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

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

FIGUERAS AND TARRAGONA. APRIL-MAY 1811

In the earlier chapter of this volume, which took the affairs of Catalonia and Aragon down to the month of March, we left Suchet making vigorous preparation for the siege of Tarragona, within whose walls his master had promised him that he should ‘find his marshal’s baton.’ While munitions and food for this great enterprise were being collected, the unemployed troops of the Army of Aragon were occupied in scouring the mountains on the side of New Castile and Valencia, always driving the partidas before them, but never able to bring about their capture or destruction. Meanwhile, Macdonald with the active part of the French Army of Catalonia, about 17,000 strong, lay in and about Lerida, ‘containing’ the main Spanish force, which had now passed under the control of the new Captain-General, the active but incapable Campoverde. Based on Tarragona, and with his divisions spread out in front of it, this officer bickered with Macdonald continually, but had achieved nothing substantial since his subordinate Sarsfield cut up Eugenio’s Italians at the combat of Valls, long weeks before[621]. His ambitious attempt to surprise Barcelona had failed with loss on March 19th, because it was based on supposed treachery within the walls, which did not really exist. Further to the north, in the Ampurdam and on the Pyrenean frontier, Baraguay d’Hilliers with the rest of the 7th Corps, some 18,000 men, had to furnish the garrisons of Rosas, Figueras, Gerona and other smaller places, and to contend with the miqueletes of Manso, Rovira, Martinez, and other chiefs. There were practically no Spanish regular troops in this direction, almost the whole of the old regiments having been withdrawn southward to face Macdonald, and to defend Tarragona and the surrounding region of central Catalonia. Nevertheless Baraguay d’Hilliers, as we shall see, had no small task thrown upon his hands. In this province the irregulars were at their best, having in the miquelete system an organization which made them far more formidable than the partidas of central or northern Spain.

On March 10th Napoleon, who had marked with approval all Suchet’s earlier operations, while he was thoroughly dissatisfied with Macdonald, resolved to cut up the old 7th Corps or Army of Catalonia, by making over nearly half of its force to the Army of Aragon. A decree declared that the three provinces of Lerida, Tarragona, and Tortosa were transferred to the charge of Suchet, with so much of the province of Barcelona as lay east of the pass of Ordal and the course of the upper Llobregat. Along with the provinces went the troops stationed in them, viz. the French division of Frère, the Italian division of Pino, and the Neapolitan division now commanded by Compère, together with the cavalry and artillery attached to them. Macdonald’s charge was cut down to the region of Barcelona and the lands north of it. The 7th Corps, or troops of his command, sank from over 40,000 to about 25,000 men. The 3rd Corps rose from 26,000 to 43,000 men. With this augmented force Suchet was told both to hold down his old realm in Aragon, and to take Tarragona, furnishing not only a siege army but a covering force as well. Macdonald was no longer to be the shield of Suchet’s operations, as during the siege of Tortosa, but was to occupy himself on a separate and minor system of operations—the Imperial orders directed him to occupy Cardona, Berga, and Urgel, the centres of resistance in upper Catalonia, and to take the rocky stronghold of Montserrat.

Meanwhile, it was necessary to transfer Macdonald’s own person from Lerida, where lay the troops that he had to surrender, to Barcelona, which was to be for the future the centre of his activity. So dangerous was the passage that he had to be given an escort of no less than 7,000 infantry and 700 horse. Taking the way of Manresa, he started from Lerida on March 30th and cut his way through the Spanish forces which stretched across his path. The regular division of Sarsfield, supported by the somatenes of central Catalonia, gave him much trouble: though they failed to hold Manresa, which the French stormed and wantonly burnt, they hung on to the flanks of the marching column, repeatedly attacked its rearguard, and cut off or slew in three days of continuous fighting some 600 men. After reaching the Llobregat at Sabadel, Macdonald went on to the neighbouring Barcelona, while his escort fought its way back to Lerida by the road of Igualada, and joined Suchet on April 9th.

Having now got the whole of his new army under his own hand, Suchet was able to prepare all his arrangements for the march on Tarragona. Ample provision had first to be made for the defence of Aragon in his rear, where the enemies were numerous if not powerful—Mina on the side of Navarre, Villa Campa and Carbajal in the mountains of the south, and the Army of Valencia beyond the lower course of the Ebro. He set aside three battalions and a cavalry regiment to watch Mina[622], and two battalions each for garrisons at Saragossa and Calatayud[623]; he placed a brigade under Paris at Daroca[624], and another under Abbé at Teruel[625] to watch the southern insurgents. To keep off the Valencians he left a regiment at Morella and Alcañiz[626], another in garrison at Tortosa[627], and 1,600 men disposed in small forts along the lower Ebro from La Rapita at its mouth to Caspe[628]. Musnier was given charge of all the troops on the right bank of the Ebro, and had orders to unite Abbé’s and Paris’s brigades and evacuate the southern hill-country if the Valencians made a serious advance against Tortosa.

This left Suchet twenty-nine battalions for the expeditionary corps with which he was about to march against Tarragona—of which nineteen were French, two Polish, and eight Italian. They amounted to just under 15,000 bayonets. Since the three divisions of the Army of Aragon had all been thinned down by the numerous detachments left behind, he amalgamated what remained of them with the French and the Italian brigades left to him by Macdonald, to make up three provisional divisions for the field, under Habert, Harispe, and Frère. The first had one French and two Italian brigades (fourteen battalions), the others two brigades each (six and nine battalions respectively). There was a cavalry brigade of 1,400 men under Boussard, and a large provision of artillery and engineers for the siege (2,000 men of the former, 750 of the latter arm). Counting the auxiliary services the army had about 20,000 men—no great figure for the task before it, for Tarragona was strong and Campoverde had some 12,000 or 15,000 regular troops at his disposition—the three divisions of Sarsfield, Eroles, and Courten—besides such aid as the miqueletes might give. And this last resource was not to be despised; though they were not always forthcoming when they were most required, yet they were not usually found wanting. They could never be caught, owing to their knowledge of their own hills, and they were never discouraged.

It was arranged that the army should march on Tarragona by two separate routes; while the divisions of Frère and Harispe started from Lerida by the road of Momblanch, the third division, that of Habert, was to move from a separate base—Tortosa, where had been collected the heavy artillery and the munitions of the siege. The guns which had taken Tortosa were still lying there, with all the artillery reserve, and it was to escort them that Habert was detailed to take the southern route along the sea-coast by the Col de Balaguer. From this direction too were to come the provisions of the army, which had been brought down by water from Saragossa and Mequinenza while the Ebro was in flood, and deposited at Mora—the nearest point on the river to Tarragona. This division of forces was perhaps necessary, but appeared dangerous; if Campoverde, when the French commenced their movements, had thrown himself with all disposable forces upon the weak division of Habert—only six battalions—and had wrecked the battering-train, there could have been no siege of Tarragona for many a month to come.

But before the two columns had started from Lerida and Tortosa, and while part of Harispe’s division was out on a final cattle-hunt up the valley of the Noguera, before the Commander-in-Chief had even come up to the front to join his army, a message arrived from the north which might well have stopped the whole expedition. On April 21st Suchet, still at Saragossa, received the astounding news that the Spaniards had captured Figueras, the bulwark of northern Catalonia, and the most important place (with the exception of Barcelona) which belonged to the French in the whole principality. The disaster had happened on the night of the 9th-10th, and the news of it had been brought by a spy paid by Macdonald, across the territory occupied by the Spanish army: otherwise it would have taken still longer to travel, by the circuitous route through France, which was the only way by which news from Upper Catalonia could reach Aragon[629]. Macdonald and Maurice Mathieu, the governor of Barcelona, who added his supplications to those of the Marshal, begged Suchet to abandon for the moment the projected siege of Tarragona, and to march to their aid with every man that he could spare. For they must collect as large a force as possible to recover Figueras, and a field army could not be got together from the much-reduced 7th Corps, which had to find a garrison of 6,000 men for Barcelona, and similar, if smaller, detachments for Gerona, Rosas, Hostalrich, Mont Louis, Palamos, and other smaller places. If Campoverde should march northward, with the bulk of his regular divisions, to succour Figueras, there would be little or nothing to oppose to him.

Suchet weighed the petition of his colleague with care, but refused to assent to it. His decision was highly approved by the Emperor when he came to know of it, and the reasons which he gave for his answer seem convincing. It would take, as he calculated, twenty-five days to move a division, or a couple of divisions, from Lerida to Figueras across the hostile country-side of Catalonia; and since the disaster was already eleven days old when the news came to hand, there must be over a month of delay between the moment when the Spaniards had taken the fortress and that at which the Army of Aragon could intervene. In that month the fate of affairs in the Ampurdam would have been already decided. The succours for the garrison of northern Catalonia must come from France, not from Aragon. Figueras lies only twenty miles from the French frontier[630], and Baraguay d’Hilliers could be helped far more readily from Perpignan, Toulouse, or Narbonne than from Lerida. National Guards and dépôt troops could be hurried to his aid in a few days. As to Campoverde, he would be called home at once by a blow delivered against Tarragona, his capital and chief arsenal. He must infallibly hurry back to defend it, at the head of his field army, and Macdonald and Baraguay d’Hilliers would then have nothing but the miqueletes opposed to them. If the 7th Corps, with the reinforcements from France which it must infallibly receive, could not deal with Rovira, Manso and the rest, it was time to abandon the Peninsular War! The crisis, whichever way its results might lean, was bound to have come and passed before the Army of Aragon could be of any use. It would almost certainly have ended in a check for the Spaniards, since the Emperor could pour as many men into the Ampurdam as he pleased. At the worst Figueras would be beleaguered so soon as the reinforcements arrived from France, and all the best of the Spaniards in northern Catalonia would be shut up in the place and kept out of mischief. It was entirely to the advantage of the Imperial arms that the enemy should lock up his men in garrisons, for they were much more troublesome when acting as partisans in the mountains[631].

Accordingly, on April 24th, Suchet, having sent a direct refusal to Macdonald’s petition, came up to Lerida, and on the 28th Harispe’s and Frère’s divisions started off for Tarragona by the shortest road, that through Momblanch. At the same time Habert with the siege artillery moved out from Tortosa for the same destination along the coast-road by the Col de Balaguer and Cambrils. On May 2 both columns were near Tarragona, having met with very little opposition by the way, for Campoverde, with the larger part of his field army, had gone off a fortnight before to the north, with the intention of succouring Figueras, and the rest of his regulars had retired into Tarragona to form its garrison.

Before dealing with the long and bitterly contested struggle at Tarragona, it is necessary to explain how Figueras had come into the hands of the Spaniards. This place was a new and well-designed eighteenth-century fortress, built sixty years back by Ferdinand VI, to supplement the defences of the Catalonian frontier. Thus it had not the weaknesses of old-fashioned strongholds like Gerona or Lerida, where the scheme of the fortifications dated back to the Middle Ages. Close to the high-road from Perpignan to Barcelona, and only twenty miles from the frontier, stands an isolated hill with a flat top, at whose foot lay the original village or small town of Figueras. Ferdinand VI had fortified this hilltop so as to form a circular bastioned enceinte, and thus created a most formidable citadel, which he named after himself San Fernando. It dominated the little town below, and the whole of the surrounding plain of the Ampurdam. The slopes below the wall are steep, even precipitous in some places, and there is only one road leading up into the place by curves and zigzags, though there are several posterns at other points. San Fernando had been one of the fortresses which Napoleon seized by treachery in 1808—a French detachment, ostensibly marching through the town towards Barcelona, had fallen upon and evicted the Spanish garrison[632]. Since then it had formed the most important base for operations in northern Catalonia, and had been the magazine from which the sieges of Rosas and Gerona had been fed. A long possession of three years had made the Imperial generals careless, and the garrison had gradually dwindled down to a provisional battalion of 600 or 700 men, mainly composed at this moment of drafts for the Italian and Neapolitan divisions of Pino and Compère, detained on their way to the front, according to the usual system. The governor was a Brigadier-General Guillot, who seems to have been a negligent and easy-going officer. The rocky fortress was so strong that it never entered into his head that his restless neighbours the miqueletes might try a blow at it. It was a mere chance that on the day when the assault was delivered a marching battalion of Italian drafts, escorting General Peyri, who was coming up to take command of Pino’s late division, happened to be billeted in the town below—next day they would have been gone.

