the gunners began to learn and humour them, some effect began to be produced, especially on the Castle. Here great flakes of masonry began to fall in the evening, but it was noticed that behind the stone facing there was a core of clay-slate, the natural soil of the Castle hill, which remained perpendicular when the masonry crumbled. On San Cristobal, the south-east front of the fort, the one selected for breaching, was somewhat damaged, and the guns nearly silenced by evening. But the besiegers’ artillery had already begun to fall off in strength: only one piece had been disabled by the French, but four others had gone out of action owing to their own faults, ‘unbushing,’ ‘muzzle drooping,’ or carriages shaken to pieces by recoil. The second day of fire (June 4th) was hardly more satisfactory in its results: against the Castle the guns made better practice so far as accurate hitting the mark went, but the balls seemed to have no effect: the core of soil behind the breached masonry remained nearly as perpendicular as on the preceding evening. ‘Eight-inch shells fired against it would not penetrate it,’ wrote the disgusted Alexander Dickson, ‘but absolutely dropped back, and burst below among the rubbish[526].’ Meanwhile one more gun in this attack was disabled by the French fire, two by ‘muzzle drooping,’ and three howitzer carriages were so shaken that they had to be withdrawn for repairs. Only thirteen guns out of the original twenty were firing at sunset, and ‘the failure of the old brass pieces was becoming so alarming that an interval of seven to eight minutes was ordered between each round, to give the metal time to cool[527].’ A new battery was constructed at the right end of the parallel, near the river, at a point somewhat nearer to the Castle than the original battery, in the hope that fire from a distance shorter by a hundred yards might have better effect, and five guns were moved into it under cover of the night.

On San Cristobal the second day’s fire was a little better in results, the flank of the fort which was selected for breaching having its parapet knocked to pieces, and much debris having fallen into the ditch. But unknown to the besiegers, whose view could not command the bottom of the ditch, the French removed most of the stones and rubbish during the night, so that the accumulation at the bottom, on which the practicability of the future breach depended, was much smaller than was supposed by the British engineers. Two more guns and two howitzers in this attack were out of action by the evening—all owing to their own defects, not to the fire from the fort. The batteries were much incommoded by an enfilading fire across the river from the Castle, where some guns had been placed on a high ‘cavalier’ to bear on the slopes below Cristobal.

On June 5 affairs went on much in the same style: the breaching of the Castle was an absolute failure: ‘the practice was extremely good, but the bank of earth at the breach still remained perpendicular[528].’ It was discovered, however, that the French were so far alarmed at the results of the battering that they were constructing elaborate inner retrenchments behind the breach. On Cristobal the prospects looked more promising; so much of the wall as was visible over the edge of the ditch along the attacked front was demolished for a distance of many yards. With another day’s fire it was decided that the breach would be practicable[529].

Accordingly the batteries on both sides of the river thundered away for the whole day on the 6th, the Castle attack with fourteen guns out of its original twenty, the Cristobal attack with seventeen remaining out of twenty-three. On the former front the results were somewhat more satisfactory than those of the three first days of battering: the seam in the castle wall appearing much wider, and the accumulation of rubbish at its foot beginning to look appreciable. Observers in the trenches held that a single man, climbing unhindered, might get up to the top, but of course there was a great difference between such a scrambling place and a ‘practicable breach.’ Nothing, at any rate, could yet be done on this side in the way of assault. There were, it must be remembered, 800 yards of open ground between the parallel from which a storming-column must start and the foot of the damaged wall, not to speak of the muddy bed of the Rivillas brook, which had to be forded in order to reach the Castle hill.

The San Cristobal breach, on the other hand, was judged ripe for assault, though the condition of its lower part was not accurately known. According to French accounts it was probably practicable at dusk, but the moment that night fell sixty men went down into the ditch, and began clearing away the débris with such energy that there was a sheer seven-foot drop once more, at midnight, between the bottom of the excavation and the lip of the battered wall above it. The garrison also stuffed up the breach with chevaux de frise, and carts turned upside down and jammed together, while the sappers in the fort prepared a quantity of fourteen-inch bombs, to be thrown by hand into the ditch when an assault should be made. It is probable that the delay of over four hours between dark (7.30) and midnight, when the storm came, just sufficed to provide defences strong enough to render the attack hopeless. The governor of the fort, Captain Chauvin of the 88th Line, deserves all credit for his admirable activity and resource.

The arrangement of the assault fell to General Houston, whose division was to deliver it. The regiments from which volunteers were picked were the 1/51st, 2/85th, and 17th Portuguese. The forlorn hope of twenty-five men was conducted by the engineer, Lieutenant Forster, who had explored the ditch on the preceding night, and led by Lieutenant Dyas of the 51st. The main body of the assaulting column was composed of 155 grenadiers, led by Major Mackintosh of the 85th; they were divided into two companies; the leading company carried ten ladders, for use in case it should be found that the ditch was cleared and the ascent to the breach steep. Detachments from the guards of the trenches were to move out, and cut the communication between San Cristobal and the works near the bridge-head, from which reinforcements might come[530].

At midnight the stormers broke out of the trenches, and ran, as fast as was possible in the obscurity, up the 400 yards of bare hillside which separated them from the fort. They suffered no great loss in the early moments of their rush, for though the garrison detected them at once, and plied them both with grape and with musketry, the darkness was a good protection. The forlorn hope crossed the counterscarp with no difficulty—it was only four feet deep in front of the breach-and leaped down into the ditch. There they came to a stand at once, for there were seven feet of sheer ascent from the hole in which they stood to the lowest point of the lip of the breach, and they saw that the gap itself had been stopped with the carts, chevaux de frise and other obstacles. Their officers called them off, and they were retiring with little loss, when the main body of the storming party came leaping down into the ditch. Getting news that the breach was impracticable, the officers in command of the two grenadier companies made a gallant but ill-judged series of attempts to escalade the unbreached parts of the scarp with the ten ladders that their men carried. The ascent being twenty feet high everywhere, and the ladders only fifteen feet long, it was bound to fail. But, refusing to be discomfited by a first failure, the stormers carried the ladders round to several other points of the ditch, looking in vain for a place where the walls might prove lower. The French garrison plied them incessantly with musketry, and kept rolling down among them the live shells that had been prepared for the occasion. At last the losses had grown so great that the wearied assailants, after spending nearly an hour in the ditch, had to withdraw. Out of 180 men employed there were no less than 12 dead and about 80 wounded[531], a sufficient testimony to the obstinacy of the assault. How hopeless it was may be judged from the fact that the French had only 1 man killed and 5 wounded. Everything seems to have been miscalculated in this unhappy affair—especially the number of the stormers—180 men of all ranks were wholly inadequate for the assault.

The failure against San Cristobal convinced Wellington’s engineers that it was useless to try force till the works had been more severely battered, and three further days of artillery work were put in, before a second storm was tried. The old guns from Elvas continued to disable themselves, and on the 9th only thirteen were in proper order on the Cristobal attack. Things would have been still worse opposite the Castle if six good iron ship-guns from Lisbon had not come up on the 7th. These were put into a new battery on the extreme right, and worked very well. But, including them, there were only twenty pieces playing on the Castle breach on the 8th and 9th. Of the original forty-six guns and howitzers only twenty-seven survived!

The net result of these last three days of bombardment on the Castle side was still unsatisfactory. The ship-guns had at last brought down a good deal of earth and rubble, which was lying in a heap at the foot of the battered wall. But on each of the mornings of the 8th and 9th it was found that the French had, during the dark hours, scarped the front of the breach, and thrown aside so much of the débris that there was still a perpendicular face of six or seven feet high, between the top of the heap of broken earth and masonry and the bottom of the seam of broken wall. This work had been carried out by the garrison under great difficulties, for the British batteries had been throwing grape against the foot of the breach all night, for the purpose of preventing any such activity. But the French, trusting to the cover of the darkness, had continued to work on manfully, and, though some men were hit, the task had on each night been more or less carried out. On the 9th the engineers came to the conclusion that they dared not advise any attempt to storm on this side, considering the enormous distance—600 yards from the wall—at which the columns of attack would have to start, even if they debouched from the part of the parallel which was nearest to the Castle. There was also the bed of the Rivillas to cross, and the guns from that part of the Castle which was uninjured, and from the flank of San Cristobal, would cut up the stormers by enfilading fire. The engineers reluctantly concluded that nothing could be done against the Castle till San Cristobal had fallen, or till a second parallel had been pushed forward much nearer to the place. This was a confession that all their original plans had been erroneous, and that the immense store of shot and shell lavished on the Castle breach had been wasted.

All therefore depended on the result of a second attempt to storm San Cristobal. Here there were now two breaches, a large and a small one; the parapets were completely knocked to pieces, and the fort looked a mere battered heap; its fire had been nearly silenced—so much so that not a single casualty occurred in the trench before it during the last twelve hours of bombardment. Nevertheless the breaches were not very practicable, for here (as at the Castle) the garrison had, by hard work during the nights, cleared away great part of the débris below the breach; they could not be prevented from doing so, because the besiegers’ batteries were so far away that they were unable to command the dead ground in the bottom of the ditch. On each morning the battered parapet was found to have been replaced with sandbags and wool-packs, and the breach itself stopped with chevaux de frise. These were swept away again by continual battering, both on the 8th and the 9th, but the gallant garrison began to replace them on each evening the moment that dusk fell. Nor could this be prevented, because, contrary to all the rules of siegecraft, the besiegers had not sapped up close enough to the walls to enable them to prevent repairs from being carried out. General Phillipon had doubled the garrison of the fort, which now consisted of two companies instead of the one that had held it on the 6th. The men were furnished with three muskets each, and a great store of grenades, fire-balls, and live shell, prepared for throwing by hand, had been sent up into the work.

The 7th Division delivered its second assault on the night of the 9th, three hours earlier than on the previous occasion, and only ninety minutes after dark had fallen. This moment had been chosen in order that the French might have less time to do repairs. But nine o’clock was still too late an hour; rough preparations to receive the stormers had already been made when they arrived. The French narratives state that an assault by daylight in the late afternoon would have been much more likely to succeed[532]. But this idea, though it had been mooted in the English camp, was rejected because of the distance which the attacking column would have to advance, fully visible in the open, under fire, and uphill. Once more the fact that the parallel was too far from the fort had become all important as a hindrance; on the San Cristobal heights approaches could not be driven any nearer, for want of earth to dig in. This had been known from the first, and should have been held sufficient reason for not attacking at all upon this stony height.

General Houston told off for the assault a force twice as great as that which had been sent forward on the 6th, 400 men instead of 180, and (a precaution neglected on the previous occasion) 100 picked shots were told off to line the outer edge of the ditch and keep up a fire against the enemy lining the breach. The assaulting column was guided by Lieutenant Hunt, R.E., and commanded by Major McGeechy of the 17th Portuguese[533]. The volunteers forming it were taken from all the regiments of Sontag’s brigade, the 51st, 85th, Chasseurs Britanniques, and Brunswick Oels, and also from the 17th Portuguese. There being now two breaches, the column was to divide into two halves, one making for that in the salient angle, the other for that in the curtain. The former carried six ladders, the latter ten[534].

The men were paraded in the ravine behind the parallel, and came out into the open at 9 o’clock. They were seen at once, and came under a rapid fire of musketry as they breasted the slope. The guiding engineer, Hunt, and the commander of the column, McGeechy, were both killed before the ditch was reached, with many others. But the forlorn hope sprang down and made for the breaches, followed a moment later by the supports. It appears that, as on June 6th, there was found to be a gap between the top of the rubble in the ditch and the lips of both breaches, six or seven feet high. The ladders were therefore brought forward, and many of them were reared; but the musketry fire knocked over nearly every man who tried to ascend them, and the few who got a footing in the breach were met and bayoneted by the garrison, who showed splendid courage, running down the slope of the breach and charging any small knot of men who struggled on from the ladders[535]. Meanwhile the mass in the ditch, who could not press forward to the breach-foot, were pelted with stones, hand-grenades, bags of powder, and fire-balls. Finally, after nearly an hour of unavailing effort, all the ladders were broken or thrown down, the assailants had lost 5 officers and 49 men killed, and 8 officers and 77 men wounded, and the column recoiled to the trenches[536]. The breaches and glacis were so strewn with their wounded that the artillery dared not fire to cover the retreat, and the French, descending into the ditch, took up to the fort two wounded officers as prisoners, removed the ladders, and threw aside much of the débris, so that the breach-foot was completely cleared.

