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

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

MASSÉNA AT SANTAREM. THE DEADLOCK ON THE LOWER TAGUS. DECEMBER 1810-JANUARY 1811

On the 18th of November, 1810, Masséna had completed the movement to the rear which he had commenced on the 14th. His army no longer threatened the Lines of Torres Vedras: he had abandoned the offensive for the defensive. Concentrated in the triangle Santarem-Punhete-Thomar, with his three corps so disposed that a march of twenty miles would suffice to concentrate everything save outlying detachments, he waited to see whether his enemy would dare to attack him; for he still hoped for a battle in the open field, and was prepared to accept its chances. At Bussaco, so he reasoned, his defeat had been the result of an over-bold attack on a strong position. The event might go otherwise if he threw the responsibility of the offensive on Wellington. He had secured for himself an advantageous fighting-ground: his left flank was protected by the formidable entrenchments around Santarem; his front was covered by the rain-sodden valley of the Rio Mayor, which during the winter season could be crossed only at a few well-known points. His right wing could not be turned, unless his adversary were ready to push a great force over villainous roads towards Alcanhede and the upper course of the Rio Mayor. And if Wellington should risk a large detachment in this direction, it might be possible to burst out from Santarem, against the containing force which he would be compelled to leave on the banks of the Tagus, about Cartaxo, and to beat it back towards the Lines—a movement which would almost certainly bring back the turning column from the North. For the English general could not dare to leave Lisbon exposed to the chances of a sudden blow, when there was little but Portuguese militia left to occupy the long chain of defensive works from Alhandra to Torres Vedras. For some weeks after his retreat to his new position at Santarem, Masséna lived in hopes that Wellington would either deliver an attack on his well-protected front, or undertake the dangerous turning movement towards his left.

No such chance was granted him. His adversary had weighed all the arguments for and against the offensive, and had made up his mind to rely rather on his old weapon—starvation—than on force. In several of his December dispatches he sums up the situation with perfect clearness; on the 2nd he wrote to Lord Liverpool, ‘It would still be impossible to make any movement of importance upon the right flank of the enemy’s position at Santarem without exposing some divisions of troops to be insulated and cut off. The enemy having concentrated their army about Torres Novas, &c., I do not propose to make any movement by which I incur the risk of involving the army in a general action, on ground less advantageous than that which I had fixed upon to bring this contest to an issue [i. e. the Lines]. The enemy can be relieved from the difficulties of their situation only by the occurrence of some misfortune to the allied army, and I should forward their views by placing the fate of the campaign on the result of a general action on ground chosen by them, and not on that selected by me. I therefore propose to continue the operation of light detachments on their flanks and rear, to confine them as much as possible, but to engage in no serious affair on ground on which the result can be at all doubtful[1].’ At the end of the month he simply restates his decision: ‘Having such an enemy to contend with, and knowing (as I do) that there is no army in the Peninsula capable of contending with the enemy, excepting that under my command; that there are no means of replacing any large losses I might sustain; and that any success acquired by a large sacrifice of men would be followed by disastrous consequence to the cause of the allies, I have determined to persevere in the system which has hitherto saved all, and which will, I hope, end in the defeat of the enemy[2].’

Accordingly Wellington’s main army was kept for the three winter months of December, January, and February almost precisely on the same ground on which it had been placed in the last week of November. The three British cavalry brigades formed a line in front of the whole, reaching from Porto de Mugem on the Tagus to São João de Ribiera on the upper Rio Mayor[3]. The infantry divisions (save the 2nd) were arranged in successive lines of cantonment behind them, watching the course of the Rio Mayor, while the reserves had retired as far as the Lines of Torres Vedras. Practically the whole force could be concentrated in a single march—or a march and a half at most—in case Masséna should take the improbable—but still conceivable—step of sallying out from Santarem to resume the offensive. When the first French reinforcements began to come up—about the New Year of 1810-11—such a sally seemed to Wellington quite worth guarding against[4]. The disposition of the infantry was as follows: On the right, near the Tagus, lay the Light Division, immediately in front of Santarem, quartered in Valle and other villages. On the left the front line was formed by Pack’s Portuguese, who lay at Almoster, on heights overlooking the middle course of the Rio Mayor. In support of the Light Division, but five miles to the rear, at Cartaxo and other places, was the large and powerful 1st Division, 7,000 bayonets. The 4th Division lay at an equal distance behind the 1st, at Azambuja and Aveiras da Cima. Behind Pack, on the inland or Leiria road, Picton and his 3rd Division were placed at Alcoentre. Their support was the 5th Division at Torres Vedras in the old Lines, seventeen miles to the rear, from which a circuitous road led to Alcoentre. Finally the newly-formed 6th Division was placed at the other end of the Lines, but just outside them, at Alemquer and Arruda, with Le Cor’s Portuguese division immediately behind, at Alhandra.