It was clearly Guillot’s carelessness, and the small numbers of his garrison, which inspired the miquelete chiefs with the idea of making an attack by surprise on this almost impregnable citadel. Rovira, the most active of them, got into communication with three young Catalans who passed as Afrancesados and were employed by the commissary Bouclier, who had charge of the magazines. One, Juan Marquez, was his servant, the other two, Pedro and Ginés Pons, were under-storekeepers. All three were mere boys, the oldest not twenty-one years of age. Marquez got wax impressions of various keys belonging to his master, including those of the store-vaults and of a postern gate leading into them from the foot of the ramparts, and made false keys from them. It was determined that a picked band of miqueletes should attempt to force their way into the place through the postern on the midnight of April 9th-10th. Rovira sent the details of his scheme to Campoverde, who, despite of his late fiasco at Barcelona, was delighted with the plan, and offered to come up with his field army to the north if the attempt should succeed.

The miquelete chiefs conducted their enterprise with considerable skill. On the 7th of April Rovira collected some 2,000 men at the foot of the Pyrenees, north of Olot, and threatened to make a descent into the French valleys beyond, in order to distract the attention of the enemy. On the 9th he counter-marched for Figueras, and at dusk got within nine miles of it. At one in the morning his forlorn hope, 700 men under two captains named Casas and Llovera, came up under the ramparts, found their confederates waiting for them at the postern, and were admitted by means of the false keys. They burst up out of the vaults, and caught the garrison mostly asleep[633]—the governor was captured in his bed, the main-guard at the great gate was surprised, and the few men who came straggling out of the barracks to make resistance were overpowered in detail. Only thirty-five men were killed or wounded on the part of the French, not so many on the Spanish side, and in an hour or less the place was won. The captors promptly admitted their friends from without, and ere dawn over 2,000 Catalans were manning the walls of the fortress. The material captured was immense—16,000 muskets, several hundred cannon, a great store of boots and clothing, four months’ provisions for a garrison of 2,000 men, and 400,000 francs in the military chest. General Peyri, with the Italian bataillon de marche which was sleeping in the town below, was unable to do anything—there had been very little firing, and when some fugitives ran down from San Fernando, it was to tell him that the place was completely mastered by the enemy. He put his troops under arms, and drew off at daylight to Bascara, half-way to Gerona, with his 650 men, after having sent off the bad news both to Baraguay d’Hilliers on one side and to the governor of Perpignan on the other[634]. The former sent him out a battalion and a squadron, and told him to return towards Figueras and to place himself in observation in front of it till he was succoured. All the disposable troops in northern Catalonia should join him within two days. Peyri therefore reoccupied Figueras town, and barricaded himself in it with 1,500 men—being quite unable to do more; he had to watch the Catalans introducing reinforcements into San Fernando without being able to molest them. Baraguay d’Hilliers did not come to his succour for some days, being unable to leave Gerona till he had called in some dangerously exposed outlying posts, and had strengthened Rosas, which was threatened by some English frigates, who showed signs of throwing a landing-party ashore to besiege it. He then came up with 2,000 men to join Peyri, while a more considerable force arrived from Perpignan under General Quesnel, who had charge of the Pyrenean frontier, and appeared with three line battalions, and two more of National Guards of the Gers and Haute-Garonne. Having 6,500 infantry and 500 cavalry concentrated, d’Hilliers was able to throw a cordon of troops round San Fernando and to commence its blockade on April 17th.

The place, however, was now fully garrisoned. Rovira had thrown into it, during the week when free entry was possible, miqueletes to the number of some 3,000, making a brigadier named Martinez, one of his most trusted lieutenants, the governor. On the 16th a reinforcement of regular troops arrived—part of the division of Baron Eroles, which had the most northern cantonments among the units of Campoverde’s field army. Eroles had marched from Martorel by Olot, and had captured on his way the small French garrisons of that place and of Castelfollit, making 548 prisoners. Campoverde sent messages to say that he would arrive himself with larger forces in a few days. Having thrown Courten’s division into Tarragona, he would bring up the rest of his available troops—Sarsfield’s division and the remainder of that of Eroles, with all the miqueletes that he could collect. Meanwhile the local somatenes of central Catalonia pressed in close upon Gerona and Hostalrich, and kept Baraguay d’Hilliers in a state of great anxiety, for he feared that they might capture these places, whose garrisons had been depleted to make up his small field force.

The opportunity offered to the Spaniard was not one that was likely to last for long, since Napoleon, on hearing of the fall of Figueras, had issued orders for the concentration of some 14,000 troops from Southern France, a division under General Plauzonne from Languedoc and Provence, and five or six odd battalions more[635]. When these should arrive, in the end of April or the first days of May, the French in northern Catalonia would be too strong to fear any further disasters. But meanwhile Macdonald and Baraguay d’Hilliers had a fortnight of doubt and danger before them. The former proposed to march himself to Figueras, with what troops he could spare from Barcelona, but since its garrison was only about 6,000 strong, and the place was large and turbulent, it was clear that he could bring little with him. It was for this reason that he wrote to Suchet in such anxiety on April 16th, and begged for the loan of one or two divisions from the Army of Aragon. Till he got his answer, he did not himself move forth. Hence d’Hilliers alone had to bear the brunt of the trouble.

There is no doubt that Campoverde had a fair chance of achieving a considerable if temporary success; but he threw it away by his slowness and want of skill. Though aware of the capture of Figueras on April 12th, he did not start from Tarragona till the 20th, nor reach Vich in northern Catalonia till the 27th. He had then with him 6,000 infantry, mostly of Sarsfield’s division, and 800 horse. Rovira drew near to co-operate, with those of the miqueletes of the Ampurdam who had not already thrown themselves into the fortress. The force collected ought to have sufficed to break through the thin blockading cordon which Baraguay d’Hilliers had thrown round the fortress, if it had been properly handled. But Campoverde was no general. On May 3rd the relieving army approached the place, the miqueletes demonstrated against the northern part of the French lines, while Sarsfield broke through at a point on the opposite side, near the town, and got into communication with Eroles, who came down with 2,000 men to join him. They fell together upon the French regiment (the 3rd Léger) on this front, which took refuge in the barricaded town and defended itself there for some time. According to all the Spanish narratives the three battalions in Figueras presently offered to surrender, and wasted time in negotiations, while Baraguay d’Hilliers was collecting the main body of his forces in a solid mass. Screened by an olive wood in his march, the French general suddenly fell on Sarsfield’s flank and rear, while he was intent on the enemy in the town alone; a charge of dragoons cut up two of the Spanish regiments, and the rest gave way in disorder, Sarsfield falling back towards the plain, and Eroles retiring into the fortress. The reserve of Campoverde and the miqueletes were never seriously engaged. If they had been used as they should have been, the fight might have gone otherwise than it did, for counting the garrison of San Fernando and the irregulars, the Spaniards had a considerable superiority of numbers. They lost over 1,000 men, the French about 400[636]. During the time while the blockading line was broken, Sarsfield had introduced into San Fernando some artillerymen (much needed for the vast number of guns in the place), and part of a convoy which he was conducting, but the greater portion of it, including a great drove of sheep, was captured by the enemy at the moment of the rout.

If Campoverde and his army had been given no other task save the relief of Figueras, it is probable that this combat would have been but the commencement of a long series of operations. But he received, immediately after his check, the news that Suchet had marched from Lerida on April 28th, and had appeared in front of Tarragona on May 3rd. The capital of Catalonia was even more important than Figueras, and it was necessary to hasten to its aid, for no regular troops had been left in the southern part of the principality, save the single division of Courten, which had hastened to shut itself up in the city. Accordingly Sarsfield was directed to take 2,000 infantry and the whole cavalry of the army, and to march by the inland to threaten Suchet’s rear, and his communications with Lerida, while Campoverde himself came down to the coast with 4,000 men, embarked at Mataro, the nearest port in Spanish hands, and sailed for Tarragona, where he arrived in safety, to strengthen the garrison. Eroles came out of San Fernando with a few hundreds of his own troops, before the blockade was fully re-established, and joined Rovira in the neighbouring mountains, leaving the defence of the fortress to Martinez with five regular battalions[637] and 3,000 miqueletes. Eroles and Rovira were the only force left to observe Baraguay d’Hilliers, and since they had only a few thousand men, mostly irregulars, they were able to do little to help the place. For the besieging force was strengthened in May by the arrival of Plauzonne’s division from France, while Macdonald came up from Barcelona with a few battalions, and took over the command from Baraguay d’Hilliers. By the end of the month he had over 15,000 men, and had begun to shut in the fortress on its height by an elaborate system of contravallations, which he compares in his memoirs to Caesar’s lines around Alesia. Martinez made a most obstinate and praiseworthy defence—of which more hereafter—and the siege of Figueras dragged on for many months, till long after the more important operations around Tarragona had come to an end. But after Campoverde’s departure for the south there was never any hope that it could be relieved: all that its defenders accomplished was to detain and immobilize the whole 7th Corps, which, when it had garrisoned Barcelona and Gerona, and supplied the blockading force for San Fernando, had not a man disposable for work in other quarters. Thus Suchet had to carry out his operations against Tarragona without any external assistance, whereas, if Figueras had never been lost, he might have counted on much incidental help from his colleague Macdonald. This much was accomplished by the daring exploit of April 10th: if Campoverde had been capable of utilizing the chance that it gave him, its results might have been far more important.

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SECTION XXVIII: CHAPTER II

THE SIEGE AND FALL OF TARRAGONA. MAY-JUNE 1811

Suchet had marched, as has been already mentioned, from Lerida, with Harispe’s division, on April 28th, Frère’s division following. On the 29th the head of the column reached Momblanch, where half a battalion was left behind in a fortified post, to keep open the Lerida road. On May 2nd the large manufacturing town of Reus, only ten miles from Tarragona, was occupied: on May 3rd the French advanced guard, Salme’s brigade, approached the city, and drove in the Catalan advanced posts as far as the river Francoli. But the siege could not begin till Habert’s force, escorting the battering-train, should come up from Tortosa; and this all-important column was much delayed. Its road ran along the seaside from the Col de Balaguer onward, and Codrington’s squadron of English frigates and gunboats accompanied it all the way, vexing and delaying it, by bombarding it whenever it was forced to come within gunshot of the beach. This was practically all the opposition that Suchet met with: a few miqueletes had shown themselves in the hills between Reus and Momblanch, but they were too weak to fight. Campoverde had carried off the best both of regulars and irregulars to the relief of Figueras, and Courten, who had barely 4,500 men in his division[638], had wisely shut himself up in Tarragona, where every man was wanted: for the enceinte was very long, and the sedentary garrison consisted of only five or six battalions. The troops inside the walls did not amount, when the siege began, to 7,000 men: hence came the weakness shown in the early days; it was not till Campoverde’s army came back from the north (May 10) that an adequate defensive force was in existence for such a large fortress.