The losses suffered, one man in three, and the time for which the stormers persisted in the attempt, some fifty minutes, prove that there was no want of courage shown on this disastrous night. The fact seems to be that, as on the 6th, the breach was not really practicable, that an attack could hardly succeed when the column had to cross 400 yards of exposed ground before reaching the fort, and that a storm should never have been tried, when the besieger had not sapped up to the edge of the ditch and placed himself in a position to command it. It may be mentioned that such a ditch as this, hewn in the live rock and very deep, was particularly hard to deal with. Its edges could not become abraded, and it was easy for the defenders to shovel away the débris that fell into it, because the bottom was solid and hard, and the masonry that had been knocked down lay on it, instead of sinking into its floor.

On the morning of the 10th the fire against the Castle was continued with vigour, but on San Cristobal there was a six hours’ truce, which was asked and granted, in order that the many wounded scattered along the slope below the fort might be gathered in. The French, being able to work unmolested at repairs during the cessation of fire, had every reason for giving a polite and humane answer to the request made by the besiegers.

Everything seemed now to depend on the attack against the Castle, since that on the other side of the river had come to such a disastrous conclusion. The fire of the newly arrived iron ship-guns was still very effective, and the breach looked larger and less steep. In fact French accounts state that it was now for the first time thoroughly practicable—but it was 800 yards from the British parallel, and the artillery on the neighbouring bastions and even on the Castle itself was still intact. Phillipon was in no wise freed from care by the successful repulse of the two attempts to storm San Cristobal. He had just had to reduce his troops to half-rations, and even on this scale there were only ten days more of food in the place: no provisions had been got in since Beresford’s first siege began in April. The garrison, though its losses in killed and wounded had not been great, had many sick, and the strain of being constantly under arms expecting an assault was beginning to be felt. There was no news from outside, save that brought by two or three deserters from the foreign corps in the British 7th Division, who reported that Soult was still in the Sierra Morena[537], and that they had heard nothing of the approach of a relieving army, though there was a rumour that Victor was going to raise the siege of Cadiz in order to join his chief. Phillipon was forced to contemplate the double possibility of his provisions running short and of a successful assault on the Castle front. Wherefore he resolved that preparations should be made to bring off the garrison by a sally, if the worst came to the worst. If no relief came, or if the walls were forced, the whole available body of his men were to cross the river to the Cristobal side under cover of the night, and to dash at the lines of the besiegers, in order to cut their way through by the road to Montijo and Merida. But this was not to be tried before the day of absolute necessity should arrive: the council of war called by the governor decided that the topic of evasion need not be broached for five days more[538]. Before those five days had expired they were out of danger and sure of relief.

It was at noon on June 10th that Wellington made up his mind that the siege must be abandoned. Calling together the divisional commanders, and the senior officers of artillery and engineers, he gave them a short address. It had been proved, he said, that it was impossible to storm San Cristobal without sapping up to the crest of the glacis, which was a practically impossible task on the bare rock. There was now a breach in the Castle, but it was too remote from the parallel, and the route to it was commanded both by the guns on the flank of San Cristobal and those on the lunette of San Roque and other parts of the southern enceinte. It was known that it had been elaborately retrenched behind, by ditches and palisades. But these were not his sole or the main reasons for stopping the siege. He had news that Marmont and the 9th Corps would both join Soult in a few days: and the allied army must not be caught in the trenches, and forced to fight superior numbers in an unfavourable position. It would be possible to stop five days more and to continue the battering for that time, but on the 15th the French armies might be concentrated and a general action forced upon him. This he would not risk, but had decided to order the whole siege-train to be withdrawn into Elvas at once, while the army would keep up the blockade of Badajoz till the enemy drew near, and would then retire beyond the Guadiana at its leisure, and take up a position on the Portuguese frontier which he had already chosen. As soon as it was dark the guns should be withdrawn from the batteries, and the sending of stores, tools, &c., back to Elvas must commence. He would have risked a couple of days more battering if he had thought it likely to lead to a storm. But it was his opinion that there was no prospect of immediate success against the place, and he was therefore resolved to give up the siege even before he was actually forced to do so. Rumour adds that he muttered more or less to himself that ‘next time he would be his own engineer[539].’ But he did not speak publicly in censure of the mistakes of Fletcher and his colleagues: the men who had planned and built the Lines of Torres Vedras were not to be disgraced lightly, even if they had failed in their last task.

The approaching concentration of the French armies had been very carefully watched by Wellington, who was in constant touch with Spencer, and had been keeping a most vigilant eye on all his reports. He had also been helped by several intercepted dispatches, taken on the way between the Armies of Portugal and Andalusia, and by reports from the guerrillero chiefs of Castile and his own secret correspondents in Salamanca. Marmont had been much more rapid in his movements, and had shown more willingness to help a colleague in distress, than was usual among the French commanders in Spain. He was new to command, and very zealous; it is certain that a year later, when he had gained more experience of co-operation with Soult, he would not come so fast and so eagerly to his aid.

The Duke of Ragusa had conducted the Army of Portugal back to Salamanca on May 15th, and had (as has been already related[540]) spent the next fortnight in breaking up the old corps into six new divisions of infantry and five brigades of cavalry. The regiments had all sent back to France the cadres of their 3rd battalions and their 3rd and 4th squadrons. The infantry battalions had been completed up to about 700 men each: and the six divisions had by May 25th about 28,000 men present with the colours[541], besides sick and detachments, who were very numerous[542]. There were only 2,500 cavalry fit for service, and six batteries of artillery; great drafts of horses were promised from France, by which it was hoped that the former would ere long be able to show 5,000 sabres, and the latter to put 60 guns in the field. Meanwhile there were not more than 33,000 men of all arms fit to march.

Soult, before starting on his Albuera campaign, had written to Masséna (whose deposition was unknown to him) to state that if he failed in his attempt to deliver Badajoz at the head of his own expeditionary force, he might have to ask for aid from the Army of Portugal. This letter was delivered to Marmont on May 14th, when he had just assumed command. He replied (May 16) that he recognized the importance of Badajoz, and would move all or a part of his army southward if it were really required. Soult received the dispatch from the hands of his colleague’s aide-de-camp Fabvier at Llerena on May 27th, and was overjoyed at its contents. He wrote to acknowledge the offer in terms of effusive politeness, and begged Marmont to march not with a detachment but with his whole army.[543] Though he was expecting to be joined by Drouet and the 9th Corps within ten days, he was doubtful whether that reinforcement would make him strong enough to face Wellington. But, with 30,000 men of the Army of Portugal placed in the valley of the Guadiana, there would be a force amply sufficient to sweep the Allies back into Portugal. On hearing that Marmont had started, he would extend his troops toward Merida, where the head of his colleague’s column, coming by Truxillo and Almaraz, would probably appear.

Long before Soult’s Llerena dispatch came to hand, Marmont had already begun to move some of his divisions towards the Tagus, as a precautionary measure, in case his offer should be accepted. But it was apparently the news of Albuera which made him resolve to betake himself to Estremadura with every available man, and not Soult’s appeal, which only reached him after he had started. He was anxious to hand over the charge of the whole frontier of Leon, and of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, to Bessières. But the Duke of Istria protested in the most vehement style against having this responsibility thrust upon him. Until he had learnt of the Albuera check, he kept preaching to Mortier on the text that Soult was well able to take care of himself, and ought to draw rather on Drouet and Madrid for reinforcements than on the Army of Portugal. Marmont might move a division to Baños and Bejar, and two more to Plasencia, but this was all that honour and prudence demanded. The main body of his troops ought to be left in or near Salamanca, to observe the British force in front of Ciudad Rodrigo. The Army of the North could not spare a man to relieve Marmont’s troops on the Douro and the Tormes, if they marched away; what with the Galicians, the Cantabrian bands of Longa and Porlier, and the guerrilleros, it had so much upon its hands that it could not find one brigade to occupy Salamanca. The Army of Portugal was so much in need of rest and reinforcement that it would perish by the way, or never reach Badajoz, if its commander persisted in carrying out his quixotic plan, &c.

All these arguments were hollow: Bessières disliked Soult, and not only would not stir a finger himself to aid him, but wished to discourage Marmont from doing so. When the news of Albuera came, he made shift to protect the frontiers of Leon, despite of all his previous allegations. His estimate of the impossibility of the march to Badajoz was absolutely falsified: the Army of Portugal accomplished it in fifteen days without any appreciable loss in men or material. Marmont deserves, as he himself remarks[544], great credit for his move, which was made contrary to his colleague’s advice, and without any orders from Paris. For Napoleon’s dispatches, based, as usual, on facts three weeks or a month old, were coming in at this time with notes as to the resting and reorganization of the army, and spoke of a battle near Ciudad Rodrigo, to keep Wellington from besieging that place, as the next task which would probably fall to the Duke of Ragusa[545]. Marmont had as directions nothing but a vague precept to ‘act for the general interest of the Imperial armies in Spain’ and to keep an eye on Andalusia, where the progress of affairs would be better known to him than it could be in Paris[546]. These directions he most certainly carried out, but on his own responsibility, and without any detailed instructions from his master. Indeed, his dispatch of May 31st, in which he informed the Emperor that he was about to march for the Tagus, brought down on him a scolding from Berthier for moving with only thirty-six pieces of artillery, and for not having sent back to Bayonne a mass of men of the train, who were to pick up horses there[547]. If Marmont had waited to procure more teams from the rear, he would never have joined Soult in time to raise the siege of Badajoz. It was the quickness of his movement which forced the Allies to abandon that enterprise.

Wellington had been from the first convinced that Marmont would move southward on hearing of Soult’s check at Albuera. It was for this reason that he made no scruple of depleting Spencer’s corps of reinforcements for the army in Estremadura: not only detachments, but probably the whole force would ere long have to be drawn to join the main army. On May 24th, as has been already mentioned, he ordered Howard’s British[548] and Ashworth’s Portuguese brigades to move towards him via Sabugal, Castello Branco, and the bridge of Villa Velha. Howard’s 1,500 men were to be taken away permanently from the 1st Division and added to the second, replacing in it three battalions which, owing to the carnage of Albuera, had to be sent home to recruit[549]. By June 8th Howard had reached Talavera Real, near Badajoz, and had formally been placed on the roll of the 2nd Division, which then rose once more to 4,000 men.

In compliance with his chief’s general directions that, if the French Army of Portugal turned southward, he himself was to make a corresponding movement, Spencer moved the Light and 1st Divisions from their cantonments towards Sabugal, on a rumour (which turned out to be premature) that Marmont had already started on the 26th of May. Learning that he had been misinformed, he brought them back again to their old cantonments between the Azava and the Coa on the 27th[550]. On the next day there arrived detailed and certain news from secret correspondents in Salamanca, to the effect that Marmont was concentrating his troops in two bodies, one, under his own command, at Salamanca itself, the other about Alba de Tormes and Tamames. The natural deduction from this information was that one column would march by the Puerto de Baños over the mountains to the Tagus, and the other by Ciudad Rodrigo and the Puerto de Perales. Wellington, on receiving the Spanish notes forwarded by Spencer, was delighted to find that his forecast was almost certainly right. ‘You will see by my letter yesterday,’ he wrote on June 2nd, ‘that I did not make a bad guess at the enemy’s probable movement, as described in the letters from our friends of the 28th, enclosed in yours of the 31st[551].’ His own dispatch of June 1st, to which he refers, had already told Spencer that the moment Marmont moved he was to bring up his right to Penamacor, and his left to Sabugal, leaving only a screen in front of Ciudad Rodrigo. But since it was not quite certain that the Marshal might not be projecting a mere raid into the Beira, either by the Almeida or the Sabugal road, no definite move was to be made till it was clear that the French columns were heading for the passes. This caution against over-hasty deductions kept Spencer very much in his original position till June 4th, the day on which Marmont’s movements became clear.