In all the main army consisted of about 48,000 men of all arms; but this did not compose the whole of Wellington’s available resources. He had transferred a considerable detachment to the southern bank of the Tagus, to protect the Alemtejo against any possible descent by the French. It will be remembered that as early as the beginning of November[5] he had sent across the river Fane’s Portuguese cavalry and a battalion of Caçadores, who were directed to watch the road along the further bank, to prevent any trifling force of French from crossing in search of provisions, and to keep open the communications with Abrantes. As long as Masséna was threatening the Lines of Torres Vedras, there was no danger that he would throw anything more than a raiding party across the Tagus; he would want every man for the great assault. But when the Marshal gave up the offensive and retired to Santarem, the aspect of affairs was changed; it was quite possible that, with his army in a state of semi-starvation, he might venture to send a considerable detachment over the river, to gather the food which was so necessary to him. Nor was it unlikely that he might have a still more cogent reason for invading the Alemtejo. If, as Wellington thought probable[6], the army of Andalusia were to be ordered up to assist the army of Portugal, it would be of great importance for the latter to possess a footing on the left bank of the Tagus, as the communication with Soult’s troops must certainly be made in this direction. Accordingly there was good reason for securing the line of the river, and for cooping up Masséna in his limited sphere on its western bank. On the 19th-20th of November, Hill and the 2nd Division, attended as usual by Hamilton’s two Portuguese brigades, and with the 13th Light Dragoons attached, crossed the Tagus in boats a little to the north of Salvaterra, to reinforce Fane’s detachment. This was a serious force—10,000 men—which Wellington could ill spare, and he made elaborate arrangements to enable it to return in haste, in the event of Masséna’s once more taking the offensive on the western bank of the Tagus. The flotilla of gunboats and river craft, which had been guarding the river, was to be kept ready at Alhandra to bring back the 2nd Division, at the first alarm of a movement of the French from Santarem. Meanwhile Hill moved up the river and established his head quarters at Chamusca, a little north of Santarem, from which point he could both observe the main body of the French and impede any attempt that they might make to cross the river, and also could keep in touch with Abrantes, and reinforce it, supposing that Masséna showed any signs of molesting it. The British brigades of the 2nd Division were distributed along the river, William Stewart’s at Pinheiros and Tramagal most to the north, Hoghton’s at Chamusca, Lumley’s at Almeirim, exactly facing Santarem. Hamilton’s two Portuguese brigades continued the line southward, Fonseca’s brigade at Mugem, Campbell’s at Salvaterra. Fane’s four regiments of Portuguese cavalry, and the British 13th Light Dragoons, were strung out by squadrons along the whole front from the neighbourhood of Abrantes to Almeirim, patrolling the river bank with unceasing care[7].

On the 29th of November Hill was disabled by a severe attack of fever, and the control of all the troops beyond the Tagus devolved on his senior brigadier, William Stewart. Wellington only allowed this hard-fighting but somewhat too venturesome officer to retain his very responsible command for a few weeks. Troubled by Stewart’s constant requests to be allowed to make offensive movements against the French, which did not enter into his own plans[8], and dreading the consequences of his enterprise, the Commander-in-Chief superseded him, by sending over Beresford to take the charge of all the forces on the Alemtejo bank of the Tagus (December 30). He would have preferred to give the duty to Hill, who had in the preceding summer carried out a similar task with complete success, while he watched Reynier from Castello Branco[9]. But Hill’s fever lingered on for many weeks, and when he was convalescent the medical men insisted that he must return to England for change of air. This he did in February, and we miss his familiar name in the records of the Peninsular War for a space of three months, till his reappearance at the front in May.

Beresford therefore began, with the New Year, to exercise a semi-independent command over the detached force beyond the Tagus, which he was to retain for nearly six months. The experiment of giving him this responsible duty was not altogether a happy one; and after his unsuccessful operations in Estremadura, and his ill-fought victory at Albuera, Wellington withdrew him to other duties in June, and once more handed over the troops south of the Tagus to the cautious yet capable hands of Hill.