Tarragona, though some of its fortifications were not skilfully planned, was a very strong place. The nucleus of the works was the circuit of the old Celtiberian town of Tarraco, which afterwards became the capital of Roman Spain. This forms the upper city in modern times. It is built on an inclined plane, of which the eastern end (530 feet above sea-level), where the cathedral lies, is the higher side, and the slope goes downhill, and westward: the southern face, that towards the sea, is absolutely precipitous, the northern one hardly less so. Large fragments of the Cyclopean walls built by the Celtiberians, or perhaps by the Carthaginians, are visible along the crest on both of these sides. On the west, the lowest part of the old town, a line of modern fortifications divided the upper town from the lower; there was a sharp drop along this line: in most places it is very steep, and the road of to-day goes up the hillside in zigzags, to avoid the break-neck climb[639]. Below the fortifications of the upper city, and divided from them by a broad belt of ground free of houses[640], lay the port-town or lower city, clustering around the harbour, which is an excellent roadstead shut in by a mole 1,400 feet long, which runs out from the south-west corner of the place. The lower city was enclosed on its northern and western sides by a front of six bastions; its southern side, facing the port and the open sea, had not, and did not need, any great protection; it could only have been endangered by an enemy whose strength was on the water, and who could bring a fleet into action. There was a sort of citadel in the port-town, a work named the Fuerte Real, which lies on an isolated mound inside the north-west angle of the walls. About 400 yards west of the most projecting bastion of the place the river Francoli flows into the sea, at the western end of the harbour. In the angle between the river and the port was an outlying work, Fort Francoli, destined to keep besiegers away from the shipping, which they might easily bombard from this point, if it were not occupied. This fort was connected with the lower town by a covered way protected by a long entrenchment containing two lunettes.

Notwithstanding the great strength of the high-lying upper city, it had been furnished with a second line of defence, outside its old Roman walls. Low down the hillside five forts, connected by a wall and covered way, protected its whole eastern front from the edge of the heights as far as the sea. The Barcelona road, crawling along the water’s edge, enters the place between two of these forts, and goes to the Lower, after sending a steep bypath up to a gate in the Upper, city[641].

On the west and north-west the high-lying fortress commands all the surrounding country-side. But to the due north there is a lofty hill about 800 yards from the walls, called Monte Olivo. This dominates the lower town, since it is 200 feet high, or more, though it is itself dominated by the upper town. An enemy in possession of it has every advantage for attacking the north front of the lower town. Wherefore, during the course of the last two years, the summit of the hill had been entrenched, and a very large hornwork, the Fuerte Olivo, constructed upon it. This was a narrow fort, following the shape of the crest of the hill, with a length of 400 yards, and embrasures for forty-seven guns. Its outer front was protected by a ditch hewn in the solid rock: its rear was only slightly closed with a low wall crowned by palisades, so as to leave it exposed to the fire of the upper city, if by any chance the enemy should get possession of it. Such an extensive work required a garrison of over 1,000 men—a heavy proportion of the 6,500 which formed the total force of the Spaniards at the commencement of the siege.

When Suchet arrived in front of Tarragona, and had driven the Spaniards within their works (May 3rd-4th), his chief engineer and artillery officers, Rogniat and Vallée, had to conduct a long and careful survey of the fortifications opposed to them. They concluded that the northern front of the city was practically impregnable, from its precipitous contours, and that the eastern front, though a little less rocky, was equally ineligible, because of the trouble which would be required to transport guns first across the high ground to the north-east, and then down to the seashore. The south front, being all along the water’s edge, was inaccessible. There remained only the western front, that formed by the lower city, where the defences lay in the plain of the Francoli, and had no dominance over the ground in front of them. There was an additional advantage for the besieger here, in that the soil was partly river sand, partly the well-broken-up loam of suburban market gardens, and in all cases very easy to dig. But if they were to attack the west front, the engineers required the General-in-Chief to accomplish two preliminary operations for them. He must take Fort Olivo, which commanded with its flanking fires much of the ground on which they intended to work, and he must drive away from the northern side of the harbour the Anglo-Spanish squadron which lay there, since its heavy guns would enfilade all works started for the purpose of approaching the western front of Tarragona in the neighbourhood of the mouth of the Francoli.

This being the programme laid down, Suchet took up his positions round the fortress—Harispe’s division had charge of the main part of the northern front, its French brigade (Salme) occupying the ground in front of Fort Olivo, while its two Italian brigades stretched eastward along the distant heights, curving round so as to cut the Barcelona road along the sea-coast with their extreme detachment. Frère’s division had the central part of the lines, and lay on both sides of the course of the Francoli river, its main force, however, being on the left bank. Habert’s division, which had just come up from Tortosa, was placed near the mouth of the river, and facing towards the port; it formed the right wing of the army, and covered the siege-park, which was established at the village of Canonge, about a mile and a half from the walls of Tarragona. The magazines and hospitals were fixed at the large town of Reus, nine miles to the rear, under a considerable guard; for though the road from thence to the French lines ran over the gentle undulations of the coast plain, yet there was always danger that bands of miqueletes might descend from the hills for some daring enterprise. Several of the intermediate villages were fortified, to serve as half-way refuges for convoys and small parties on the move.

Some days were lost to the French in completing the survey of Tarragona, in settling down the troops into their permanent camps, and in bringing up from the rear, along the Tortosa road, the remainder of the battering-train and its munitions. It was not till May 8th that serious operations began. Suchet’s first object was to drive away from the northern end of the harbour the English and Spanish ships, whose fire swept the ground about the mouth of the Francoli, across which his siege-works were to be constructed. With this object a large fort was constructed on the shore, in which very heavy guns, fatal to shipping, were to be placed. Commodore Codrington, who was lying in the harbour with a small squadron of two 74’s and two frigates, assisted by several Spanish gunboats, bombarded the fort incessantly, but what he destroyed in the day the French rebuilt with additions every night, and on May 13th the fort was sufficiently completed to receive its armament of 24-pounders. The ship-guns were unable to cope with them, and the vessels of the Allies during the rest of the siege were compelled to keep to the south end of the port, and could only vex the besieger’s subsequent trench-building by a distant and ineffective fire. On the 16th a first parallel, directed against the most advanced Spanish work, Fort Francoli, was begun in the low ground beside the new fort.

Before this check to the squadron had been completed a great change in the situation was made by the arrival of Campoverde on May 10, with 4,000 regular troops brought by sea from Mataro—fractions of the divisions of Eroles and Sarsfield, though neither of these generals had come in person[642]. The garrison being strengthened up to 10,000 men, and raised in morale by the reinforcement, became very bold and enterprising. Sorties began almost at once: Harispe’s division having seized on the 13th May two slight outlying entrenchments below Fort Olivo, three battalions sallied out on the 14th and made a desperate attempt to retake them. It failed, but on the 18th an equally vigorous sortie was made against the fort beyond the Francoli, and the first parallel near it, by about 2,000 men, who drove in the trench-guards and destroyed a section of the works, but were finally thrust back into the lower city by the arrival of reinforcements led by General Habert. How hot the fighting had been here is shown by the fact that Suchet’s dispatch owns to a loss of over 150 men, with three officers killed and eleven wounded. The sallying force lost 218, a figure which Suchet enlarges in his report to 250 killed and 600 wounded. On the 20th the Spaniards made a third sally, on a different front, far to the north-east, across the high ground north of the Barcelona road, and tried to break through the line of blockade kept up by Harispe’s Italian brigades. This was on a smaller scale, and had no luck; it was apparently intended to open up communication with Sarsfield, who (marching by circuitous ways across central Catalonia) had reached Valls and Alcover, only ten miles from Tarragona, on the upper Francoli, with 1,200 men. This trifling force was to be the nucleus of an ‘army of relief’ which was to be collected from all quarters to threaten Suchet’s rear. Sarsfield made his appearance known to his chief in Tarragona by lighting beacons on the mountain tops. Learning that the Spanish force was insignificant, Suchet detached two battalions and some cuirassiers to drive Sarsfield further away from Alcover, and did so with small loss, forcing him to retire to the mountains above Valls.

About this time the French artillery and engineer commanders reported to their chief that it would be at least ten days before they were in a position to begin a serious attack against the western front of the city, and Suchet resolved that the enforced delay should be utilized for an attack on Fort Olivo, whose capture would sooner or later be a necessity, if the main operations against the city were to prosper.

Accordingly, while the approaches against the west front went steadily on, a separate offensive advance against the Olivo was prepared. Between the 22nd and the 28th of May trenches were pushed towards the fort, and batteries containing thirteen guns erected to bear upon it. Their fire had effected serious damage on the parapets and the artillery of the fort by the 29th, yet the engineers reported that they could not fill the ditch, which was dug in the solid rock, and could not promise to make accessible breaches beyond it. But they reported that the rear face of the work, which the French artillery could not reach, was very weak, the low wall and palisade closing the gorge being no more than nine feet high. There was also a gap in the front protection caused by the entry, into the right end of the fort, of an aqueduct which carried water down into Tarragona. This structure made a sort of bridge across the ditch; it had not been cut, but only closed with palisades, which were being rapidly demolished by the French cannonade[643].

On the night of the 29th Suchet made the rather rash venture of trying to escalade Fort Olivo at the two weak points. One column was to turn the work under cover of the darkness, and to endeavour to break in at the gorge in its rear. The other was to try the imperfect breach in the right front, by crossing the aqueduct, though it was only seven feet broad, if it should be found that the ditch was impassable. Meanwhile a general demonstration was to be made by scattered tirailleurs against the whole face of the Olivo, so as to distract the attention of the enemy, and the batteries down by the Francoli were to bombard the lower city with the same purpose. Both attacks were successful—more by luck than by their deserts, for the plan was most hazardous. The column which had gone round to the rear of the fort ran in upon a Spanish regiment[644] which was coming up the hill to relieve the garrison. The two forces hustled against each other in the dark, and became hopelessly mingled in a close combat just outside the postern gate of the gorge. The garrison was unable to fire upon their enemies, because they were intermixed among their friends, and, when the fight surged against the postern and the palisades, the French succeeded in entering the gorge, some by scrambling up the low and weak defences, others by bursting in at the gate along with the Spanish reinforcements with whom they were engaged. They might have been checked, for the defenders were fighting fiercely, if the other attack had not also succeeded. But at the right front of the fort, where the second assault was made, though many of the forlorn hope fell into the ditch, a desperate charge took the storming-party across the seven-foot gangway of the aqueduct, and over the shattered palisades that blocked it. The garrison could tell by the noise of the musketry that the enemy had entered both in front and in rear, and were stricken by despair[645]. But the greater part of them clubbed together and continued a desperate resistance, which was only subdued when Suchet sent in all his reserves and the trench-guards to back the stormers. They were then beset on all sides, and finally overwhelmed.

The losses of the garrison were terrible—of the five battalions of Iliberia and Almeria, and the two companies of artillery which had been engaged—some 3,000 men in all—very nearly one-third, as it would appear, were slain or captured[646]. The prisoners were about 970 in number, many wounded, including the commander of the fort, Colonel Gomez, who had received no less than ten bayonet stabs. Three or four hundred men had been killed—the French had given little quarter during the earlier part of the fighting. The remainder of the garrison had escaped into the city, by climbing over the low wall of the gorge and running down the slopes, at the moment of the final disaster. The French loss, according to Suchet, was only about 325 killed and wounded, and probably did not greatly exceed that figure. The assailants had, it must be confessed, extraordinary luck. If the turning column had not become mingled with the Spanish reinforcements it might never have been able to break into the gorge; while the other attack could not have succeeded if the governor had taken the proper precaution of cutting the aqueduct, which served the stormers as a bridge—for the ditch proved wholly impracticable, and the breach could not be approached.

On the morning after the assault the spirit of the Spaniards was so little broken that a sortie was made with the purpose of retaking the Olivo, the survivors of the two regiments which had lost it volunteering to head the attack. Campoverde thought that the French might be caught before they had made new defences to protect the weak rear face of the fort, but they had built up the entry of the gorge with sandbags, and the assault—led by Colonel O’Ronan, a Spanish-Irish officer—was beaten off with loss, though a few daring men not only reached the gorge, but scrambled in through its broken palisades to die inside the work. All the guns of the upper city were then turned upon the Olivo, and reduced its rear to a shapeless mass of earth. But this did not seriously harm the French, who burrowed into its interior and made themselves strong there. They only wanted to be masters of the hill because it flanked their projected approaches in the low ground, and did not intend to use it as their base for any further active operations.