The Marshal had concentrated one division (Foy’s[552]) and all his cavalry at Salamanca on June 1st, while Reynier with two divisions, followed at a day’s distance by three more, moved from Tamames for the eastern pass, the Puerto de Baños. On the 3rd the Marshal and the smaller column started from Salamanca on the Rodrigo road, for the purpose of making a demonstration against Almeida, which was intended to hold Spencer in his present position, while Reynier and the main body of the French army should get two or three days’ start. Marmont reached Rodrigo on the 5th, and sallied out from it, cavalry in front, on the following morning. He was exposing himself to some danger, since Spencer had four divisions within call, though his cavalry was weak—only two British and two Portuguese regiments[553]. But, uncertain as to the strength of his enemy, Spencer gave way; the Light Division and Slade’s cavalry being drawn back from the line of the Azava, while the other three divisions marched for Sabugal under the cover of this screen. The road to Almeida being thus left unguarded, Pack, who was lying there with his Portuguese brigade, blew up such part of the enceinte as remained intact after Brennier’s explosion, and retired westward. For this both he and Spencer were blamed by Wellington, who said that they should have waited till the French actually made a move towards Almeida before destroying it. Its subsequent repair was made much more difficult by the supplementary damage needlessly carried out[554].

Marmont’s force, 5,000 foot and 2,500 cavalry, advanced in pursuit of Spencer by both the Gallegos and the Carpio roads. It was only on the latter, however, that any serious skirmishing occurred. Montbrun’s squadrons in overwhelming numbers pressed hard on the British cavalry screen, composed on this front of the 1st Dragoons and a squadron of the 14th Light Dragoons, under Slade. That brigadier, always, if his subordinates are to be trusted, a little over-slow in movement, allowed himself to be outflanked while executing a series of demonstrations to cover the rear of the infantry, and only got off without serious loss through the gallantry of a squadron of the Royals, who charged the turning force at an opportune moment, and gained time for the rest of the regiment to retire with some difficulty across the marsh of Nava de Aver[555]. A dangerous movement was got over with the loss of only four men killed and nine wounded.

Spencer’s whole force had reached Alfayates by the night of the 6th, retiring before a French column of not a third of its own strength. On the next day he received from Colonel Waters, one of Wellington’s great intelligence officers, news which cleared up the situation for him. Waters, who came in from a tour in the Sierra de Gata, reported that an immense French column was already passing the Puerto de Baños, thirty miles to the east, and that the force in front of the British did not apparently exceed the single division of infantry and the four brigades of horse which had been already seen and noted. There was no need therefore to retire towards the Zezere and the Estrada Nova, for Marmont was not making a serious raid into Portugal, but only covering the march of his main body by a demonstration. The truth of this intelligence was soon verified, for the Marshal, instead of pressing the British rear on the 7th, wheeled eastward, and went off by the Pass of Perales, leaving Spencer entirely unmolested.

Wellington’s original orders thus became valid and practicable, and Spencer was able to march his whole four divisions towards Badajoz and the main army, with the certainty that he was moving parallel to Marmont’s route, and that he could join his chief many days before the French columns could unite with Soult. For the invaluable bridge of Villa Velha now became of primary importance. It provided a good passage over the Tagus, leading straight to Estremadura by a short line, while the French, having no bridge lower down the river than Almaraz, were compelled to make a much longer detour, and to spend several days more than the British in transferring themselves to the southern seat of war.

The head of Spencer’s marching column was now formed by Anson’s light cavalry, who had moved (as it will be remembered) towards Castello Branco before the rest of the army[556]. Then came the infantry divisions, while Slade remained to cover the rear, and only marched on when the main body had already crossed the Tagus[557]. The route lay from Alfayates by Penamacor, São Miguel d’Arche, Castello Branco, Villa Velha, Niza, and Portalegre. Anson crossed the Tagus at the bridge of Villa Velha on June 11th, the Light Division on June 12th, the 1st Division on the 14th-15th, Pack’s Portuguese and the 6th Division on June 15th-16th. Slade’s cavalry, who had waited behind near Castello Branco till it should be certain that no French were showing in this direction, only came over the river on the 19th. All this was rough marching, in hot weather, over bad roads, and the troops suffered somewhat from sunstroke and from occasional lack of water in the mountains. But the transport worked fairly well in spite of all difficulties, and food only once failed to be distributed regularly[558]. By dint of moving as far as was possible in the early morning and the evening hours, the divisions made good time, and the distances covered exceeded on several days twenty miles in the twenty-four hours[559].

On the 13th the head of the infantry column was at Niza, only twenty miles from Portalegre, and fifty from Badajoz, while its rear had passed Castello Branco and was nearing the Tagus. Wellington was therefore able to contemplate the situation with serenity. Spencer’s whole force would be able to join him long before Marmont could unite with Soult. He ordered that each of the divisions, as it reached Portalegre, should take several days’ rest before moving on to Campo Mayor and Elvas.

The French army meanwhile had endured a much longer and more fatiguing march. The head of Reynier’s column, moving by Fuente Roble, Baños, and Bejar across the chain of the Sierra de Gata, reached Plasencia on the 9th and Almaraz on the 11th. Marmont and the smaller column which had demonstrated against Spencer fell into the rear of the main body at Malpartida near Plasencia on the 14th[560]. The passage of the Tagus at Almaraz took longer than had been expected, because pontoons which had been ordered down from Madrid had failed to appear, and the whole army had to be ferried over by driblets on the flying-bridge already existing there. But though strung out over fifty miles of road by this mischance, the Army of Portugal at least got the advanced squadrons of its light cavalry to Truxillo on the 14th[561] and to Merida on the 17th. The head of the infantry column was a day’s march behind, and reached Merida on the 18th, with the main body trailing down the mountain road from Truxillo behind it. Soult’s advanced guard was already in possession of the town and bridge of Merida, and the junction of the Armies of Andalusia and Portugal was secured.

But meanwhile Wellington had retired from their neighbourhood. On the afternoon of the 10th the orders had been issued for the withdrawing of all the guns from the siege-batteries before Badajoz, and by the next morning many of them were already en route for Elvas. All through the 11th and 12th convoys of ammunition, platforms, fascines, wool-packs, &c., were being sent to the rear, and by the night of the last-named day there was nothing left in the trenches or the camps save a small daily store for the troops, who were kept to blockade the fortress as long as was prudent. For it was well that the garrison should be straitly shut in, and forced to consume as much of their provisions as possible; Wellington knew that they were only rationed up to the 20th, and there was a bare chance that Soult or Marmont might be delayed by some unforeseen mishap. Nothing of the kind happened, however, and on the 13th Soult began to stir. He had been joined by Drouet’s long-expected corps on that morning; it had accomplished a most circuitous march from Valladolid, by Madrid, Toledo, the pass of Despeñaperros and Cordova, in which it had consumed more than a month (May 11th-June 13th). All Drouet’s corps was composed of 4th battalions of regiments belonging to the 1st or 5th Corps, and the provisional brigade of cavalry which accompanied him consisted of 3rd and 4th squadrons belonging to dragoon regiments of the Army of the South. These were at once treated as drafts, and amalgamated with the depleted units which had been so much cut up at Albuera. The 5th Corps and the other regiments present with Soult had 4,000 men drafted into their ranks[562], and once more became strong. There remained over one provisional division, 5,000 strong, which consisted of 4th battalions whose regiments were absent with Victor before Cadiz[563]. Drouet’s arrival gave Soult a total force of some 28,000 men, which made him still unable to face Wellington with his own unaided strength; but he knew that he could count on Marmont’s approach with 30,000 more within a week.

If he pressed in upon Badajoz before the junction took place, he would risk the very real danger that Wellington might march against him with every available man, and force him to another battle. He therefore first sent cavalry along the highroads towards Villafranca and Los Santos, and only when they reported that there was no British infantry in front of them, moved up his main body to Villafranca and Almendralejo (June 16th). Reconnaissances were pushed towards the bridges of Merida and Medellin, where the Army of Portugal was to be expected. As he kept very far from Wellington’s front, Soult’s march was unmolested; the British general had concentrated the 4th and 2nd Divisions and Hamilton’s Portuguese on the old Albuera position on the 14th of June, and could have brought up the 3rd and 7th and Ashworth’s Portuguese to join them in a few hours. But he was not going to take offensive action, and since Soult kept well away from him, he waited till he had news that the two French armies would get in touch at Merida on the 17th, and retired with his whole army beyond the Guadiana on that day.

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SECTION XXVII: CHAPTER II

WELLINGTON ON THE CAYA. JUNE-JULY 1811

On the morning of June 17th the five divisions of the Anglo-Portuguese army which had hitherto remained on the south bank of the Guadiana crossed that river, and retired to the positions along the line Elvas, Campo Mayor, Ouguella, which Wellington had already selected for them. The water was low, and the bulk of the troops used the fords between Jerumenha and Badajoz[564] which are practicable during the summer months, except after days of exceptional rain[565]. Head quarters were moved back to the country-house known as the Quinta de São João, near São Vicente, a spot equidistant from Elvas and Campo Mayor. The 7th Division, from the north side of Badajoz, made a corresponding movement, and fell back into the same general line. Spencer’s column from the Beira was now all across the Tagus, save Slade’s cavalry and the 5th Division, and its head was resting at Portalegre, to which its rear was rapidly coming up. As there are only two marches between Portalegre and Elvas, it was clear that the two sections of the allied army were certain of their junction. For since on the 18th Marmont’s column-head had only reached Merida, and Soult’s was at Almendralejo, it would take some days for the two French armies to draw together, and concert further operations on the northern side of Badajoz.

But there was one section of the allied forces which Wellington was anxious not to withdraw across the Guadiana, but to send on another quest, and all his future movements depended on the march of this corps. The moment that Soult began to advance from Llerena on the 14th, and to edge off in the direction of Merida and Marmont, he had left the western roads into Andalusia uncovered. Except a trifling detachment at Guadalcanal, there was now no force protecting Seville on that side. From the day that he got the news of the Marshal’s northerly march, Wellington began to press General Blake to return at once into his old haunts in the Condado de Niebla, passing round the left rear of the enemy, and to begin to threaten Seville. There was now nothing to prevent him from doing so, and it was well known that the Andalusian capital was left to a scanty garrison, largely composed of convalescents and untrustworthy Juramentados. As long as Soult lay at Llerena, he could easily throw a column to the flank to succour Seville; but when he had moved on, this was no longer in his power. As early as June 10 Wellington had written to Castaños[566] that Soult would ultimately move on Merida, and that Blake would then be able to slip into Andalusia either by the route of Xeres de los Caballeros and Fregenal, or if he preferred a safer though longer road, by that hugging the Portuguese frontier, following which he would emerge into Spain by Mertola. He could not be stopped on either route, and his appearance before Seville would bring back Soult in haste from Badajoz, and cure him of any desire to cross the Guadiana or to besiege Elvas. On June 12th Wellington ordered his commissaries to prepare rations at Mertola for the benefit of the Spaniards, who would probably be in their usual state of semi-starvation, and wrote to Blake to urge him to march at once[567]. The Captain-General consented to move, but asked for more food; he was told in reply that he should be fed from Jerumenha to Mertola while he was on Portuguese soil, but must rely on his own exertions while he was in Spain. On the morning of the 17th Blake crossed the Guadiana at Jerumenha with Loy’s 1,000 horse, the 10,000 infantry of Zayas and Ballasteros, and two batteries, and started to march down-stream for his destination. He was quite out of touch with the enemy, and so well protected by the Guadiana and the mountains that it was certain that his movement would be unobserved. Marching fast, he reached Mertola on June 22nd, and Castillejos, across the Andalusian frontier, on the 24th. Thus Wellington was serenely confident, when the enemy came up against his front, that he had thrown a bomb behind them, whose explosion would cause no small stir, and infallibly draw back a large section of the Army of Andalusia to defend Seville. Without these troops Soult would be in no condition to attack him[568], even with Marmont’s aid. The crisis between Elvas and Badajoz, therefore, could only last for a few days.

Meanwhile it had to be faced, and from the 22nd to the 29th of June Wellington might have found himself engaged in a general action on any day of the week. Soult and Marmont had met at Merida on the 18th—the day after Wellington’s army had crossed the Guadiana. The elder marshal had overwhelmed the younger with compliments—it was the first time, he said, that the Army of Portugal had done anything for the Army of the South; with a colleague who was unselfish and enterprising, he felt himself able to undertake any task[569]. It was settled that the combined armies should march against the Albuera positions next morning, in three columns. Marmont and his six divisions would move along the bank of the Guadiana by the road running through Lobon and Talavera Real: the main body of the Andalusian forces would take the route Almendralejo-Solana-Albuera. One division detached by Soult (it was the ten battalions of Conroux, the undistributed fraction of Drouet’s 9th Corps) was to turn the British line by a flanking movement through Almendral to Valverde. Thus just 60,000 men were put in motion, Marmont having brought about 32,000 of all arms, while Soult, including Drouet, had about 28,000. Expecting an action, for Wellington was known to have been at Albuera on the 16th, and his departure was unsuspected, the three columns advanced cautiously, and ready to deploy. But no enemy was found, and by the evening of the 19th it was known that the Anglo-Portuguese were all behind the Guadiana. At dusk the head of Marmont’s light cavalry got in touch with the garrison of Badajoz, and learnt that the last of the Allies had disappeared from in front of its walls on the 16th. Phillipon was justified of his long and obstinate defence: on the very day before his half-rations would have given out, and at the moment when he was thinking seriously of blowing up his works, and making a dash to get away, the expected succours had appeared.

On the 20th Marmont entered Badajoz in triumph, amid the blare of military music, and a few hours later Soult arrived and exchanged felicitations with him and with the trusty governor. The two main columns of each of their armies converged on the fortress, but Briche’s light cavalry and the divisions of Conroux and Godinot went to Olivenza, to see if by chance the Allies were holding that unlucky and ill-protected town. It was found empty (June 21st), the small Portuguese garrison having retired to Elvas on the 17th.

With 60,000 men in hand (or more, if the 3,500 bayonets of the Badajoz garrison are counted) and with one bridge and many good fords at their disposition, for the crossing of the Guadiana, the two marshals had the power to thrust a general action upon their adversary—unless indeed he should retire far beyond the Portuguese frontier, and so give them the chance of laying siege to Elvas. It remained to be seen what was his purpose, and on June 22nd a general reconnaissance on the further bank of the Guadiana was carried out. On the left Godinot’s division advanced from Olivenza to a point opposite Jerumenha, where, being very visible from the further bank, it was furiously but ineffectively cannonaded by the Portuguese garrison. Two dragoon regiments under General Bron forded the river, but found no allied troops in this direction. On the right, Montbrun, with two cavalry brigades of the Army of Portugal, passed the Badajoz bridge, and marched on Campo Mayor. After driving in a cavalry screen belonging to De Grey’s and Madden’s regiments, he found himself feeling the front of a defensive line, which he estimated at two division of infantry and 1,400 horse, and could get no further forward[570]. He returned to report that Wellington was showing fight.

In the centre, where Latour-Maubourg in person, with fourteen squadrons of dragoons and Polish lancers, forded the Guadiana almost in front of Elvas, there was hard fighting, ending in a petty disaster for the allied outposts. Here the cavalry screen was formed on the right by the 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion, on the left by the 11th Light Dragoons. The French column drove in the pickets of the hussars, who resisted from the water’s edge onward with great obstinacy. Presently the main body of this weak corps (only two squadrons strong[571]) came up, and with more courage than discretion charged the leading French regiment, which they broke. But being outflanked by the enemy’s reserves, they were surrounded on three sides, and had to cut their way out with a loss of three officers wounded, two dead, and twenty prisoners. The remains of the hussars rallied behind the Quinta de Gremezia, where they were presently joined by the main body of the 11th Light Dragoons. The enemy pushed them no further, but turning to the right swept along Wellington’s outpost line in the direction of Badajoz. By so doing they found themselves in the rear of the outlying picket of the 11th, formed by Captain Lutyens’s troop. This little force had, by some mischance, not paid much attention to the disturbance in front of the hussars, nor had any orders been sent to them by their brigadier (Long) to bid them be cautious as to their flank. Warned at the last moment by a German sergeant, Lutyens had just collected his men, and was about to retire, when he saw a body of cavalry, not on his flank but directly in his rear, cutting him off from Elvas. Thinking that a bold dash was his only chance, he closed up his men and charged the front French squadron, which he broke through. But a second line was behind, and he and his whole party of sixty-four sabres were ridden down and captured[572]. Only one wounded officer (Lieutenant Binney) cut his way through and brought the news of the mishap[573].

Wellington, with his usual clear perception, attributed this little disaster to the fact that the two regiments engaged had both landed in the Peninsula only a few weeks before, and were utterly unpractised in outpost duty. The hussars ought to have retired skirmishing—it was not their duty to try to fight five regiments of French. The light dragoon pickets had clearly not kept touch with the detachments on their flanks, or they would have heard of the advance of the enemy in force, and would not have been surrounded before they were aware that the French had got well round their rear. ‘This disagreeable circumstance,’ he writes, ‘tends to show the difference between old and new troops. The old regiments of cavalry, throughout all their service, with all their losses put together, have not lost so many men as the 2nd Hussars and the 11th Light Dragoons in a few days. However, we must make the new as good as the old[574].’ Wellington also blamed General Long. ‘Let him attend to the directions he before received from Sir Stapleton Cotton, to throw out only small picquets of observation on the Caya and Guadiana. If he had had his whole brigade, instead of one large picquet, on the Caya, he could not have prevented the enemy from advancing.... This principle is well known and understood in the army, and if it had not been acted upon invariably, we should have lost all our cavalry long ago, in the way in which Captain Lutyens lost the picquet of the 11th this morning[575].’

By the evening of the 22nd the two French marshals, as the result of their wide-spreading reconnaissances, were fully aware that Wellington lay in force from Campo Mayor to Elvas, and had no intention of retiring. But they had not been able to make out the details of his position, which lay across an undulating country wooded in many parts, and not to be embraced in a single view from any commanding spot. As a matter of fact their adversary had now got up all his troops; the last division from the Beira came into touch with the main body on the morning of the 23rd. Elaborate orders issued for the conduct of the army in case the French should advance for battle, show what were the intentions of Wellington[576].

His front extended from Ouguella near the Gebora river almost to Elvas, a distance of twelve miles. Ouguella was a little town with mediaeval fortifications, susceptible of defence for some hours. It was garrisoned by two companies of Portuguese from Elvas. Beyond it rises the mountain of the Dos Hermanas, and there is no practicable route to turn it, save by an immense détour in the direction of Albuquerque, so that the flank was very secure. Between Ouguella and Campo Mayor lay the 3rd and 7th Divisions under Picton. Campo Mayor had been repaired since its recapture, and had received a Portuguese garrison; it had some heavy guns (24-pounders) which would sweep the level ground in front of it. West of this fortress lay the allied centre under Hill, composed of the 2nd and 4th Divisions and Hamilton’s Portuguese, extending from Campo Mayor to the Caya. Beyond that river in the direction of Elvas, in a somewhat ‘refused’ position leaning backward to the north-west, lay the three brigades of the 1st Division, under Spencer, forming the right wing, and resting on the great fortress as their flank-guard. This formed the front line. The reserves were the Light Division on the Monte Reguingo in front of Arronches, ready to support Picton, and the 5th and 6th Divisions, which were on the Portalegre road, échelonned in advance from that place, behind Spencer, and able to reinforce the right or centre. The cavalry was out in front, Madden’s Portuguese on the left, Long’s brigade on the right, with De Grey’s, Slade’s, and Anson’s regiments ready in reserve to transfer themselves where they should be wanted[577]. The whole force available was about 46,000 infantry, of which 29,000 were British, 5,000 cavalry, of which 1,400 belonged to the weak Portuguese brigades of Madden, Otway, and Barbaçena, and 14 batteries with 80 pieces and 2,800 gunners. The gross total was 54,000, not including two regular and two militia regiments of Portuguese forming the garrison of Elvas. Thus the allied army, though still appreciably inferior in numbers to the enemy, more especially in the cavalry arm, was strong enough to take the defensive in a good position[578]. Every available regular unit in Portugal had been gathered in by the 23rd, even Pack’s and Barbaçena’s small Portuguese brigades, which had remained down to the last possible moment in the Beira. The ground was most formidable for defence, covered by three fortresses, and having in its front an open plain which, though interspersed with occasional groves, was sufficiently commanded by the heights on the British flanks to make it impossible for any large body of troops to move across it in any direction without being detected. Wellington had placed observation parties at the many ‘Atalayas,’ the old Moorish watch-towers, which line the Portuguese frontier, and had arranged for a system of flag-signalling to convey news from one flank to the other. There were also warnings to be given by gun-fire, from pieces detailed for that purpose at Ouguella and Campo Mayor[579]. The cross-roads along the rear of the position being good, and the Caya fordable in many places, Wellington thought that he was certain of being able to transfer troops with swiftness and security to any part of the line that might be threatened. The only way in which the enemy could approach him unseen would be by moving at night, and even so there would be ample warning, since the cavalry pickets were out far in front of the line, and would give notice betimes. Moreover, a night-march of some nine miles out from Badajoz over unknown ground, towards an undiscovered position, would have little temptation for the enemy. The danger of blundering into a trap in the dark would be too great.

But as a matter of fact the French Marshals were not proposing to attack. They had learnt that Spencer’s divisions were up, so that the whole of the Anglo-Portuguese army was in front of them, and they shrank from committing themselves to a general action. Marmont wrote to Berthier on June 21st, Soult on June 22nd, and in neither of their dispatches is there the least intention displayed of making any further offensive move. Both state that they intended to attack the Albuera position on the 19th, if Wellington had stayed in it. ‘The enemy,’ says Marmont, ‘retired in haste, repassed the Guadiana, and returned into Portugal, without leaving us any chance of tackling him. It is tiresome that he would not make trial of his fortune, for a decisive victory would infallibly have marked our arrival in this region.’ Soult, in very similar terms, writes: ‘The Duke of Ragusa and I had resolved to give battle, but Lord Wellington prudently retreated before we could come up with him. Yet he had 60,000 men, of whom 30,000 were English, including General Spencer’s divisions just drawn in from the north, 14,000 Portuguese, and 16,000 Spaniards; there were 5,000 cavalry among them. It is vexatious that no general action could take place: our success would not be doubtful. But we may hope that another occasion may present itself, especially if the Army of Portugal continues to keep in touch with the Army of the South, and communicates with it, as it is now doing. Of that I have no doubt, from the alacrity with which the Duke of Ragusa marched to join in the relief of Badajoz with all his disposable forces.’ Soult then proceeds to state with great gravity that Albuera was a signal victory, and the sole cause of the preservation of Badajoz—ignoring the fact that he retreated sixty miles after it, and could not move again till he had been joined by Drouet and Marmont[580].

If Soult wanted another signal victory of the type of Albuera he had only to march nine miles towards Campo Mayor, on the day after he wrote this dispatch to Berthier. The temptation was surely great, since the defeat of Wellington’s army would have shaken to its foundations the whole defence of the Peninsula. To assemble the force now lying by Badajoz, Andalusia and Leon had been stripped of all disposable troops, and left exposed to the raids of the Spanish Armies of Galicia and Murcia, and to the omnipresent guerrilleros, who had already cut communications in every direction. If Wellington could be beaten, the concentration was justified; if he were left unmolested nothing had been gained, save the reprovisioning of Badajoz—and the game might go on for ever. Battle was now offered to the Marshals if they chose to accept it—the reconnaissance of June 22nd proved that the Allies had taken up a position and were standing on it.

But neither Soult nor Marmont would advance. The cause of their reluctance to engage was undoubtedly a moral one. As Napier very truly remarks in a typical sentence[581], ‘Marmont’s army was conscious of its recent defeats at Bussaco, at Sabugal, at Fuentes de Oñoro; the horrid field of Albuera was fresh; the fierce blood there spilt still reeked in the nostrils of Soult’s soldiers.’ The generals, no less than the rank and file, felt a qualm at the idea of attacking Wellington in a position which he had taken up with deliberation, and where he showed himself serenely expectant of their attack. They were aware that an attempt to dislodge him would be rendered very tiresome by the fact that Elvas and Campo Mayor protected his line. They over-valued his forces by the number of Blake’s army, which, till the 24th June, they wrongly supposed to be still with him. So contenting themselves with dictating pompous dispatches concerning the importance of the relief of Badajoz—which was indeed a notable advantage—they went each upon his separate way. Instead of attempting to inflict a defeat on Wellington, the Marshals did no more than patch up a scheme by which they thought he might be contained and held in check for the present. In short, the offensive spirit was gone: the French armies in Spain found themselves thrown upon the defensive; and so things were to remain for the rest of the Peninsular War. The offensive, though it was hardly realized as yet, had passed to Wellington[582].