After the Olivo disaster Campoverde held a council of war (May 30th), and announced to his officers that the means by which Tarragona could be saved was the collecting of a great army of succour to fall upon Suchet’s rear. He was himself about to depart, in order to take command of it; Sarsfield’s and Eroles’s small detachments, all of which he would collect, must form its nucleus. The somatenes of all central Catalonia should be called in, and the province of Valencia had promised to lend him a whole division of regulars. So saying, he departed by sea along with his staff and a number of the richer inhabitants of the city (May 31st). General Caro, who had hitherto acted as governor, was sent to hurry up the Valencians, and the command of the place was made over to an officer newly arrived from Cadiz, General Juan Senen Contreras[647], who by no means liked the task assigned to him. The garrison was still 8,000 strong, for just after the fall of the Olivo two battalions of regulars arrived from Valencia[648]—the first-fruits of the succours promised from that province—and a draft of 400 recruits landed from Majorca. It seems to have been a mistake of Campoverde to come to Tarragona at all—his presence would have been much more valuable in the interior, where a supreme commander was much wanted, and while he was shut up in the fortress (from May 10th to May 31st) little had been done outside. The Junta of Catalonia, now sitting at Montserrat, had been issuing many proclamations, but had not accomplished much in the way of gathering in the somatenes.

On June 3rd Campoverde reached Igualada, and established his head quarters there, but found only 3,000 men assembled under Sarsfield. He sent that general off to Tarragona, to act as second in command to Contreras, and took over charge of his few battalions; by calling in Eroles, and hunting up deserters and detachments, he had collected in a fortnight 5,280 regular infantry and 1,183 cavalry—all that there were of mounted men in Catalonia. The whole was much too small a force to justify him in attacking Suchet in his lines—even when the somatenes should come in to join him. All depended on the expected succours from Valencia, and they were slow in arriving. Charles O’Donnell, the newly appointed Captain-General of that province, had made up a scheme for drawing off Suchet by attacking his garrisons in southern Aragon, and had gone off early in May with his main force against Teruel. This scheme had no effect whatever; Suchet had fixed his teeth into Tarragona, and was not to be distracted by any demonstrations against his more distant detachments. Campoverde grew so desperate that he offered to give over supreme command to O’Donnell, if the latter would come into Catalonia with his whole disposable force, and begin by attacking Mora, Suchet’s great dépôt on the Ebro. The Valencian Captain-General, though he refused to take this responsibility, finally agreed to send a division of regulars under General Miranda by sea to join the Catalans. This force, about 4,000 strong, appeared at Tarragona on June 14th, and came ashore, but was immediately afterwards reshipped by Campoverde’s orders, and transferred to Villanueva de Sitjes, where it landed, and marched inland to Igualada to join the ‘army of succour,’ which by its arrival was raised to nearly 11,000 regular troops.

While Campoverde was slowly beating up his reinforcements, Tarragona was already in grave danger. The formal attack on the lower city began on the night of June 1st, when Vallée and Rogniat, the commanders of the French artillery and engineers, declared that they had everything ready. The front selected for attack was the two south-westerly bastions, those called San Carlos and Orleans, but as a preliminary task it was necessary to drive the Spaniards out of the subsidiary and external defence formed by the outlying Fort Francoli, at the mouth of the river, and by the long entrenchment which joined it to the city, with the lunette of the Prince, a very small work, inserted in its midst. For Fort Francoli had a position which would enable it to enfilade the French trenches when they should draw near to the enceinte of the city.

On the night of June 1st the French threw up their first parallel at a distance of only a little over 300 yards from the bastion of Orleans: it was connected with the entrenchments beyond the Francoli by a zigzag trench. On the second night the parallel was completed for a length of 600 yards, and three batteries begun in it—one directed against the lunette of the Prince and the line joining it to Fort Francoli, the other two against the bastion of Orleans and the adjacent curtain. On June 3rd the besiegers began to work forward by a flying sap towards the fort, and by the 7th had pushed their front trench to within twenty yards of the work. On that same day the artillery began to play against it, not only from the new batteries, but from the old ones beyond the river, which had previously been directed against the fleet. The fort was weakly built, and a practicable breach was made in its left face before the bombardment had been twelve hours in progress. Serious damage had also been done to the long entrenchment connecting Fort Francoli with the lower city. Contreras, rightly regarding the work as untenable, ordered its serviceable guns to be removed the moment after dusk set in, and bade its commander, Colonel Roten, to draw off the garrison, two battalions of the regiment of Almanza. They withdrew at 8.30, and an hour and a half later three French columns charged out of the trenches and seized the fort[649]. They were surprised to meet with no resistance, not having detected the withdrawal of the Spaniards. Finding themselves unopposed, they tried to push along the entrenchment from the fort towards the town, but were stopped, with some loss, by the guns of the Prince lunette.

The Spanish engineers had assured Contreras that the low-lying Fort Francoli would be untenable under the fire of the neighbouring bastion of San Carlos, the battery on the Mole on the other side of the harbour, and the heavy guns of the men-of-war. A fierce fire was opened against it from all these quarters, but proved insufficient to stop the French from burrowing into the ruins of the fort, connecting it with their trenches, and finally building in its right front a heavy battery, which bore along the line of the entrenchment and enfiladed the Prince lunette. This work faced northward, and exposed only a weak flank to the attack. Fort Francoli having ceased to be an obstacle, the besiegers could now throw out a second parallel from the first, which they had constructed in front of the bastion of Orleans. Five new batteries were placed in it, some bearing on Orleans, some on San Carlos, and one having the special task of beating down the Prince lunette. The Spanish guns in the lower city answered with a fierce fire which caused much damage and took many lives, but the work, nevertheless, went on unceasingly. On June 16th all the new batteries were ready to commence their work.

Contreras had been much chagrined by the complete failure of the best efforts of his artillery to hold back the advance of the enemy, and reports that the morale of the troops was disagreeably affected by the arrival of the Valencian division of Miranda on June 14th and its prompt departure, after staying less than two days in the place. The garrison had looked upon it as a seasonable reinforcement, and were dashed in spirits when it made no stay with them. It seems to have been a complete mistake to have brought these 4,000 men to Tarragona at all: they should have been landed at once in Villanueva de Sitjes to join the army of succour.

Nevertheless the governor did his best to delay the progress of the French attack, and when his artillery proved ineffective, sent out two strong sorties on the 11th and 14th, which did some damage to the trenches[650] but were driven back in the end, as was inevitable. On the 16th all the new French batteries were ready, as well as that in Fort Francoli, and the bombardment began. The advanced batteries were within 120 yards of the bastions which they were attacking, and had a tremendous effect. By evening there was the commencement of a breach in the left face of the Orleans bastion, and several other parts of the enceinte were badly damaged, as was also the Prince lunette. This had not been effected without grave loss: one French battery had been silenced, a reserve magazine had been blown up, and the loss in men among the artillery had been very heavy. Nevertheless the assailants had the superiority in the cannonade, and were well satisfied. After dark the columns of stormers carried the Prince lunette by assault, one of the parties having slipped round its flank by descending on to the beach, where a few yards at the water’s edge had been left unfortified. The battalion of the regiment of Almanza which held the work was practically exterminated. Thus the Spaniards lost the last of the outer protections of Tarragona, and the captured lunette became the emplacement of one more battery destined to play upon the bastion of San Carlos (June 17).

It was clear that the crisis was now at hand: the French were now lodged close under the walls of the city, and had already damaged its enceinte. But to storm it would be a costly business, and Contreras showed no signs of slackening in his energy, though his letters to Campoverde and his narrative of the siege both show that he thought very badly of his position. It was clear that both sides must now utilize their last resources: Suchet had already ordered up from beyond the Ebro the brigade of Abbé, which had hitherto been observing the Valencians, in order that its 3,600 men might compensate him for the heavy losses that he had suffered[651]. Contreras began to call on the Captain-General very hotly for help; at his departure Campoverde had promised that the army of succour should be pressing Suchet’s rear within seven days, and now seventeen had elapsed and no signs of its approach were to be seen. He complained bitterly that many of his officers were failing him; even colonels had gone off by sea to Villanueva de Sitjes pretending sickness, or absconding without even that excuse[652]. Naturally the spirit of the rank and file had suffered from this desertion. There is good contemporary Spanish authority for the notion that Contreras himself contributed somewhat to the discouragement, by exhibiting too openly his failing hope, and stating that Tarragona must fall in a fortnight if the field army did not save it[653]. But so far as practical precautions went he did his duty, strengthened the damaged places in the walls as best he could, and devoted much energy to seeing that the troops were properly paid and fed, and that the breaches were mined, and protected to the rear by cuttings and traverses. Very different was the conduct of Campoverde, who showed that he was absolutely unfit for command by his miserable conduct during the critical weeks. After having been joined by Miranda’s Valencian division on June 16th he had 11,000 regular troops under his hand, a force insufficient to meet Suchet in the open field, but quite large enough to give the French grave trouble—indeed to make the continuance of the siege impossible if it were properly handled. But to bring effective pressure upon the enemy it was necessary to come up close to him, and Campoverde for many days tried a policy which was bound to fail. He kept far away, cut Suchet’s communication by placing himself at Momblanch, and sent Eroles and other officers to molest the French detachments on the Lower Ebro and to cut off the convoys coming up from Tortosa and Lerida. Apparently he hoped that these distant diversions would cause Suchet to draw off great part of his army from the siege, in order to succour his outlying posts. But the French general did nothing of the kind, and took no notice of the loss of convoys, or the danger to remote dépôts; he stuck tight to the siege, and at this very time, by calling up Abbé’s brigade from the south to Tarragona, he had deliberately risked even more than before on the side of Valencia. Between the 16th and the 24th June, the critical days in the siege, Campoverde and his 11,000 men had no effect whatever on the course of operations. Yet he kept sending messages to Contreras promising him prompt assistance, and on the 20th bade him dispatch Sarsfield out of the city, to assume command of his old division in the fighting which was just about to begin. That fighting never took place—to the Captain-General’s eternal disgrace—for at the last moment he flinched from placing himself within engaging distance of Suchet. It seems clear that his true policy was to push much closer to the enemy’s lines, so as to force the French to come out against him, and then either to let them attack him in some strong position in the hills to the north-east of Tarragona, where their cavalry would have been useless, or else to avoid an engagement by a timely retreat when Suchet should have been drawn well away from the fortress. In either case he would have compelled his adversary to draw so many men away from the siege that it could not have proceeded. For it would have been useless for Suchet to march against him with less than 7,000 or 8,000 men, and the total of the besieging army had dwindled down to 16,000 by this time, while Abbé’s reserve brigade had not yet come up. Probably, as Napier suggests, a blow at the French magazines and hospitals at Reus, only ten miles from Tarragona, would have forced Suchet to draw off two divisions for a fight, and Campoverde need not have accepted it, unless he had found himself some practically impregnable position. But to skulk in the hills many miles away and send detachments against outlying French posts could have no effect.

While Campoverde hesitated, Suchet took the lower city of Tarragona by a vigorous effort. At seven o’clock on the evening of the 21st the assault was delivered by five storming-columns, composed of the massed grenadier and voltigeur companies of all his French regiments, 1,500 strong, and supported by a brigade under General Montmarie, There were now two good breaches in the bastions of San Carlos and Orleans, the curtain between them had also been much injured, and even the Fuerte Real, the inner stronghold behind the Orleans bastion, had been damaged by shot and shell which passed over the outer works. Contreras had sent down into the lower city 6,000 out of the 8,000 men who were still at his disposition, and had handed over the charge of them to Sarsfield, the officer who had the best reputation in the whole of Catalonia. But by an ill-chance there was actually no one in command when the assault was delivered. Campoverde’s dispatch recalling Sarsfield to the field army had come to hand that morning, and Contreras, thinking himself bound to obey it, sent Sarsfield a passport to leave the city, and designated General Velasco to take his place. Sarsfield, whose courage cannot be impeached, but whose judgement was evidently at fault on this afternoon, left at once, embarking on board a boat in the harbour at three o’clock, without going to see Contreras or waiting for the arrival of the officer who was to supersede him. He merely sent for the senior colonel in the lower city, handed over the command to him, and put out to sea at a moment’s notice. Four hours later, when the storm took place, Contreras was not aware that Sarsfield had yet departed, and Velasco, coming down to take charge of the troops, found himself in the middle of the fighting before he had reached the walls, or discovered the manner in which their garrison was distributed. There was clearly something wrong here—apparently Sarsfield and Contreras were not on good terms, and the former acted with small regard for the welfare of the service[654].

At seven o’clock Suchet let loose the stormers, who were led by the Italian General Palombini, while, to distract the attention of the garrison to other points, he ordered a general bombardment of the northern front, and showed a column on the side of Fort Olivo. The assault was immediately successful at both the critical points: the forlorn hope on the side of the Orleans bastion, starting from its ditch, went up the breach like a whirlwind, losing somewhat from the musketry fire of the defenders but not from their cannon, for all had been silenced. The Spaniards were cleared out so quickly from the bastion that they had not time to fire two mines, which would have blown up the breach and the storming-column if they had worked. They rallied for a few minutes at the gorge, but were driven from it by the French reserve, who poured into the town. At the San Carlos breach matters went almost as rapidly: the first attacking column was checked, but when the second supported it, the united mass carried the breach and burst into the town; a retrenchment and a row of palisades erected behind the breach were crossed in face of a half-hearted defence. All the columns having penetrated within the walls, those who turned to the left attacked the Fuerte Real, the weak and somewhat damaged work which served as citadel to the lower city: it was carried by assault without any great difficulty, partly because its earthen ramp had been somewhat damaged by the bombardment, and could be climbed at some points, but more because the garrison defended themselves very badly, and gave way when they saw that the streets on their flanks and behind them were inundated by the enemy. The other section of the stormers, inclining to their right, moved towards the mole and the large magazines at its base, where they met General Velasco, who had only arrived at the moment that the assault began, with the Spanish reserve. There was fierce fighting here for a moment, but, turned by a column which had passed around their flank by the quay at the water’s edge, Velasco’s men broke like the rest. The whole of the garrison rushed up the slope, towards the one gate which leads into the upper city, and finally entered it under cover of a heavy fire kept up from the neighbouring ramparts. Contreras reports that some of the pursuers came on so fiercely that they were shot down while actually battering at the closed gate.

The losses of the two parties were about equal in numbers—Contreras reports that he found no more than 500 and odd men missing when the battalions from the lower city were reassembled; Suchet gives 120 killed and 362 wounded as his total loss. The casualties on both sides would have been heavier if the garrison had fought better—but it is clear that, when the breaches were once gained, no serious attempt was made to defend the Fuerte Real, the retrenchments, or the barricaded houses of the lower city. Only Velasco’s reserve battalions made any fight in the streets; the rest fled early. The French might perhaps have made more captures—they only took 200 wounded prisoners—if they had not turned at once to plundering the houses and magazines. But they fell into great disorder; many of the unfortunate inhabitants of the quarter about the port were not only stripped of their goods but murdered, and a great number of dwellings were wantonly set on fire. Eighty guns were captured on the walls of the lower city, and a great quantity of food and stores in the dépôts along the quay. But the soldiers destroyed more than was saved—especially in the wine stores.

Not the least disastrous result of this unhappy affair was that the harbour was now closed to the Spaniards. The English men-of-war and the native merchant vessels which had hitherto sheltered under the west end of the mole had to put out to sea. The traders went off to Villanueva, Minorca, or Valencia, but Codrington’s squadron sought the bare roadstead off Milagro Point, under the precipitous southern face of the upper city. Here there were no quays, and when the sea was rough it was impossible to land. But in ordinary weather boats could communicate freely with the shore, and Tarragona was not yet deprived of its access to the water, though that access had become difficult and dangerous. Suchet proceeded to make it more so on the 23rd, when he erected a battery, near the base of the mole, to play on the roadstead. Landing, however, was made rather exciting than dangerous by these guns, which never did much harm.

On the morning after the storm of the lower city the French engineers began to make surveys for the attack on the inner line of defence of Tarragona. Its strength lay in its commanding position, and in the fact that along many parts of its short front the ground just below it was too steep and too rocky to allow of approaches being constructed on it. Its weakness was that the wall was weak and old—a seventeenth-century work built only to resist the cannon of that day. There was no ditch or other outer defence, unless a hedge of prickly aloes counted as such. The front was composed of four bastions; counting from north to south they were named San Pablo, San Juan (at whose left side lay the only gate), Jesus, and Cervantes. The last named overhung the precipitous cliff looking down to the sea above Milagro Point. The French engineers reported in favour of making the attack on the curtain wall between San Juan and San Pablo, the ground here being less steep than elsewhere, and showing soil which could be dug into; there was also some cover to be found, in half-ruined houses along the road up to the gate. Moreover the other, or southern section of the wall, was not only on a steeper ascent, but might be exposed to high-trajectory fire from the ships in the roadstead below. The first parallel, therefore, was thrown up opposite San Juan and San Pablo, with a communication to the rear covered by the buildings and gardens along the road, and three batteries were planned in it, and commenced on June 24th. A fourth battery, down in the plain outside the city, was to co-operate by a flanking fire uphill.

This day saw Campoverde’s first and last demonstration in favour of the garrison. It was a miserable affair. Driven to do something by Contreras’s appeals, and by the openly displayed discontent of his own army, he at last drew in close to the French lines. On the 23rd his army marched from Momblanch to Villarodona, fifteen miles north-east of Tarragona. On the next day it was divided into two columns; the first (composed of Miranda’s Valencian division) marched over the hills, with orders to fall upon the encampments of Harispe’s Italian brigades on the north-east side of the French lines. The second, or Catalan division, under Sarsfield, with which went the Captain-General himself, marched by another road more to the east, and was to come into line on Miranda’s left. Meanwhile Contreras was to make a sally out of the eastern side of Tarragona with 4,000 men of the garrison, and to attack Harispe’s rear when he saw his front engaged with the ‘army of succour.’ Both Campoverde’s columns reached the points designated for them, Miranda getting unopposed to Pallaresos, and the second division to Cattlar, three miles further east. Suchet, warned by his outlying cavalry, concentrated Harispe’s and part of Frère’s divisions in the rear of his lines to the French left of Fort Olivo, leaving Habert, Abbé, and the rest of Frère’s troops to hold the lower city and the trenches. His line, composed of some 8,000 men including all his cavalry, was plainly visible both to the Spaniards outside and those within the city, and Contreras formed his sallying column ready to rush down when the first cannon-shot should be heard. But Miranda, on finding himself in touch with the enemy, sent back messages to the effect that he was not sure of his route, that the French seemed very strong, and that he dared not advance. Instead of depriving him of his command, and then bringing up the second column to the help of the first, Campoverde, after some hesitation, gave him leave to draw back, and both divisions retired that night to Vendrils, ten miles to the rear, in the eastern hills. Not a shot had been fired, and Contreras, whose men had been waiting under arms the whole afternoon, had to draw them back into the city without having seen a single man of the relieving army, which, though only four miles away, was hidden from him by the intervening hills. So ended a day of great peril for Suchet, who with 11,000 men in front of him, and 4,000 more ready to attack his rear, might well have suffered a disaster, or at least have proved unable to prevent the junction of the two hostile forces. For the Spaniards were not bound to descend and attack him in the plain, but might have manœuvred along the hills and forced him to take the offensive in unfavourable ground, under pain of seeing them break his blockading line. Codrington summed up the situation by writing to his chief, Pellew, that ‘the Marquis [Campoverde] blamed Generals Miranda and Caro, while the latter retorted the accusation, and I am inclined to think by giving full credit to what each says of the other, neither will suffer ignominy beyond that to which his conduct has entitled him.’ For Tarragona, as Contreras was truly repeating in every dispatch that he sent out, was in imminent danger, and if the army of succour did not give it immediate help might fall at any moment. The city, as a matter of fact, was taken only four days later.

Campoverde, however, had now formed the conclusion that he was still too weak to attack Suchet. He wrote orders to Contreras to send him out of the city his two best regiments, Iliberia and Almeria, and General Velasco to command them. He made a desperate appeal to the somatenes to rally to his colours, which had little effect, for his reputation was now gone, and he was suspected of timidity or even of treason. Finally he got news that there was a small British expeditionary force in Catalan waters, and sent his lieutenant Eroles to sea, to look for it, and to invite it to land at Villanueva and join him. In a week or so he would have 20,000 men, as he supposed, and would then try something desperate. Meanwhile, unjustly suspecting Contreras of cowardice, he sent secret letters into Tarragona to the brigadier-generals of the garrison, bidding them depose and confine the governor if he showed signs of capitulating. Disgusted at this move, the generals showed the epistles to Contreras, who was driven still deeper into despair by seeing that the Captain-General distrusted him, regarded his views as to the danger of the city as exaggerated, and was evidently deferring succour for an indefinite period. Nevertheless he concealed his knowledge of the plan for his deposition, and prepared, under protest, to send the regiment of Almeria off by sea; to dispatch Iliberia also he refused, saying that his garrison was already insufficient. But rough weather on the 27th prevented the regiment from embarking from the dangerous Milagro roadstead, which was unapproachable by boats during an east wind.

Suchet, freed from a dire responsibility by the disappearance of the army of succour on the night of the 24th, resolved to hurry matters, lest it should presently come forward again in greater strength. On the following day the siege troops pushed forward by zigzag approaches to within 150 yards of the wall of the upper city, and commenced a second parallel in front of the curtain between San Juan and San Pablo. This was done under a hot and effective fire which cost many lives; the completion of the projected batteries, and more especially the hauling of their cannon up steep slopes and among ruins, took more time than the engineer officers had calculated to be necessary. It was not till the morning of the 28th that the twenty-two heavy guns destined for the breaching had been got into place, and that the fire was opened.

These three days, the 25th-26th-27th of June, were a time of agony for the unfortunate Contreras, who was distracted from his primary duty of preparing to receive the assault by having to deal with Campoverde’s plot for deposing him, and other problems. The most important of these was the arrival in the roadstead on the 26th of a flotilla, which brought not only some small reinforcements from Valencia and Murcia, but about 1,100 British infantry[655] and a half-company of artillery under Colonel Skerret. This little force had been sent by General Graham from Cadiz at the desire of the Regency, which was seeking in all quarters for help for Tarragona. Colonel Skerret had Graham’s orders to do everything that could be done for the place, short of placing his detachment in any position where it was exposed to serious danger of having to capitulate, i. e. he was forbidden to land it if he should think Tarragona untenable, unless he judged himself able to bring off the troops by sea in the moment of disaster. On the morning of his arrival the weather was so rough that no boat could get in to the shore, and communication with Contreras was opened up by a sailor who swam ashore with a letter. The governor thus found himself offered the aid of the British force if he would guarantee that it would be able to escape should the town fall—a most hampering condition. In the evening, the surf having somewhat abated, Colonel Skerret came ashore, and was joined next morning by an engineer and an artillery officer, as also by General Charles Doyle, and by Codrington, the commander of the British squadron off the Catalonian coast. They conferred with Contreras, who told them that he feared the town was untenable, and that he intended, when the walls should be breached, not to make a prolonged defence, but to sally out of the Barcelona gate, and to try to cut his way to join Campoverde. He thought that the sortie must succeed, since the French would be intent on a storm on the western side of the fortress, and would never expect an attack to be delivered at the same moment from its eastern side. He therefore invited Skerret to land his 1,200 men and take part in the enterprise. But if he preferred to join him in withstanding the approaching storm by the French, he might choose whatever point he liked in the enceinte, and defend it. It is clear that at this moment the governor was himself hesitating between the two alternatives, and that it relieved his mind to throw the responsibility of choice on Skerret.