Meanwhile the Allies could not tell what might be the intentions of the enemy. Seeing the enormous advantage that a victory would bring the French, and remembering the way in which they had stripped all Spain of troops in order to produce the army which now lay opposite him, Wellington thought that he was to be attacked, and continued for some days to perfect his preparations. The period of intent waiting was from the 23rd to the 28th of June, during which nothing was to be made out concerning the main purpose of the French. Petty cavalry reconnaissances in the direction of the Albuquerque and Montijo roads, much moving about of small columns between Olivenza and Badajoz, were observed—but no certain deductions could be drawn from them. ‘No judging what he means yet: meanwhile everything is ready for him,’ wrote D’Urban, Beresford’s chief of the staff, in his diary on June 25th. As a matter of fact, the small movements hitherto observed were merely matters of foraging and exploration, and had no occult meaning. On the 27th, however, there was something definite to be learnt; on the morning of that day Godinot’s division blew up the walls of Olivenza, and marched to Valverde. This disappearance of the French left wing might have meant that all the columns were being drawn in for an attack in the centre; but it might also mean that Soult was about to send back troops to Seville. That the latter was the true interpretation was shown on the 28th, when Godinot definitely marched not towards Badajoz, but southward along the chaussée leading to Andalusia by Los Santos and Monasterio. It was certain that, if Soult was sending away men from the front, he could not be intending to attack, since every man would be required, if a dash at the Anglo-Portuguese lines was in contemplation. When Wellington had news from the peasantry of Godinot’s southward march on the 29th June, he could see that the die had been cast, and that he need no longer look for an attack upon his lines. He was soon afterwards informed that two divisions were gone southward, not merely one; but for some time he could get no certitude of the departure of the second division, though it was perfectly true that this unit (Conroux’s ten battalions of Drouet’s old corps) had departed almost immediately after Godinot.

What had happened was that on June 24th, the fourth day after the entry of the two Marshals into Badajoz, Soult had informed Marmont that he had such bad news from Andalusia that he must return at once to Seville with some of his troops. It was not so much Blake’s diversion which was working[583]—the French had learnt of his start on the 24th, but did not know that he had reached the Condado de Niebla—as the tidings of the spread of the insurrection in the Ronda mountains, and of threatening movements by Freire’s Army of Murcia against the 4th Corps. The force in Eastern Andalusia had lent so much to Soult’s field army[584], and so much more to garrison the province of Cordova[585], that it was much under strength. There were only 9,000 men, or less, left in the kingdom of Granada, and the Murcian army was 14,000 strong. Marmont refused to take Soult’s fears seriously, being (as he himself tells us[586]) convinced by this time that his colleague was wanting to throw all the responsibility of keeping Badajoz safe and ‘containing’ Wellington on the Army of Portugal. He replied that unless Soult promised to leave him the whole of the 5th Corps, and all Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry, he should order his troops to march for Truxillo and Almaraz, and throw the charge of Badajoz on the Army of the South, which might keep it if it could.

Soult was forced to assent to this demand, and took away only Godinot’s and Conroux’s provisional divisions, and three regiments of cavalry. The 5th Corps, now placed under Drouet[587], and six dragoon regiments, were left behind on the Guadiana, to enable Marmont to maintain a safe defensive against Wellington. They made up some 15,000 men, which, with the 32,000 of the Army of Portugal, provided a force quite insufficient to attack the Allies, yet large enough to prevent a siege of Badajoz. For no general, least of all the cautious commander of the Anglo-Portuguese army, would undertake to besiege a fortress of the first class, situated on two sides of a broad river, with 54,000 men, when a covering force of 47,000 men was supporting it in the near vicinity.

Meanwhile, for a fortnight after Soult had departed from Badajoz for Seville on June 28th, Marmont and Drouet on one side of the Guadiana, and Wellington on the other, stood observing each other, and waiting each for some move on the part of his adversary. The British general knew that the French in his front were no longer strong enough to attack him on his positions around the Caya. But he must keep his army concentrated, since, if he made detachments in any direction, Marmont might yet make a dash at Elvas; and that place, though it had been much improved of late[588], during the weeks when an attack on it seemed probable, still left something to be desired, especially in the quality of the guns on its walls—our old acquaintances of the siege of Badajoz, and their brethren. As long as Marmont and Drouet remained massed near Badajoz the allied army could not disperse.

On the other hand, the French generals were compelled to keep together for a time, in order to superintend the victualling of Badajoz, whose magazines were absolutely empty at the moment of its relief. If they had drawn back into cantonments, and scattered their men, Wellington might have thrown a light corps and cavalry across the Guadiana, and have established once more a blockade of the fortress. Accordingly, from the 28th of June to the 15th of July the Army of Portugal and the 5th Corps remained concentrated in the quadrilateral Badajoz-Merida-Almendralejo-Almendral, sweeping the country-side for provisions. Each regiment was ordered to deposit in the magazines of Badajoz a prescribed number of fanegas of wheat or maize, making in all six months’ rations for a garrison of 4,000 men. North of the Guadiana the French cavalry ranged about the region around Montijo and Torre del Fresno, where they were in constant touch with Wellington’s exploring squadrons sent out from Campo Mayor and Ouguella: but no serious collisions occurred. At last, on July 15th it was reported that Badajoz was fully provisioned, and Marmont informed Drouet that he was about to disperse his army in cantonments reaching as far as the Tagus, since northern Estremadura was wholly exhausted. He would keep a division at Truxillo, half-way between Merida and the Tagus, and the rest of his army could be brought back at the shortest notice, if the Anglo-Portuguese should make a forward move. Drouet, after changing the garrison of Badajoz for new battalions of the same regiments which had endured the two sieges of May and June, and confiding its charge once more to the trusty Phillipon, drew back the 5th Corps to Zafra, Los Santos, and Merida, leaving Briche’s light cavalry at Santa Marta to keep the communication with Badajoz open. The Marshal and the general calculated that if Wellington should once more come forward, they could join again at Merida in six or seven days to ‘contain’ him. He could do nothing against Badajoz in the short time that would elapse before their concentration.

But Wellington had for the present no further designs against the fortress which had cost him so much useless labour. The moment that Marmont’s departure was announced to him, he too dispersed his army into cantonments. The banks of the Caya and Guadiana were notorious for their fever, and the troops were already beginning to suffer from it. On the 18th of July orders were issued for the 3rd and 6th Divisions to march for Castello Branco, the 7th for Niza, the 1st and 5th for Portalegre, the 4th for Estremos and then for Pedrogão, the Light Division for Castello de Vide and Montalvão. Only the 2nd and Hamilton’s Portuguese remained in the neighbourhood of Elvas—the former at Villa Viçosa, the latter at Fronteira and Souzel, a little further to the north-west[589]. Hill retained charge of these two divisions, which formed the Anglo-Portuguese Army of the South for the next twelve months. His allowance of cavalry consisted of Barbaçena’s and Otway’s Portuguese brigades, and Long’s and De Grey’s British brigades, which are for the future spoken of as the ‘second cavalry division’ of the allied army. Its command was given not to Lumley, who had used the troops so effectively during the late campaign, for he had just gone on sick leave to England. It went to Sir William Erskine, of whom Wellington could find no more to say, when proposing him to Beresford for this post, than that he would at any rate do better than Long, and that, if very blind, ‘which is against him at the head of cavalry,’ he was at any rate very cautious[590]. The fact was that Erskine had given grave dissatisfaction at Sabugal and elsewhere, and that the Commander-in-Chief wished to shunt him on to some new line, where he would have less responsibility. Yet the experiment of trusting him with two cavalry brigades was a risky one!

There was more reorganization carried out in the allied army during the months of June, July, and August 1811 than at any other period of Wellington’s command. Owing to the arrival of more cavalry regiments,[591] there were by September 1st six cavalry brigades in existence instead of three, and they contained thirteen regiments instead of the original seven which had served in 1810 and the early months of 1811. Wellington’s mounted strength had been almost doubled—though most of the corps arrived too late to be available when the French were showing such a preponderant cavalry force on the Caya in June. But in the next campaign Wellington was to be, for the first time since his arrival in the Peninsula, possessed of an adequate proportion of mounted men.

As to the infantry, the 1st Division (as we have already seen[592]) had given a brigade to the 2nd to repair the losses of Albuera. The 2nd Division had taken over Howard’s brigade from the 1st, and had consolidated the remains of Colborne’s and Hoghton’s shattered regiments from two brigades into one. The 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Divisions were comparatively little altered, getting, between them all, only two more battalions on balance, after replacing certain old ones by newly arrived units[593]. But the 7th Division, hitherto containing only one British brigade (Sontag’s) was provided with a second one, by taking in Alten’s light infantry battalions, which had fought so well at Albuera.

The net result of all this change was that, when Wellington once more divided his army into a northern and a southern force in August, the latter (now under Hill) amounted to about 9,000 bayonets and nearly 4,000 sabres. This detachment having four cavalry brigades (five British and four Portuguese regiments) was able to ‘contain’ its normal adversary in Estremadura, Drouet’s 9th Corps, which had about the same number of cavalry and two or three thousand more infantry. Hill’s regular task was to cover Elvas and to keep Drouet in check, without committing himself to any large offensive operations, for which his force was manifestly inadequate.

But the Anglo-Portuguese northern corps, or main army, was now far stronger than it had ever been before, amounting to some 46,000 men, including 5,000 cavalry. It now became for the first time decidedly superior in numbers to its special opponent, the French Army of Portugal, which even after receiving its drafts and convalescents in the autumn did not amount to quite 40,000 men, and was very weak in cavalry, of which it did not possess more than 3,000. Clearly, then, for the future Marmont could not possibly take the offensive against Wellington with his own forces, and would have to depend for help on the Army of the North, if matters came to a crisis. He would be lucky if he were able to ‘contain’ the Anglo-Portuguese, and certainly could not think of doing more, unless he were able to get prompt reinforcements from Bessières—or, after that Marshal’s departure, from his successor, Dorsenne. Indeed, the Army of Portugal was so clearly inadequate to discharge the function of protecting the whole Spanish frontier from the Guadiana to the Douro, that the Emperor, though in October he once more proposed to Marmont an invasion of Portugal, was ultimately forced to make over to it 16,000 men from the Army of the North, the divisions of Souham and Bonnet[594]. But of this more in its own place. It must suffice here to say that the net results of the spring and summer campaigns of 1811 was to leave the French decidedly on the defensive all along the Portuguese border, and to transfer to Wellington the opportunity of trying the offensive. It was to be five months, however, before he succeeded in taking it up—his autumn operations of 1811 were tentative, and led to no definite results. From July to December there was much manœuvring, but little change came of it.

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SECTION XXVII: CHAPTER III

EVENTS IN THE NORTH OF SPAIN DURING THE CONCENTRATION ON THE CAYA. DORSENNE AND THE GALICIANS. JUNE-AUGUST 1811

It is often forgotten by English writers that while the armies of Wellington, Soult, and Marmont faced each other near Badajoz in June-July 1811, only in the end to depart in different directions without a battle, there was a second and minor crisis going on in the north, which had important consequences. Wellington had designedly brought it about, because without it the French would have had much larger forces disposable for action against Portugal, and might have given much trouble by demonstrating against the Beira frontier.

When Marmont and Sir Brent Spencer, moving in parallel columns, transferred themselves in ten days from the banks of the Agueda and the Tormes to those of the Guadiana, the north-eastern angle of Portugal was almost stripped of troops. There remained only the militia divisions of Silveira[595] north of the Douro, in the province of Tras-os-Montes, and of Wilson and Trant south of the Douro, in front of Guarda and Celorico. The whole did not amount to 12,000 men, of inferior quality. Fortunately the French Army of Portugal had gone southward en masse. Marmont had left nothing behind him save the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo and a great dépôt of convalescents, dismounted dragoons, and other odds and ends, at Salamanca. From them there was nothing to be feared.