The British officers, military and naval, spent the afternoon in going round the city. They agreed with Contreras that the wall was weak and likely to be breached without much difficulty. This being so, was it consistent with Graham’s directions to land the troops? The sortie might fail, and the garrison, Spanish and English, might be driven back into the town and captured. A defence of the breach might also fail, and in that case it would be almost impossible to get off the troops by sea, since if Skerret’s own single boat had had the greatest difficulty in coming ashore in the surf, it was certain that many boats, hastily manned and crammed with soldiers, and escaping under the fire of the pursuing French, would come to grief on a large scale. Skerret and Codrington, after much consultation, resolved that they dared not bring the British troops ashore, for they could not guarantee that the men could be taken away again. They therefore refused both of Contreras’s alternative offers. Just at this moment Baron Eroles arrived from Campoverde, with an appeal to Skerret to land at Villanueva de Sitjes and join the ‘army of succour.’ With Codrington’s approval the colonel consented to do so[656], and set sail northward early in the morning of the 28th. It cannot be disputed that this whole business was most unhappy in its results. That a British force should appear in the roadstead for 36 hours, and then depart without landing a man, appeared to the garrison of Tarragona to prove that their own condition was hopeless. If there had been a reasonable hope of defending the town successfully, as they argued, the British would have come ashore. Their departure caused deep discouragement, and Contreras was no doubt right in stating that next after Campoverde’s conduct that of Skerret was the most active cause of the demoralization which the garrison showed on the next day. It would have been far better that the expedition should never have appeared. Yet it is hard to blame Skerret or his adviser, Codrington. They had Graham’s orders that the men were not to be placed in a position where they might have to capitulate, and it could not be disputed that Tarragona on June 27th was such a position[657]. It would have been better not to tie Skerret’s hands by any conditions, and to leave him free to act as he thought best for the interest of Great Britain and Spain. The addition of 1,100 steady infantry to the force defending the breaches might very possibly have wrecked Suchet’s assault; even if their effort had failed, the loss of two battalions would have been a lesser shock to British prestige in eastern Spain than their withdrawal into ignominious safety at the moment of danger.

Contreras spent the few hours that remained to him after Skerret’s departure in hesitation between the idea of cutting his way out of Tarragona along the eastern road, and that of defending the town to the last possible moment. He finally resolved that he would hold the walls for one day only, and would evacuate the city on the night of the 28th, if the French had made any impression during the first twenty-four hours of the bombardment. The main body of the garrison, divided into three columns, was to make its exit from the Rosario gate, while 1,400 men remained to hold the walls as long as they could, with orders to save themselves if possible and follow the rest when the enemy should break in. Officers and men alike were informed of this, and had their destined positions in the sortie explained to them. It seems likely that the knowledge that they were intended to abscond in a few hours made the troops less obstinate in their defence when the assault came. But meanwhile Contreras made proper preparation for holding back the enemy till the destined time of departure. He told off his best regiments to the exposed front, and constructed a second line of defence behind it, by barricading and loopholing the houses of the Rambla, the broad street above the enceinte, and by blocking the narrow lanes which lead up to it with barrels filled with stones, so that from wall to wall there was a continuous inner fortification. But all this was a temporary arrangement—the garrison was to hold out till night only, and then escape by a great sortie.

Unfortunately the sortie was never made—for Suchet pushed matters so fast that the bombardment and the assault were all over in twelve hours. The twenty-two guns in the breaching batteries opened at dawn, and soon began to damage the weak old walls in the most effective style. The French had originally intended to make two breaches, one to the left in the curtain near the San Pablo bastion, the other to the right nearer the bastion of San Juan. But finding the latter hard to complete owing to the misdirection of one of his batteries, Suchet had the whole force of the battering turned on to the spot nearer to San Pablo, which he regarded as most favourable for his purpose. By four o’clock in the afternoon there was a breach over 30 feet broad at this point, all the guns in the adjacent flanks of the two bastions had been silenced, and nearly all those along the whole front. The explosion of a powder magazine had completely wrecked the Cervantes bastion at the other end of the Spanish line. Notwithstanding that the musketry fire of the garrison was still unsubdued, and that the breach was not very wide, Suchet determined to risk all, by assaulting the place in the later hours of the long summer afternoon. Three columns, each composed of 400 men of the compagnies d’élite of various regiments, were sent forward into the advanced trenches: 1,200 men more under General Habert crept up to the shelter of the front houses of the lower city. A separate force of five battalions under General Montmarie marched outside the walls, and placed itself in the low ground facing the Rosario gate, but out of gunshot. This column was to advance towards that gate if the assault succeeded, and was to be admitted by the stormers, if they won their way into the north-west angle of the upper city, just behind the breach, from which the gate was not far distant.

At five o’clock the three storming-columns burst out from three separate points of the trenches and raced for the breach, which they reached by no means simultaneously, for two of them were somewhat hindered by the aloe hedge below the wall, which had not been entirely broken down by the bombardment. They received a tremendous musketry fire from the whole front, but only three guns in the left side of the San Juan bastion plied them with grape: the rest of the Spanish artillery had been dismounted or disabled. Contreras had filled the breach with the remains of the two battalions of Provincial Grenadiers of Castile, a corps which had been serving with credit in Catalonia since the autumn of 1808; in support was the regiment of Almeria, also reckoned a good unit. The important retrenchment in the Rambla was held by the regiment of Almanza; of the rest of his force there was a less proportion along the front of attack, and a greater proportion placed on the unassailed south and north flanks of the city than was wise. Troops should have been heaped unsparingly upon the breach.

The first French column that reached its destination came on in some disorder, got half-way up the crumbling débris on the breach, and recoiled under the musketry fire from its crest. But when the others arrived, and General Habert and a crowd of other officers put themselves at the head of the mass, and led a second assault, it was successful. The stormers rolled over the summit of the breach and trampled down the Provincial Grenadiers. The regiment of Almeria, which had been placed behind in column, with orders to charge the enemy with the bayonet the moment that he broke through, gave way—according to Contreras—without carrying out his command. The main body of the French then swept down into the street behind the breach, but some turned to their left to try to open the Rosario gate to Montmarie, and others made to their right and swept the ramparts as far as the Cervantes bastion. The Spaniards had rallied at the retrenchments along the line of the Rambla, and made here a better defence than on the far more tenable walls. The assault had succeeded in half an hour[658]—the street-fighting which followed was prolonged and bitter. But when the French reserves arrived and entered the upper city, the barricaded street was passed, the Rosario gate was burst open, so that Montmarie’s column got in upon the Spanish flank, and the resistance went to pieces. Contreras, manfully trying to bring up a battalion of Savoia, his last intact regiment, for a charge, was bayoneted and taken prisoner. One of the divisional generals, Courten, bethinking himself of the proposed sortie that was to have taken place that evening, led out a disorderly remnant of 3,000 men by the Barcelona gate, and tried to escape along the seashore. They had not got far when they ran into one of Harispe’s Italian brigades and some squadrons of chasseurs à cheval, which had been set to watch this obvious bolt-hole. When checked, some of the demoralized troops tried to turn back towards the city, others dispersed and strove to get away across the hills, some hundreds stripped, and endeavoured to swim out to the British ships, which were lying in the Milagro roadstead[659]. A fair number of these were saved by the boats of the Blake and her consorts, which ran inshore to pick them up. But many more were cut down by the French cavalry on the beach, and it was some time before the excited riders would give quarter, and accepted the surrender of Courten and the survivors. General Velasco, the second-in-command in the city, had the luck to escape across the mountains almost alone, and brought the bad news to Campoverde.

While this ineffective attempt at a sally was in progress, the street-fighting in the city above was still going on. Isolated bodies of the Spaniards made a most desperate resistance: Colonel Gonzales, the brother of Campoverde, attempted to hold out in the cathedral with 300 men, but was killed with all followers after a brave resistance. The fact that many small parties defended themselves for a time in barricaded private houses gave the French an excuse for something that almost amounted to the systematic massacre of non-combatants. All the larger dwellings were broken open, whether shots had been fired from their windows or no, and a great proportion of their inhabitants murdered. Of the 4,000 corpses which littered the streets of Tarragona more than half were those of civilians, and according to the Spanish official report 450 women and children were among the slain[660]. As one Spanish authority bitterly remarks, the victorious stormers generally gave quarter to any man wearing a uniform, and let off their fury on priests and unarmed citizens. Plunder was even more general than murder, and there was the inevitable accompaniment of drunkenness and rape. Knowing what happened at Badajoz in April 1812, it is not for the British historian to dilate with too great moral indignation on the doings of Suchet’s soldiery. Suffice it to say that all the atrocities afterwards seen at Badajoz were suffered by the unhappy people of Tarragona, and that the actual slaughter of non-combatants was much greater—about 100 inhabitants are believed to have been murdered at Badajoz, more than 2,000 in the Catalonian city. Spanish authorities state that the Poles and Italians behaved decidedly worse than the native French. The officers made some attempt to check the orgie, but (like the British at Badajoz) they failed: riot and slaughter went on all night, and it was not till the next day that order was restored. One of the most dreadful incidents of the storm was that many individuals, both soldiers and civilians, tried to escape to the Milagro roadstead by climbing down the precipitous south front of the city, and, losing their footing, were dashed to pieces or mortally maimed on the beach below.

The garrison, owing to the last-received reinforcements, was over 10,000 strong at the moment of the storm; as Suchet accounts for more than 8,000 prisoners[661], the actual loss at the storm cannot have been much over 2,000 men. But to the 10,000 Spaniards killed or captured on June 28th we must add the losses of the garrison during the earlier operations. It seems that the Army of Catalonia lost in all 14,000 or 15,000 men in this disastrous siege. A certain amount of the wounded, however, had been sent off from time to time on English ships to Majorca and other safe destinations, and survived to fight another day. The French casualties during the siege amounted to 924 killed and 3,372 wounded—a total of 4,296. This was a very heavy proportion out of the 22,000 men[662] who were from first to last engaged in the operations; and if the sick, who are not included in Suchet’s report along with the wounded, are deducted from the survivors, it is clear that the army must have been reduced to a dangerously low figure by June 28th, and that the Spanish authorities[663] who estimate the total loss of their enemies at 6,000 cannot be far out.

But the effect produced was worth the effort which had been made: nearly two-thirds of the regular troops of the Army of Catalonia had been destroyed. The great fortress, which for three years had been the base of the Spanish resistance, had been taken; there was now no considerable place left in the hands of the patriots—Solsona, Berga, Cardona, Seo de Urgel, and the other towns which they still retained were of small importance. They had lost their one fortified harbour, and for the future their communication by sea with Valencia, the Balearic Isles, and the British fleet, could only be conducted hastily and, as it were, surreptitiously; for any port, to which their forces in the inland might descend for a moment, was always liable to be attacked and seized by a French flying column. How nearly the spirit of resistance was crushed in the principality by the stunning blow which Suchet had inflicted will be shown in our next chapter.

Meanwhile, having reorganized his troops, and determined that the upper town of Tarragona should be fortified and garrisoned, but the harbour town dismantled and abandoned, the French commander was at liberty to proceed further with his scheme for the conquest of eastern Spain. But there was bound to be some preliminary delay before he could deliver his great blow against Valencia. One brigade had to be told off to escort the 8,000 Spanish prisoners to Saragossa; another had to return to the south to deal with the insurgents of Aragon, who had been left comparatively unmolested while Abbé was drawn off to the siege. Suchet himself—soon to be a marshal, for the Emperor carried out his promise that ‘he should find his baton within the walls of Tarragona’—marched with some 7,000 or 8,000 men, all that was left disposable, to open up communications with Barcelona. Before his departure he had a curious interview with Contreras: the wounded general, brought before him on a stretcher, was reproached with having violated the laws of war by persisting in the defence of an untenable town when capitulation had been his bounden duty! The Spaniard made the proper answer, that any commander who surrenders before he is obliged is a traitor and a coward. Thereupon Suchet changed his tone, and offered him tempting conditions if he would take service under King Joseph. This proposal being answered as it deserved, Contreras was sent as a prisoner to the castle of Bouillon, from which he escaped after a captivity of fifteen months in October 1812[664].

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SECTION XXVIII: CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF FIGUERAS AND THE AUTUMN CAMPAIGN IN CATALONIA. JULY-OCTOBER 1811

The news of the fall of Tarragona, brought by the fugitive General Velasco, came as a thunderclap to Campoverde and his ‘army of succour.’ While the Captain-General had been hesitating, marching and countermarching, and sending about for further reinforcements, the great city entrusted to him had fallen. It was impossible for the simplest soldier in his ranks to fail to see that the whole responsibility for its loss lay with Campoverde, and from that moment his authority ceased, and officers and men alike began to clamour for his resignation. His former popularity in Catalonia had, most deservedly, vanished. The newly raised recruits began to melt away from their colours; the somatenes refused to serve one whom they regarded as a coward, if not as a traitor. On the news that a French column had started from Tarragona to attack him, Campoverde abandoned his head quarters at Vendrils, and fled inland to Cervera, where he at last thought himself safe for the moment. His departure exposed the dépôt at Villanueva de Sitjes, where his sea-borne stores were lying, and the French seized it on the 30th, making prize of many ships not ready for sailing, and capturing 800 Tarragona wounded in the hospital. Skerret’s 1,200 British were lying off the place in their transports, just preparing to land and to join Campoverde, as he had desired. Finding that disembarkation was impossible, and that the Catalan army had disappeared, Skerret took his expedition back to Cadiz, after a most humiliating experience.

Meanwhile there was high debate at Cervera. The Valencian general, Miranda, demanded that Campoverde should at once dismiss him and his division, and permit them to return home by sea. They had been lent by Charles O’Donnell for the one purpose of the relief of Tarragona; and that operation being now impossible, for the best of reasons, Miranda claimed leave to depart. He was naturally anxious to serve no longer under such a miserable chief as Campoverde—though his own behaviour on June 24th gave him no right to complain. It was hard to see how his request could be refused, yet many of the chiefs of the Catalan army thought that the departure of the Valencian division implied the end of all formal war in the principality. The proposal to remove not only the Valencians but all the regular troops was raised: Campoverde, feeling his authority gone, and willing to throw all responsibility on his lieutenants, called a council of war on July 1st. By a majority of four to three general officers, the meeting decided in favour of abandoning Catalonia altogether. Sarsfield, the fighting-man of the army, gave a furious negative, and Campoverde himself made a more timid objection to the move[665]. But the retreat to Valencia being once voted, the Captain-General was only too glad to fall in with the project, and to be quit of the duties which he had so ill discharged. All the regulars were to sail when a convenient exit to the sea could be found—at the moment of the council of war Suchet was on the move in the neighbourhood of Barcelona, and the small ports usually available were blocked. It was a miserable resolve, when Figueras was still holding out, when the inland was still intact, and when Suchet had been obliged to disperse his troops, and could obviously make no general move for some weeks. Fortunately difficulties cropped up to prevent the evacuation. The British commodore, Codrington, when asked to prepare transports and convoy, replied ‘that although he would strain any point to restore to General O’Donnell and to Valencia the troops so liberally furnished by that kingdom, he would not embark the Marquis of Campoverde, or any of the troops belonging to Catalonia, which it was his duty to assist in defending, instead of depriving it of that protection which it had[666].’ Eroles, Manso, and other local Catalan officers sent in equally strong protests; they would be glad to be rid of the Captain-General, but it would be treason to withdraw the whole regular army, and to leave the principality to be defended by the miqueletes alone. The spirit of the people would be brought low, and resistance would die down when they knew that they were abandoned for ever by the army.

Meanwhile Suchet had spent the days while the Spaniards were debating in opening up the communications between his own army and Barcelona, which had so long been out of touch. He marched with the greater part of the divisions of Harispe and Frère, as has already been mentioned, to Villafranca and Villanueva de Sitjes, where he left the bulk of his troops, then by the pass of Ordal to Barcelona itself. Here General Maurice Mathieu was in a very isolated position, for since Macdonald had taken off all the disposable troops to the siege of Figueras, the city had been entirely cut off from him, the somatenes having intercepted the road, while English cruisers maintained a fairly effective blockade on the side of the sea. Suchet concerted with the governor a plan for opening up communication with Macdonald, and occupying the port of Mataro, north of Barcelona, where the Spaniards still had an access to the sea. He determined to bring up Harispe and Frère, and went back to pick them up. This he did, and returned with them to Barcelona on July 9th, while an expedition sent out by Maurice Mathieu seized Mataro.

But meanwhile Campoverde, reflecting that if the little ports between Tarragona and Barcelona were blocked to him, there still remained those between Barcelona and Rosas, had made a rapid march through the inland, and had arrived at Arens de Mar, north of Mataro, before Suchet returned to Barcelona. The bulk of Miranda’s division was safely shipped off on July 9th by Codrington, and transported to Valencia[667]. But the cavalry, refusing to abandon their horses, had turned westward, under a Colonel Gasca, and to the number of some 900 saved themselves by a most extraordinary march. Striking across northern Aragon, and dodging between the French garrisons, they reached the Upper Ebro near Tudela, where they forded the great river by the aid of guides lent them by the great guerrillero Mina. Once on the south bank, they executed another equally dangerous march, evading many French detachments, and rejoined Charles O’Donnell in the end of August, having travelled in six weeks no less than 740 miles, through the heart of a region which was supposed to be in military occupation by the enemy. Their loss was only four officers and fifty-three men, though 213 horses had perished in the mountains. This achievement sufficiently shows the superficial nature of Suchet’s occupation of Aragon: he could not prevent so large a body as 900 men from crossing it twice from end to end.

Campoverde, after shipping off Miranda’s infantry at Arens de Mar, had retired inland to Vich, where on the evening after the embarkation his disastrous captain-generalship came to an end. For he found waiting him there General Luis Lacy, sent by the Cadiz regency to relieve him in command. The new chief was a stranger to Catalonia, and the people would have preferred Eroles to lead them—indeed, a junta of Catalan officers had already offered to put themselves under his orders[668]. But Eroles, the most honourable of all the local leaders, refused to commit an act of indiscipline, and Lacy was recognized as Captain-General, while Campoverde absconded hastily by sea. Rejecting all idea of evacuating the principality, Lacy drew back into the mountains with the mere wreck of an army which had been handed over to him—some 2,000 or 3,000 men—and established himself at Solsona, where the Junta of Catalonia also took refuge. In this place and the neighbouring hill-towns he began to reorganize his demoralized troops, and to gather in recruits and deserters. But he was far too weak to do anything for the long-enduring garrison of Figueras, which was still holding out, though nearing its last gasp.

Suchet, after failing to prevent the embarkation of the Valencian division, had determined to spend some time in opening up free communication between Barcelona and Macdonald’s army in front of Figueras, as also between Barcelona and his own base of operations at Lerida. He must set matters on a satisfactory footing in Catalonia, before undertaking the great invasion of Valencia, which the Emperor had assigned as his next task. The expedition towards Macdonald’s rear was accomplished by Suchet himself with the divisions of Frère and Harispe. One column (Palombini’s Italians) marched up the valley of the Tenes river, by Monbuy and Codinas, the other and larger column followed the Congost river. Neither met with opposition, and they joined at the defile of Centelles above Vich. That town was occupied on July 15th, and flying columns sent out from it to Ripol, Olot, and Castelfollit. By means of these detachments Suchet got into touch with Macdonald, who was found to be holding Figueras closely blocked, and to be in no need of help, for though his army was sickly, yet the besieged garrison was known to be in a desperate condition, and its surrender was expected to occur at any moment. Determining that Macdonald could shift for himself, and would be able to overrun all northern Catalonia when his army was set free from the siege, Suchet turned back from Vich, with the object of achieving his second aim, the clearing of the road from Barcelona to Lerida. This great route was safe for large detachments—indeed, Montmarie’s brigade had marched along it almost unmolested ten days back. But it could not be used by convoys or small parties, so long as the Spaniards were in possession of the mountain of Montserrat, which overhangs it for many miles. This lofty peak, the projecting angle of one of the chief Catalan sierras, was the nearest point to Barcelona now in the hands of the patriots. It was occupied at this moment by Eroles and some 1,500 miqueletes, who continually made descents into the plain from their fastness. The Montserrat is a fantastic pile of rock, whose highest point reaches 4,000 feet above the sea-level; it is mainly composed of red slate, a geological formation which runs to precipices, and at first sight the enormous bulk—its circumference is fifteen miles—looks almost inaccessible. But several paths run up among its clefts, and on a platform 3,000 feet up lies the sanctuary of Our Lady of Montserrat, the oldest and formerly the richest sanctuary of Catalonia, with a great Renaissance church and a large monastery. Most of the monks had fled to Majorca with their treasure in 1808, and their empty home served as the head quarters of the local miqueletes, and the magazine of their munitions. For cargoes of arms and stores, run ashore on the central Catalan coast, were generally forwarded to Montserrat for distribution. The mountain was not regularly fortified, indeed it was too large for fortification, but there were two batteries with ten guns placed across the only practicable road which led up to the sanctuary from the north, and the buildings themselves, far above, had been loopholed and barricaded. Nothing save its own steepness protected a minor path which climbs to the monastery from the village of Colbato. Another from Monistrol, which lies in the plain to the north-west, had been blasted away in places. The aspect of the peak was formidable, but its strength was more apparent than real, when it was held by no more than 1,500 irregular troops: for over and above the known paths there were many places where lightly equipped men could scramble, over slopes which were only precipitous in certain sections. When a very large force delivered a concentric attack on the mountain, it was impossible for the small garrison to block every possible point up which active assailants might make their way.

Suchet had brought up more than 10,000 men for the attack, including a battalion or two borrowed from the garrison of Barcelona. Abbé’s brigade was to make the main assault along the road: Montmarie’s brigade, now returned from Lerida, was to menace the steep path from Colbato to the summit; Harispe and Frère, lower down towards the plain, watched the Igualada and Manresa roads, the Barcelona troops the road to the south by Bruch. On July 25th the assault was delivered by Abbé’s five battalions: they were scarcely opposed on the lower slopes, but met with a fierce resistance at the first battery, near the chapel of Saint Cecilia, 1,200 yards from the monastery. Here the column halted, to throw out swarms of skirmishers over the precipitous hillside. Some of them climbed high enough to bring an enfilading fire to bear on the Spanish guns, and as their discharge began to slacken, the grenadier companies charged up the road and captured them. The miqueletes fell back on the second battery, which was presently captured in the same fashion by the combination of a flanking fire and a frontal attack. The Spanish gunners, the only regulars present, stood to their guns to the last in the most gallant way, and were nearly all bayoneted. Abbé was rearranging his column for an attack on the fortified monastery above, when furious firing was heard to break out in its direction, and the garrison were presently seen streaming down the hillside to the east. A large body of the French skirmishers, thrown out for the first attack, had found their way over the rocks to the back of the sanctuary, where there are rough tracks leading to some hermitages which lie out far from the main buildings. When some 300 men had collected behind the monastery, they delivered an attack on it from the rear. The small reserve placed in the buildings was panic-stricken by an attack from this side—all the more so because they saw the rest of their comrades recoiling from the batteries below, which had already been taken. They fled, after making no great stand, and, joining the main body, rushed down the precipitous ravines on the east front of the peak, where a few perished by falls, but the majority got away safely over ground where the victors could not follow. So fell Montserrat, with a loss of only 200 men to the French and 400 to the Spaniards. The storming of the holy mountain was a picturesque rather than a really difficult achievement, but the blow inflicted on the Catalans was a very severe one: Montserrat had been looked upon as impregnable, and the protection of its patroness was supposed to have defended it for the three years during which the French had been holding Barcelona, which lies so close to its foot. The Spaniards had now no post left on the great road from Barcelona to Lerida, and Suchet disposed part of his army to hold this line, Palombini’s Italian brigade being left on Montserrat, while Frère’s division lay at Igualada, and two cavalry and one infantry regiments held Cervera and its neighbourhood (the ‘Llano de Urgel’ or flat land of western Catalonia) as far as the gates of Lerida. Abbé’s brigade went off southward, to join Musnier’s division (to which it belonged) on the lower Ebro.