But behind Salamanca lay Bessières’s Army of the North. The Duke of Istria had, very unwillingly, pledged himself to Marmont to take over the supervision of the frontiers of Leon, when the Army of Portugal marched for Badajoz. He had declared, when asked for help in May, that he had not a man to spare after providing for the duty already incumbent on him of holding down all Old Castile, Asturias, and Santander. As the Emperor kept assuring him, by angry dispatches from Paris, this was an exaggeration[596]. It was in his power to collect a small field army of 12,000 or 15,000 men, without giving up any essential point in his extensive sphere of operations; and in July he did so, much against his inclination, and suffered no harm by so doing. If such a force had been set to threaten northern Portugal during the concentration on the Caya, Wellington would have felt most uncomfortable. But occupation was found for Bessières from another quarter, and this was part of the British commander’s general scheme for the defence of the Peninsula. With the consent of General Castaños, since he could only suggest and not command any operations to be undertaken by Spanish troops, Wellington had provided for an attack on the flank of Bessières by a force of which we have heard nothing for many months—the Army of Galicia[597]. If threatened on the Esla and the Orbigo, Bessières would be able to spare no attention for the Agueda.

At this time the Army of the North was not so strong in numbers as it became a few weeks later, when Napoleon’s ‘divisions of Reserve’ began to cross the Pyrenees. In June 1811 it consisted of only four infantry divisions, those of Generals Bonnet, Serras, Roguet, and Dumoustier, and of two brigades of cavalry under Wathier and Lepic. Bonnet’s division had been holding the central region of the Asturias and the city of Oviedo since it had conquered them in January 1810. In addition it had occupied a string of ports from Gijon to Santander, in order to keep off the English cruisers from their communication with the guerrilleros of the Cantabrian hills. Bonnet had a strong force, four full regiments of infantry, making 8,000 men, yet could never complete the conquest of the Asturias. Wherever he struck with a strong force he could penetrate, but any move far from his base at Oviedo brought down the enemy upon some of his isolated posts, which he had then to rescue by a swift return. His enemies were on the left hand the relics of the old Spanish Army of Asturias, now under General Losada, who hung about the mountains on the Galician frontier—on the right the great partisan chiefs Porlier and Longa, whose beat was in the sierras above Santander.

On the left of Bonnet lay Bessières’s second division, that of Serras, which had originally been assigned to the Army of Portugal in 1810, but had remained behind to watch the Galician Spaniards. Its head quarters were at Benavente; it held Astorga as an advanced post, and Leon as a flank-guard. From the latter place it communicated with Bonnet through the pass of Pajares. This was an enormous front for a division of 6,000 men to occupy, and that, too, one not composed of picked troops, but of miscellaneous units. For Serras had two Italian regiments (32nd Léger, 113th Line[598]) and two Polish and two Swiss battalions, so that much the larger half of his men were auxiliary troops and not native French.

On the other hand, there was nothing left to be desired in the two divisions of Roguet and Dumoustier, which held the central position in Bessières’s cantonments: they were all troops of the Young Guard, eleven regiments of tirailleurs, chasseurs, and voltigeurs; attached to them were three composite regiments of guard cavalry and a proportion of artillery—the whole made up of 15,000 men of the best quality. Dumoustier’s division was cantoned within the provinces of Valladolid and Palencia, Roguet’s within that of Burgos. On the south they had no enemies save the guerrilleros of the Guadarama and the Avila and Soria sierras, tiresome and elusive but not formidable foes. On the north, in the Liebana and the Cantabrian hills, Longa and Porlier were much more troublesome and dangerous. Their bands were well armed, and organized on the principles of a regular army, yet had not lost the power of rapid movement which was the true strength of the partida system. The sierras in which they operated were, including their foot-hills, some fifty miles broad, a chaos of passes and ravines. Countless expeditions against them had led to no final result. Like the holy men of old, when persecuted in one region they merely fled to another. If the flying columns and petty garrisons were withdrawn for a moment, they would be at the gates of Burgos or Santander within two days, and the high-roads Burgos-Vittoria and Burgos-Valladolid, the main arteries of communication with France, would be cut.

There was soon to be a fifth division in Bessières’s army, but it had not yet arrived from France—that of Souham, which formed (along with the divisions of Caffarelli and Reille) the great reinforcement poured by Napoleon into northern Spain during the late summer of 1811. But in June it was only beginning to march up from Marseilles, Turin, and Spezia, the distant garrisons from which it was to be drawn[599]. Before it arrived in Spain Bessières had ceased to command the Army of the North, and Dorsenne had taken his place. Hence (though Wellington was not aware of the fact) the months of June and July were exceptionally favourable for a move against the French flank in this direction.

In addition to his four infantry divisions, Bessières possessed Wathier’s brigade of light cavalry, and Lepic’s brigade of guard cavalry, together with some unbrigaded units such as the 130th of the Line (the fixed garrison of Santander)[600], the battalion of Neuchâtel, which he had moved forward to Salamanca, a number of squadrons of gendarmes, and a quantity of drafts for the Armies of Portugal and the Centre, which had been stopped on their way south in a surreptitious fashion, by various post-commanders who wanted to strengthen their depleted detachments. In the autumn Marmont succeeded in extracting no less than 4,000 of his own men from the territories of the Army of the North, not without much friction with the local officers who wished to detain them[601].

The whole force between the borders of Navarre and those of Portugal was in June and July not less than 60,000 men, even before the three divisions of Souham, Reille, and Caffarelli came up from France. On the other hand, they had an enormous area to keep down, not less than a fifth of the whole surface of Spain. And if their regular enemies, the Armies of Galicia and Asturias, were weak, they had among the irregulars opposed to them the boldest and the most obstinate of all the guerrillero chiefs. Any serious move against a section of Bessières’s long line would cause disturbance over the whole of his viceroyalty, since to collect a serious force he would have to cut down the garrisons of many localities below danger-point.

It was on this fact that Wellington relied when he obtained Castaños’s leave to set the Spanish Army of Galicia in motion. It was fortunately led at this moment by an active and enterprising chief, Santocildes, the hero of the defence of Astorga in 1810, who lent himself eagerly to the plan, though his army was not in good order. The cadres left behind in the north, when del Parque moved into Estremadura in the winter of 1809-10, were the worst and weakest of the old Army of Galicia, and though they had been filled up with local recruits, till the whole force had a nominal strength of 21,000 men, the organization was bad, and the want of well-trained and capable regimental officers very noticeable. The Junta of Galicia had spent more energy in 1810 on quarrels with the Captain-General Mahy than on the equipment of its army. Its weakest point was that it possessed only 600 regular cavalry—a defect that must be fatal if it left the mountains to descend into the plains of Leon. It was for this reason that Wellington advised Santocildes to form the siege of Astorga, to harass Bonnet in the Asturias, but not to quit the skirts of the friendly sierras.

On taking over charge of the whole kingdom of Leon from Marmont, Bessières came to the conclusion that he must draw in troops towards the south, lest he should be caught in a position in which he had no disposable central mass towards the Douro. Consequently on the 6th of June he sent orders to Bonnet to evacuate the Asturias and fall back by the pass of Pajares to Leon, in order to place himself in closer touch with Serras.[602] On the 14th, therefore, Bonnet left Oviedo and came over the mountains with three of his regiments, while the fourth went eastward parallel to the coast, in the direction of Santander, picking up in its retreat all the small garrisons which had been left to dominate the Asturian ports, and to prevent communication between Longa and Porlier and the English cruisers. By the 17th Bonnet lay at Leon with 6,000 men: he was just in time to support the scattered front line formed by Serras’s division against the attack which Wellington had planned. For Santocildes and the Army of Galicia had advanced against Astorga, quite without his knowledge, two days before he marched south from Oviedo.

The disposable force of the Spaniards consisted, after the weakest and least serviceable regiments had been told off for garrison duty at Corunna, Ferrol, Vigo, and other fortified places, of about 15,000 men. Santocildes brought his reserve from Lugo and the division of General Taboada, nearly 7,000 men and 600 horse, to Villafranca in the Vierzo, from which he advanced down the passes to Astorga on June 12th. A second division of 2,500 men under General Cabrera came forward at the same time from Puebla de Senabria, as far as the edge of the mountains above the Rio Tuerto, and demonstrated against La Baneza, the half-way post between Astorga and Benavente. The left wing, composed of Losada’s Asturians, was wanting: it had followed Bonnet when he began to retreat and had occupied Oviedo. Losada remained there himself, but sent one brigade to join the main army by a circuitous route[603], since the direct way by the pass of Pajares and Leon was blocked by Bonnet. This brigade under Castañon did not get to the front till June 23rd.

On the 19th of June Santocildes found Astorga evacuated; the small garrison of 400 men had blown up part of the city walls, and absconded on that same morning. They fell back on Bonnet at Leon. Meanwhile Serras started to march northward from Benavente with 2,000 men, to ‘contain’ Santocildes, while Bonnet sent forward two regiments under his brigadier, Valletaux, to assist Serras. But their forces never met: the column from Benavente got engaged with Cabrera’s division near La Baneza, and could not push further forward. That from Leon found most of Taboada’s division placed across its path near Benavides, behind the river Orbigo, nine miles in front of Astorga (June 23). Valletaux, despising his enemy, crossed the stream and attacked, though the balance of numbers was against him. When the engagement had been for some hours in progress, Castañon, with the brigade just arriving from Asturias, came down on his flank. The French were beaten: Valletaux fell, and his brigade lost over 300 men[604] in the combat, which the Spaniards name from the village of Cogorderos and the French from that of Quintanilla de Valle. The defeated force fell back beyond the Orbigo, and was succoured by Bonnet, with the rest of his troops from Leon. Meanwhile Serras retired towards Benavente, and called loudly for help to his chief, Bessières.

Santocildes, seeing that Cabrera had now nothing in front of him at La Baneza, called up his division to Astorga, and uniting it with the troops of Taboada and Castañon marched against Bonnet on July 2nd. The French general, after trying to defend for some time the bridge of the Orbigo, found himself so outnumbered that he must retreat towards Leon. But before he had been driven back so far, first Serras from Benavente, and then Bessières himself, with Dumoustier’s division from Valladolid, came up to join him. The French, now 13,000 strong, advanced to seek a general action (July 18). Santocildes, showing great prudence, refused to fight in the plain, hastily abandoned Astorga and the banks of the Orbigo, and withdrew into the mountains south-west of Astorga, where he took post at Torienzo. The enemy did not pursue, and only a party of light cavalry entered Astorga, which it abandoned next day. For Bessières had received intelligence that his head quarters at Valladolid, which was almost ungarrisoned in the absence of Dumoustier’s division, had been attacked by the partidas of the southern sierras (July 15). At the same time General Dorsenne reported from Burgos that Mina had crossed into his government, deserting his more usual haunts in Navarre, and had united with Longa and Porlier. They had a large force and had cut the communications with Santander. On returning to Valladolid with the Guard division, Bessières found waiting there on July 25 his letters of recall to Paris. The Emperor had deposed him, partly in consequence of complaints as to his intractability made by King Joseph, partly because he was dissatisfied at the hopeless tone of his dispatches, in which (to his master’s discontent) he kept setting forth the thesis that the war in Spain was being conducted on a wrong system, and that the Army of the North was helpless[605]. His post was given to General Dorsenne, a man of inferior ability, though his operations prove him not to have been such a conceited imbecile as his jealous subordinate Thiébault alleges[606]. Indeed, his record in the north compares not unfavourably with that of Bessières, and he was decidedly more ready to aid his neighbours than the Duke of Istria—which was the main thing necessary among French generals in Spain.

On the departure of Bessières for Valladolid, his subordinates Bonnet and Serras had halted behind the Orbigo, holding La Baneza as their advanced point. Santocildes, who showed as much enterprise as prudence during his short tenure of command, learning that there were now only 6,000 or 7,000 men in front of him, came down again from his mountains on July 28th with all his three divisions, and advanced against them: they were forced, after some slight skirmishing, to abandon La Baneza and the line of the Orbigo, and to fall back on Leon. Santocildes advanced to the Esla, and roving detachments sent out from his front pushed forward as far into Old Castile as Sahagun and Palencia. The partidas got possession of the whole country-side, and the French garrisons of Zamora, Toro, Benavente, and Salamanca were completely cut off from their communication with Dorsenne’s head quarters at Valladolid. There was equal trouble in the provinces of Burgos and Santander, where Longa and Porlier long held occupied the Guard division of General Roguet, evading him when necessary, and always returning to give trouble when he had passed by.

Unfortunately for the Spaniards, Santocildes was at this moment superseded by General Abadia, whom Castaños had sent to take general command of the ‘6th Army’. He was in every way inferior to his junior and predecessor, being neither so alert nor so cautious, and having a craze for unnecessary innovation in matters of detail, which might have been harmless in time of peace, but was vexatious when carried out during a campaign. Wellington had at first conceived great expectations from his intelligence[607], but soon became entirely disappointed with him.