With the fall of Montserrat ended Suchet’s Catalan campaign. He had subdued all that part of the principality which had been made over to him, when Napoleon broke up the old 7th Corps and assigned the districts of Lerida, Tortosa, and Tarragona to the Army of Aragon. He had now before him the long-projected invasion of Valencia, and intended to take it in hand, so soon as the brigades escorting the Tarragona prisoners should have returned to Saragossa, and the southern regions of Aragon should have been cleared of the insurgents, who had flocked down into them from the hills when Abbé’s brigade had been withdrawn to the north in June. For during the siege of Tarragona Villacampa had invested Teruel, in which a French battalion was shut up, Duran had attacked Calatayud, though without success, and a partisan named Campillo had raided as far as Cariñena, only thirty miles from Saragossa. During the month of August, when Suchet was able to dispose of the troops set free from Catalonia, flying columns under Harispe, Compère, and Peyri scoured all southern Aragon. Teruel was relieved, and Villacampa and his lieutenants were driven back into their old fastnesses in the sierras of Albaracin and Molina, the remotest recesses of the rugged land where Aragon and New Castile meet. But the Valencian expedition could not be taken in hand before the month of September had begun.

Meanwhile the siege of Figueras had lingered on for a month longer than Macdonald and Suchet had expected. The brigadier Martinez, with his five small regular battalions[669] and his 3,000 miqueletes, had made a most admirable defence. No assistance, not even any prospect of assistance, had been before them since Campoverde’s defeat on May 3rd. The whole field army of Catalonia had been drawn away to defend or relieve Tarragona, and Martinez had no friends near him save the somatenes of the Ampurdam and the Pyrenean valleys, who were willing, but weak and disorganized. Their most popular chief, the fighting priest Rovira, had gone off to Cadiz to ask for succour, but found there that Tarragona was rightly considered a far more important place to save, and that there was no hope for Figueras. All that the somatenes could do was to molest Macdonald’s convoys and foraging parties. May, June, and July wore slowly away, and Martinez was still holding out, with a garrison reduced to half-rations. Yet he was doing good service, since he was detaining in front of him the whole of the disposable troops of the 7th Corps, not to speak of some battalions of National Guards from the southern departments of France. No help from Macdonald could come to Suchet during the whole of the siege of Tarragona, or the subsequent operations about Montserrat. Instead it was Suchet who was forced to help Macdonald, by clearing his rear by the march to Vich.

The Duke of Tarentum had completed a great circumvallation around the rocky fortress of San Fernando, and had pushed forward batteries to within 500 yards of its walls, but he never attempted to breach them, or to storm the place. It is hard to make out why he made no such endeavour, for though the place is high lying and difficult of approach, it is not more so than the upper city of Tarragona, with which Suchet was dealing in such a prompt and drastic fashion. But from March to August Figueras was blockaded rather than besieged. Macdonald’s proceedings are all the more difficult to understand because his army was suffering severely from the heat during June and July—the National Guards and the newly arrived battalions from the interior of France were thinned by malarial fevers, and by pestilence bred by long tarrying in unsanitary camps. Probably we must ascribe his refusal to open trenches and proceed to battering-work and assault, to his memory of what had happened at Gerona. The 7th Corps had an evil tradition of the repeated failures to storm that city, and of the loss of life which had accompanied them. Figueras, it was clear, must fall sooner or later from starvation; there was no chance that it could be relieved; was it worth while to waste good soldiers in taking by force a place that must yield in a week or two for want of provisions? Macdonald evidently under-estimated the obstinacy of the defenders and the amount of their stores, and may have regretted in July that he had not started a regular siege in May. But it was now too late to begin it, since surrender was inevitable within a few days, as he supposed. Evidence of the distressed state of the garrison was forthcoming on July 17th, when Martinez turned out of the fortress, without any demand for exchange, 850 French and Italian prisoners who had been confined in the bomb-proofs since the commencement of the siege; they were in a half-starved condition, and reported that for some days they had hardly received any food at all[670]. General Guillot and the officers were not released—they were useful hostages, since their lives were at the disposition of the governor, in case the French should threaten to refuse quarter to irregulars, or make other harsh demands when the inevitable surrender should draw nearer.

The expectation that Martinez would hoist the white flag within a few days of the release of the prisoners was entirely falsified. He held out, suffering terrible privations, for another month; he was aware that Tarragona had fallen, that Campoverde’s army had gone to pieces, and that he had no hope of succour. But he rightly considered that it was his duty to detain the 7th Corps before his walls to the last possible moment. Meanwhile he kept up the spirits of his garrison as best he could, by assuring them that it was well within their power to break out through the adversary’s lines by a general sortie, when the last rations should have been issued. By August 16th this moment had arrived: the Spaniards had eaten not only the few horses in the place, but the dogs and rats[671]: only three days’ half-rations were left. The plan for the evasion was well designed: in the afternoon Rovira, who had returned with empty hands from Cadiz, showed himself on the hills nearest to Figueras with some 2,000 somatenes—all that could be collected; he made roving demonstrations against the north side of the French circumvallation, in the hope of drawing the reserves in that direction, but allowed himself to be driven away without serious resistance. After dark, however, Martinez sallied from the fortress on the opposite side—the south-west—in the direction of the sea, hoping to find the line thin on that front. He had brought with him every man who could march, and dashed at the circumvallation in one broad column. The hostile pickets and outposts were rolled in, but the Spaniards were brought up against an impassable abattis, while two batteries on each side began playing against the flanks of the mass. After vainly trying to break through for some minutes, they recoiled into the fortress, leaving 400 dead and wounded behind them.

Next morning (August 17th) General Baraguay d’Hilliers, judging that the enemy must now be thoroughly disheartened, sent in a parlementaire to propose capitulation. Martinez, aware that his last bolt was shot, agreed to surrender on the third day, that following the issue of the last half-ration in his stores. The garrison crawled out and laid down its arms on the 19th: it mustered something over 2,000 men still able to stand, and there were another 1,000 in the hospitals. From first to last some 1,500 more had perished during the four months and nine days that the siege had lasted. The French had suffered almost as heavily—4,000 men had died in the lines since March, many more from fever and dysentery than from shot and shell. Macdonald sought eagerly among the prisoners for the three young Catalans who had let their compatriots into San Fernando. The two brothers Pons had escaped with Eroles in June[672], but the third, Juan Marquez, was found, and hanged on a high gallows on the ravelin of the fortress.

Thus ended in disaster the story of Figueras. But both the capture of the place and its defence form a most honourable page in the history of the war. Rovira’s enterprise in seizing it and Martinez’s obstinacy in maintaining it, long after all hope was gone, were equally praiseworthy. Though nothing came of the exploit in the end, they had immobilized the whole French 7th Corps for the entire summer of 1811, and had prevented Macdonald from giving a single battalion to help Suchet’s attack on Tarragona. If Campoverde had possessed the most ordinary capacity or resolution, he might have turned the opportunity given him by the somatene chiefs to such good account as to wreck all the campaign planned by Napoleon for the subjection of Catalonia. Better management on May 3rd might have led to the defeat of Baraguay d’Hilliers, and if he had been driven off from Figueras, and isolated from Macdonald, who was then far away at Barcelona, Suchet would have had to march to the help of his comrades, and the siege of Tarragona could never have begun. We are brought back to the point which has already so often confronted us—Campoverde’s miserable inefficiency was the final cause of all the disasters of 1811 in the principality of which he was the Captain-General.

Two such blows as the fall of Tarragona and the recapture of Figueras seemed to render inevitable the final subjection of Catalonia. It is with astonishment that we find that its obstinate people maintained their resistance for two years more, and were found still defending themselves when the war came to an end with the abdication of Napoleon in 1814. The new Captain-General, Lacy, was a man harsh and unpopular, but he had at least the merit of energy. His army was a mere wreck, but he issued orders for a general levy of all men between 18 and 40 to fill the depleted cadres of the few surviving regular battalions, and despite the ill-will of the Junta—who wished to lean more on the miqueletes, and distrusted the old army—he gradually collected a new force. Early in August, as if in bravado, he burst into France on the side of Puigcerda, and executed a destructive raid along the valleys of Cerdagne. If he was not strong enough to help Figueras, or to oppose Suchet, he was at least determined to do all the harm that he could to the enemy. This incursion threw Napoleon into a fit of rage, and, forgetting his own orders to Suchet which prescribed the invasion of Valencia as the next decisive move in the war, he wrote him an angry dispatch on August 22nd[673], in which he told the newly appointed Marshal that he ought to have left a strong French division at Vich, and to have marched with his main body against the Catalonian inland, aiming at Cardona and Urgel and the other unsubdued places. ‘He should have profited by the panic into which the Spaniards had been thrown, and might have terminated the war in the province, while by making his retrogression to Saragossa he has given the enemy the chance of rallying on all sides.’ It is sufficient answer to this accusation to say that, if the Marshal had thrown all his available troops into the Catalan mountains, he would have become involved in a series of endless marches and counter-marches after an intangible enemy, which would have prevented him from carrying out in the autumn his great and successful attack on Valencia. The strength of the Catalan resistance did not lie in the possession of Cardona or Urgel or any other old-fashioned stronghold, but in the determination of its people not to lay down their arms. There is no probability that the war could have been ‘terminated’ in the way that the Emperor hoped.

By September Lacy had reorganized the remnants of the old Army of Catalonia into three weak divisions under Eroles, Milans, and Sarsfield, each containing only four or five battalions. Every one of the new units represented many lost corps—the single regiment of Baza included all the remnants of the Granadan division, which Reding had brought to Catalonia in 1809 fourteen thousand strong. The new Cazadores de Cataluña raised by the well-known miquelete-chief Manso were formed from the cadres of six old Catalonian tercios[674]—it was the same with the regiments bearing the local names of Manresa, Mataro, and Ausona. The cavalry, consisting of the few hundred Catalonian horse who had but joined in Gasca’s retreat to Valencia, amounted to five squadrons of hussars and cuirassiers. The whole, including garrisons, may have made up 8,000 men—all that was left of the 25,000 organized troops which had formed the ‘1st Army’ on December 1st, 1810. But there still remained an Army of Catalonia, and as Macdonald and Maurice Mathieu and Decaen were to find, the Catalans were still ready to fight.

When the enemy was under the delusion that with the fall of Montserrat and Figueras the back of the resistance of the Principality had been broken, Lacy began to take the offensive. On September 11-12, aided by English ships, he drove the French out of the Medas Islands, at the mouth of the Ter, and built on the largest of them a fort which gave him a secure point of communication with the Mediterranean Squadron. But this was a side-issue: in October he accomplished something far more important. Descending on the line of garrisons by which the French kept open the road from Barcelona to Lerida, he took 200 men at Igualada on October 4, captured a large convoy near Cervera three days later, and on October 11 took that town with 645 prisoners, and the neighbouring Belpuig with 150 more on October 14. The chain of forts was broken, and to the intense joy of all Catalonia the French dismantled the monastery of Montserrat and evacuated the Holy Mountain. Half of Suchet’s work in the summer had been undone. A few days later Macdonald was recalled to Paris (October 28); he was the third marshal whose reputation got no profit from his Catalonian campaign—his failure was as bad as that of Augereau, and he had not even got the small credit that St. Cyr won in battle. The command of the 7th Corps fell to General Decaen.

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