Just before Abadia replaced Santocildes, the position of Dorsenne was wonderfully improved by the arrival on the Ebro of the division of Souham, 7,000 strong, which had been promised to him in June, and had been marching up from Marseilles for five weeks. The commander of the Army of the North at once turned over the province of Burgos to Souham, and moved forward from it the greater part of the Guard division of Roguet, which thus became free for operations in the open field. Caffarelli’s and Reille’s divisions were now also present in Biscay and Navarre, so that the available strength of the French in northern Spain was higher than it had been since the summer of 1810, and Dorsenne thought that his rear was adequately covered. He therefore marched with the two divisions of the Young Guard and his two cavalry brigades, to link his operations with those of Bonnet on the Esla. Dorsenne started from Valladolid on August 9th, marching in two columns, Dumoustier’s division by Mayorga and Valencia de Don Juan, Roguet’s by Villalpando and Benavente, so as to converge on La Baneza. Bonnet, strengthened by some reinforcements, advanced at the same time from Leon against the bridges of the Orbigo and Astorga, and Dorsenne, with a small reserve, followed by the road Valladolid-Valderas. It was evidently intended that Roguet’s division should turn the Spanish right, and drive the whole army northward, and away from Galicia, while it was attacked in front by Bonnet and Dumoustier.

Fortunately for his army, which was now about to be attacked by nearly 30,000 men, Abadia listened to the advice of Santocildes, and withdrew hastily to the hills when, on August 17th, his outposts were attacked. Cabrera’s division retired on its old post of Puebla de Senabria, and got into communication with Silveira’s Portuguese, who had come up to Braganza. Castañon and the Conde de Belveder[608] (who had just relieved Taboada in command of the 2nd Division) were drawn back to the two passes above Astorga, those of Manzanal and Fuencebadon. Dorsenne, dividing his troops, attacked both, and carried them, not without severe fighting, on July 27th. The Spanish detachment in the Manzanal pass was badly cut up: that before Fuencebadon suffered less. The French lost General Corsin. Behind the passes there are two lines of retreat into Galicia, the northern and more obvious is the great chaussée to Corunna, via Villafranca and Lugo, which Sir John Moore followed in January 1809. The southern and more rugged is that by Ponferrada, Domingo Flores, and the Val de Orres to Orense, which La Romana took in that same historic retreat. This last road was now chosen by Abadia, for two reasons: the first was that by taking it he placed himself upon the flank of Dorsenne’s advance against the heart of Galicia, and forced the enemy either to turn against him, and follow him into a remote and desolate country, or (if he pressed on) to expose his communication with Astorga and Leon. The second reason was that he knew that Dorsenne had come lightly equipped, intending rather to drive his army out of the Astorga region than to conquer the whole province of Galicia; the French would not, therefore, be able to feed on the desolate route between Ponferrada and Orense, and would probably turn back, content with having cleared the plains of Leon.

This argument was correct. Dorsenne went no further on the great chaussée than Villafranca, which he sacked on August 29th, and then turned on his heel, refusing to press deeper into Galicia, or to pursue Abadia’s army. He marched back to Astorga on the 30th-31st, burning every village of the Vierzo on his way, and descended into the plains of Leon. Abadia followed cautiously, reoccupied Villafranca and Ponferrada, and pushed his outposts forward again to the edge of the mountains. It was found that the French were repairing Astorga, which they once more garrisoned, and held as an outpost till the next year. The ground occupied by the Army of Galicia was exactly the same on the 10th of September as it had been on the 10th of June, save that all Asturias was still clear of invaders. It was not till the late autumn that Bonnet once more made his appearance in that oft-invaded province.

The reasons of Dorsenne’s sudden retreat from the borders of Galicia were many and various. It must not be supposed that his expedition had been taken in hand with the object of conquering that province, as Napier seems to suggest[609]. Such a task would have required much longer preparation than he had been able to make: he had neither collected the stores and munitions that would have been required for so great an enterprise, nor made the necessary dispositions for the protection of the vast space behind him. When he marched against Abadia, he left nothing between the Ebro and the border of Portugal save Souham’s newly arrived division and a few of Serras’s battalions scattered in small garrisons at Leon, Benavente, Valladolid, &c. His movement of advance had been made to chase the Army of Galicia out of the plains, where it had been showing itself so persistently since June, and to relieve the pressure which it had brought upon Bonnet and Serras. There was no purpose of conquest underlying his march, only a desire to scour the valleys of the Orbigo and the Esla of tiresome intruders. The Spaniards were wholly mistaken in supposing that he retired from Villafranca because Abadia had shown a disposition to make a long resistance, or because the Junta had called out the alarmas, or general levée en masse of the province, raised on the principle of the Portuguese Ordenança. He could have gone on further if that had been his intention—but he had no such desire.

Not only were his munitions exhausted, but all the news behind him was unsatisfactory. Though the reinforcements from France had arrived on the Ebro, Old Castile was in the most disturbed condition. There had been a notable disaster at Santander on August 14th-15th, when Porlier, by a sudden concentration, had stormed the town, dispersing General Rouget’s[610] garrison, and had then swept away most of the minor posts around it; only Torrelavega had succeeded in beating off his assault. But when reinforcements came flocking in, the Spaniards had retired to the hills with 300 prisoners, and were threatening other points. The gates of Palencia and Valladolid had been insulted by partidas, who showed themselves boldly in sight of the walls, and established a loose blockade, which could only be pierced by the movement of considerable columns. But the most pressing point was Ciudad Rodrigo: Julian Sanchez had cut its communications with Salamanca, and had defeated small bodies of 300 or 400 men which had been sent to reopen them. A much larger force had to be detailed to throw provisions into the place in July, but by the end of August stores were again running low, and General Reynaud, the governor, whenever he could pass an emissary through the lines of the partidas, kept asking for help of all kinds.

But since Dorsenne started for his expedition against Astorga, the problem of getting food into Rodrigo had been complicated by the appearance of Wellington’s army on the Coa and the Agueda. On August 12th the head quarters of the Anglo-Portuguese army had been moved up from the south to Fuente Guinaldo, in the immediate neighbourhood of the blockaded fortress, and already on August 8th the garrison had detected British outposts—from the Light Division—in their immediate neighbourhood. Now, since Marmont and the Army of Portugal were still in the valley of the Tagus, and all Leon was still in the charge of the Army of the North, Dorsenne found himself responsible for the revictualling, indeed for the relief from blockade, of a fortress which might be beset by 40,000 men. It was absolutely necessary for him to return from the border of Galicia, and to concert matters with Marmont for a common movement against Wellington. For the field force of the Army of the North, which had just driven Abadia into the hills, was not over 28,000 strong, and obviously could not succour Rodrigo by its own unaided strength.

Returning to Valladolid early in September, with the two Guard divisions, and leaving Bonnet once more to observe the Galicians, Dorsenne opened pourparlers with Marmont for a general concentration against Wellington. Of this effort we must speak in its due place.

Meanwhile matters settled down in the northern field of operations. Bonnet was too weak to move, or to think of reoccupying his old post in the Asturias. Abadia’s army was much reduced in numbers, both by privations and by desertion: the last days of the late campaign, spent in the desolate Val de Orres, had been particularly trying to the troops. An English observer who saw them at Ponferrada described them as ‘in even worse condition than might be expected—half the soldiers without trousers, and wearing only capotes—while the clothing of the rest shows great need for improvement. They are a fine body of men, standing well, though deeply marked by privation, and as badly trained as equipped. The best corps can only manœuvre singly, not attempting movements of the line; the Toledo battalion broke down in attempting to change front en échelon. The cavalry are on a level with the infantry, move with wide gaps between squadrons, and cannot go accurately through the sword exercise. The horses might each be a Rosinante—the artillery as badly manned as horsed[611].’ The numbers were terribly low: it was doubtful whether the whole field force could produce 10,000 men, and they had started on the June campaign with 15,000.

Dilapidated, however, as the Army of Galicia might be at the end of its operations, it had done well, having kept the French Army of the North ‘contained’ for the many weeks during which Wellington was absent on the Guadiana. Bessières and Dorsenne had accomplished nothing positive during that time; and the territory held down by the invaders in September was less than it had been in June by the whole extent of the Asturias. It is absurd of Napier to state that ‘Galicia with its lordly Junta, its regular army, fortified towns, numerous population, and constant supplies from England, had less weight in the contest than the 5,000 Portuguese militia conducted by Trant and Wilson[612].’ The province, so far from being of no weight in the contest, did Wellington most useful service. The two diversions carried out by Santocildes, which twice compelled the Army of the North to mass all its available field troops on the Orbigo, were operations of the most profitable sort, and since the Galician always retired in time, led to no disasters of the kind that too often happened when a Peninsular general was overdaring. But while paying his just due to Santocildes, we must praise even more the unwearied activity of the chiefs of the Cantabrian bands and the guerrilleros of Old Castile and Leon. It was Longa and Porlier, and Julian Sanchez, who, with forces that were never very great in numbers, paralysed by their ubiquity and their unceasing enterprise the greater part of Bessières’s and Dorsenne’s troops. If they had not been in existence, the French might have found men enough to conquer Galicia, or to attack north-eastern Portugal in force. This was true throughout the whole of 1810 and 1811, and was a governing fact in the history of the Peninsular War. Even though the Emperor pushed 30,000 fresh infantry (the divisions of Souham, Reille, and Caffarelli) into northern Spain in July and August 1811, he was never able to make the communication between Bayonne and Madrid absolutely safe, or to call any region subdued which was not held down by a garrison altogether out of proportion to its population.

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SECTION XXVII: CHAPTER IV

SOULT’S TROUBLES IN ANDALUSIA. JULY-SEPTEMBER 1811

After his departure from the Guadiana on June 28th, Soult found himself plunged into a new series of troubles, which were to continue all through the summer and autumn. Just as he was about to set out for Seville with two cavalry regiments as escort, following in the wake of Godinot’s and Conroux’s infantry, he received the unwelcome news that Blake, of whose march he had been aware since the 24th, had crossed the lower Guadiana near Mertola on June 23[613], and had invaded the Condado de Niebla with nearly 12,000 men. If Blake had struck straight at Seville there can be little doubt that he would have taken it, for General Daricau, the governor, hastened, on the first news of the approach of an enemy, to shut himself up in the fortified Cartuja Convent, with his scanty garrison of convalescents, drafts, and Juramentados. He had not the least hope of maintaining the large and turbulent city under control. But no one appeared to molest him, except some cavalry, who were easily driven off by cannon-shot. Blake, apparently disliking to present himself in the open plain of the Guadalquivir, had not marched on Seville, but sat down on June 30 to besiege the castle of Niebla, the capital of the region which he had invaded. It was the only French garrison left in western Andalusia, and was held by a battalion of 600 ‘Swiss’ in King Joseph’s service—a miscellaneous corps formed of deserters of all races from the Spanish and British armies, under a Colonel Fritzhardt. Blake lay for five days before the mediaeval castle with the division of Zayas, while Ballasteros, with the rest of the army, took a position to cover him against French troops coming from Estremadura, who (as was rightly suspected) were not long in appearing. The siege failed because Blake had brought no artillery with him—on account of the bad mountain roads he had sent his guns round from Mertola by Ayamonte, and they had not come up. An attempt to take the castle by escalade failed, and the Spanish general was sitting helplessly before its walls on July 2nd, when the news came that the French were upon him. Soult, hearing on his way southward of Blake’s raid, had turned both Conroux and Godinot against the invaders, and had continued his own route to Seville with no more than the cavalry and one infantry regiment. While Godinot marched on Niebla by Cala and Aracena, Conroux tried to cut in between Blake and the sea by a circuitous route by Fregenal, through the worst of the mountains, aiming at the ports of Huelva and Moguer. It was hoped that the Spaniards might be caught between the two divisions—but the quarry was too shy. Blake departed at the first alarm, and embarked at Ayamonte with Zayas’s division; Ballasteros, marching away into the hills which he knew so well, evaded Conroux, and passed for a time northward into the Sierra de Aroche. The cavalry under Penne Villemur did not abscond by water, but returned along the Portuguese frontier to Estremadura, where it joined the skeleton army of Castaños, which still consisted of no more than six or eight battalions under Morillo and Carlos de España, some 3,000 or 4,000 men at most. Wellington had sent it back to Villa Viçosa during the operations around the Caya, declining to use it in the fighting-line till it should be reorganized. Blake, whose embarkation at Ayamonte on July 8th had been accompanied by circumstances of disgraceful panic[614], returned to Cadiz with 7,000 men. Ballasteros followed him thither six weeks later, having descended from the hills and embarked at the mouth of the Guadiana at the end of August.

Blake’s Niebla expedition had been conducted with the greatest timidity and incompetence. Yet it had served Wellington’s purpose much as he had intended, since it drew off 11,000 French troops into a remote corner of Andalusia for some weeks. It is true that Soult’s original withdrawal from the Guadiana was not caused by this diversion, but it had forced him to send away on a wild-goose chase troops urgently needed elsewhere. For if Conroux and Godinot had not marched to Niebla and Ayamonte, they would have gone straight to Granada, to reinforce the 4th Corps, which was, throughout the month of July, in considerable danger from the Murcians. It was not till August had begun that Soult was able to come to its aid, with the divisions which had been distracted to the far west by Blake’s expedition.

Of Freire’s Army of Murcia we have heard nothing since the unhappy rout of Baza (November 3, 1810). After that shock it had kept quiet for many a day, and only dared to move when, in April 1811, Soult began to make heavy requisitions on the 4th Corps, in order to form the army that marched for Albuera. Further drafts had been called westward in the end of May, so that Leval, who succeeded Sebastiani as commander of the corps about this time, was left with numbers quite inadequate to hold down the broad kingdoms of Jaen and Granada. This, of course, gave Freire the chance of accomplishing something useful: and, leaving the frontiers of Murcia, he began to press forward against the French posts. He had at this time a force of three infantry divisions, under La Cuadra, Sanz, and Creagh, and two weak cavalry divisions under Osorio and Ladrón. The whole amounted, after making deductions for the garrison of Cartagena (2,000 men) to nearly 12,000 bayonets and 1,500 sabres[615]. In May Freire began to push forward cautiously, with his cavalry and two divisions on the high-road Lorca-Baza-Granada, and a smaller force, consisting of La Cuadra’s division, on the side road which leads, by Huescar and Pozoalcon, to the valley of the upper Guadalquivir and the kingdom of Jaen. His progress was so slow that the French were able to withdraw at their leisure before him, without any loss. Leval was so weak that he made no attempt to stand, and evacuated in succession the coast lands about Almeria, as far as Motril, the highlands east of Granada, including the towns of Baza and Guadix, and the upper valley of the Guadalquivir. La Cuadra’s advanced posts penetrated as far as Ubeda, and bickered with the garrisons of Baeza, Linares, and Jaen. Officers sent out from the main column raised the mountaineers of the Sierra Nevada, and bands of insurgents began to cut the communications between Granada and Malaga. At the head of these irregulars was the turbulent Conde de Montijo, of whom we last heard when he got into trouble for conspiring against the supreme Junta[616]. He is now found more usefully employed, giving trouble to the enemy instead of to his own Government.

Cautious though Freire had been, his advance had shaken the hold of the 4th Corps on eastern Andalusia. Leval reported to Soult that, with the 3,000 or 4,000 troops whom he had concentrated at Granada, he was quite helpless, and was wellnigh blockaded on every side. It was only with difficulty that he could keep in touch with the Polish division, which lay in and about Malaga, or with the garrisons of Jaen and Cordova on the other side. He could only collect a force sufficient to attack Freire by abandoning all his outlying posts, and permission to do so had not been granted him. He must be reinforced, or allowed to concentrate his scattered troops and strike at the enemy’s main body.

A few days later the state of affairs in eastern Andalusia became still more threatening. Blake, after embarking at Ayamonte on July 8th, had two days later returned to Cadiz with the two Albuera divisions of Zayas and Lardizabal. He stayed only a fortnight in the island city, and got leave from the Regency to join the Army of Murcia. In order that he might dispose of all the forces in that direction, he asked and obtained the control of the Valencian army also, and was made Captain-General of that province as well as of Murcia and Aragon. Blake landed at Almeria on July 31st with the same troops that he had brought back from the west—about 7,000 foot and 500 horse. From thence he led them to join Freire’s army near Baza, and left them there, while he himself (taking Zayas and some other officers with him) made a hasty visit to Valencia, to receive over the command from the Marquis del Palacio[617], and to see what measures were necessary with regard to the threatening movements of Suchet on the side of Aragon.

The two divisions under Lardizabal and Joseph O’Donnell (vice Zayas) had joined Freire on August 3rd, and a force of 15,000 infantry and nearly 2,000 horse was thus concentrated near Baza. But Freire, being now only the interim commander, refused to take any responsibility, and remained apathetically watching the small French force in Granada, which was (for the moment) absolutely at his mercy. He posted the army in a very strong position near Gor, twelve miles in front of Baza and forty miles from Granada. It was covered in front by the ravine of one of the tributaries of the Guardal river, and could only be turned on the flanks by a very wide movement in difficult ground. La Cuadra’s division remained at Pozoalcon, some thirty miles away from the main body, observing the kingdom of Jaen and vexing its garrisons by small incursions.

Soult had returned to Seville after the expulsion of Blake from western Andalusia, but with no intention of staying there for long, since it was clearly necessary to re-establish the lost prestige of the French arms on the side of Granada, and to reoccupy the ground which Leval had been forced to give up. But he had judged that there was no desperate hurry, since Freire had shown himself such a sluggish adversary: and though he had already directed Godinot’s provisional division to march on Jaen in the last days of July, he himself was still at Seville when he received the unexpected news of Blake’s disembarkation at Almeria on the 31st of that month. Since the Army of Murcia was thus reinforced, the danger to Leval at Granada had become imminent, and it was clearly necessary to rescue him at once. Accordingly the Marshal, setting out from Seville on August 3rd with four regiments of Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry and part of Conroux’s infantry division[618], arrived at Granada by forced marches on the 7th. Godinot was at the same time directed to move from Jaen and Baeza against La Cuadra, to drive him off from Pozoalcon, and then to fall upon the flank and rear of Freire’s strong position near Baza.

Nothing could have served Soult better than the chance that the army against which he was marching was destitute for the moment of its new Commander-in-Chief, and left in charge of a substitute who shirked responsibility. From August 3rd, when the Albuera divisions joined Freire, down to the 7th, when the reinforcements reached Granada, the small French force in that city had been in a most dangerous position. But nothing whatever had happened during the critical days: the Spaniards had remained quiescent behind the ravine of Gor. Picking up the small part of the garrison of Granada that could be spared to join his field force, Soult marched against the enemy on the 8th of August, and was in front of their position on the 9th, with 6,000 infantry and 1,500 horse. Seeing the enormous strength of the ground, he contented himself with making noisy artillery demonstrations against Freire’s line, and waited for the arrival of Godinot, who with 4,000 bayonets and 600 sabres was due to appear in the rear of the Murcians on the 10th, if all had gone well with him.

As a matter of fact Godinot had marched against La Cuadra on the 7th from Baeza, by the way of Jodar. The Spanish general, who was outnumbered, abandoned his post at Pozoalcon on the 8th and fell back towards Huescar, nearer the frontier of Murcia, without fighting. Godinot, therefore, found nothing to prevent him from falling on the rear of the main hostile force, and marched on Baza. His approach was reported to Freire, who detached against him Joseph O’Donnell’s division of 4,000 men, and ordered La Cuadra to hasten to its aid, and to join in covering the flank of the army. O’Donnell took post at the fords of the Guardal river, in front of Zujar, and stood on the defensive, hoping to be joined by La Cuadra during the course of the day. The latter, however, had gone off too far to the east for it to be possible for him to return in time, and O’Donnell was badly beaten by Godinot on the afternoon of the 9th, and lost a third of his men—423 killed and wounded, and 1,000 dispersed or prisoners.

By continuing his march for another eight miles, after beating O’Donnell, Godinot might have seized Baza and cut off Freire from his retreat on Murcia. But his men were tired, and it was reported to him that a new Spanish force—La Cuadra, coming up over late in the day—was approaching. Wherefore he halted, and only sent out cavalry to search for Soult’s flank, and to reconnoitre Baza. But Freire, on hearing that O’Donnell was crushed, and his own rear threatened, silently evacuated his strong position in the night, and marched through Baza and across Godinot’s front with all his host. He got away, but Soult, detecting his retreat at dawn, bade Latour-Maubourg pursue him with all speed at the head of his horsemen. The Spanish rearguard was caught up at Las Vertientes, ten miles beyond Baza. Freire ordered his cavalry, under Osorio and Loy, to face about and protect the march of the infantry. But a charge of Pierre Soult, who led the French advance brigade, broke the Spanish horse, who fled in all directions, uncovering the infantry. The latter took to the hills—one column consisting of the divisions of Sanz and O’Donnell went off southward, and escaped without much loss by Oria and Albox. The other, containing the divisions of Creagh and Lardizabal, turned north, plunged into the Murcian hills, and made its way by Maria to Caravaca. La Cuadra, making a separate retreat in a parallel direction, also arrived at the last-named place[619]. Such was their haste that one column made thirty-six miles in the day on the 10th, the other twenty-seven. Stragglers were many.

The Murcian army was thus divided into two masses, neither of which covered the main road to the capital of the province, and Soult, standing triumphant at Velez Rubio with his 12,000 men united, might have marched on Murcia had he chosen. But the way was long—some seventy miles—and the intervening country rough and thinly peopled. The Marshal resolved not to pursue Freire, but to devote himself to the hunting down of the insurgents of Granada and the southern mountains, while the main hostile army was out of action. When, therefore, Blake returned from Valencia to pay a hasty visit to his scattered army, he found it shaken in morale, and weaker by 4,000 men than when he had left it, but not destroyed. Of the two disjointed sections, one descended in haste from the northern mountains, the other came in marching parallel with the coast; they met at Alcantarilla in front of the city of Murcia, on August 14th, and began to fortify a position there. But the French had turned back; Soult contented himself with reoccupying Baza with a permanent garrison, and did not cross the Murcian frontier. Hence Blake was able, a few weeks later, to take off to the north not only his own two divisions, but part of Freire’s troops, for service against Suchet on the side of Valencia. It was a lucky chance for him that the invasion of Valencia from the side of Aragon only began upon September 16, more than a month after Soult had returned into Andalusia. If it had come earlier, there would have been no succours available for the oft-defeated and never very efficient ‘2nd Army’, as the Valencian corps was now called.

Soult had not gone in person further than Velez Rubio, though his light cavalry had pursued the flying Spaniards many miles further, as far as the pass of Lumbreras. On August 14th he turned back[620], and broke up his army into several columns, who were to hunt down the insurgents of the Sierra Nevada and the Alpujarras. The main body returned to Granada, a flanking column occupied Almeria, another swept the valley of the upper Guadalquivir. There was much plunder and a good deal of reckless shooting of inhabitants—for the French were exasperated at the rising which had taken place in districts that had seemed for the last eighteen months to be pacified. But the crushing of the insurgents turned out to be a long business—indeed eastern and southern Andalusia were never so thoroughly under Soult’s control as they had been in 1810 and the early months of 1811. The Count of Montijo lurked persistently in the mountains, and gained several small successes over General Godinot, who was in main charge of the hunt. On August 21st he captured two whole companies of Poles near Motril, and a few days later checked a column of 1,500 men under Colonel Remond. He himself ultimately got off to join the Murcian army, but the local guerrilleros continued the strife, which was to blaze up again into a formidable conflagration when a new Spanish regular force came upon the scene. This was the division of Ballasteros, who, as has been already mentioned, abandoned his old haunts by the Rio Tinto and the lower Guadiana, to land on September 4th at Algesiras with 3,000 men. Calling in the serranos of the Ronda mountains to his aid, he captured many small places, and forced Soult to turn Godinot’s troops against him. Thus the insurgents further east got a momentary respite, and Soult’s unending troubles took a new turn. But the autumn and winter warfare in the extreme south of Andalusia must be narrated in another place. Suffice it to say here that Soult was never in the later months of 1811 so free from trouble as to find it easy to send any serious aid to Drouet and the 5th Corps, whose duty it was to check and contain Hill’s Anglo-Portuguese divisions in Estremadura.

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