The main force, meanwhile, faced the front of Masséna’s army; Beresford’s detachment observed its left flank along the Tagus. But this was not all; Wellington had also taken his precautions to cast around the rear of the irregular parallelogram held by the French a screen of light troops, which effectually cut their communications with Spain, and restricted, though they could not altogether hinder, their marauding raids in search of provisions. This screen was weakest beyond Abrantes, on the line of the Zezere; but here the land was barren, and the enemy had little or nothing to gain by plundering excursions. The Castello Branco country was only guarded by its own Ordenança levy, which was trifling in force, as the whole ‘corregedoria’ from the Zezere to the Elga had only 40,000 souls, and it had sent its two militia regiments within the Lisbon lines. But, save in the small upland plain about Castello Branco itself, there was practically neither population nor tillage. The less barren and deserted mountain land between the Zezere and the Mondego was much more worth plundering, and was protected by the militia brigade of John Wilson, who lay at Espinhal on the Thomar-Coimbra road, with a force of four battalions, which ought to have numbered 3,000 men, but often shrank down to 1,500. For the militiamen, unpaid and ill-fed, deserted freely during the winter season, and as their homes lay far northward, by the Douro, it was not easy to gather them back to their colours. But Wilson had always a sufficient nucleus about him to check any marauding party that fell short of a regiment, and was a real restraint on the foragers of the 6th Corps, when they pushed out from Ourem or Thomar to gather food. He was only once seriously engaged, when, on December 23rd, General Marcognet, with two battalions and a cavalry regiment, came up against him, drove him out of Espinhal after some skirmishing, and pushed a reconnaissance as far as the Mondego, of which we shall hear in its due place.

Beyond Wilson to the west, the line of observation was taken up by Trant’s militia brigade, which lay at Coimbra, to which town many of its fugitive inhabitants had by this time returned. He had a larger force than Wilson—seven militia regiments, whose strength varied from day to day but seldom fell below 3,000 men. With this irregular force he watched the line of the lower Mondego, keeping pickets out some way to the south of the river, as far as Louriçal and Redinha. They were only once driven in, when on Dec. 6th-8th one of Montbrun’s dragoon regiments pushed up the high road, and verified the fact that all the passages of the lower Mondego, including the bridge of Coimbra, were guarded.

The last link in the chain of detachments which Wellington had cast around the French was the garrison of the sea-girt fortress of Peniche, half-way between Lisbon and the mouth of the Mondego. It was held by the dépôts of several infantry regiments of the regular army, under General Blunt of the Portuguese service, not by any single organized unit. But there were some 2,000 or 3,000 recruits, more or less trained, in the place, and the enterprising Major Fenwick, whom Blunt had put in charge of his outpost-line, kept large pickets out in the direction of Caldas and Obidos, which frequently came in contact with the raiding parties of the 8th Corps, and did them much harm. Fenwick was mortally wounded in action near Obidos on Dec. 4th[10], but the forward position of these outposts of the Peniche garrison was maintained, and the French could never forage in the coast-land for a radius of some fifteen miles around that fortress, though they moved as they pleased about Leiria and the deserted abbeys of Batalha and Alcobaça. The Portuguese outposts at Caldas were in close and regular touch with Anson’s cavalry pickets from São João de Ribiera on the Rio Mayor.

It will be seen therefore that the limited space in which Masséna’s army could seek its living was a parallelogram, bounded by the Tagus on the south, the lower Zezere on the east, the Rio Mayor and the Alcoa (the river of Alcobaça) on the west, and on the north by an irregular line drawn from Leiria through Pombal to Cabaços near the Zezere. Outside these limits food could only be got by large detachments, moving with all military precautions, and obliged to keep up a constant running fight with the Portuguese militia. The profit from such expeditions, whose march was necessarily very slow, was so small that Masséna sent out very few of them, since the peasantry got off with their flocks into the hills, whenever the first skirmishing shots along the high road were heard. The sustenance of the French was mainly obtained by harrying and re-harrying the area bounded by the limits stated above, where they could work their will without meeting with any resistance. There was very little change in the cantonments of Masséna’s army during the three months of their stay between the Tagus and the Zezere. Of the 2nd Corps both divisions were in the Santarem fortifications, holding the town and the banks of the Rio Mayor to the west of it. Close in touch with the 2nd Corps came the 8th, with Clausel’s division in front line from Tremes to Alcanhede and Abrahão, and Solignac’s in second line at Torres Novas, Pernes, and the adjacent villages. Both corps had their cavalry brigades out in front of them, along the line of the Rio Mayor. Ney and the 6th Corps formed the general reserve of the army, having Mermet’s division at Thomar (the Marshal’s head quarters), and Marchand’s at Golegão near the Tagus; Loison’s, the third division of the corps, was detached on the Zezere, guarding the bridge which had been established across that river at Punhete, and watching the garrison of Abrantes. Its front post was at Montalvão beyond the Zezere, only five miles from the Portuguese fortress; its remaining battalions were ranged along the river from Punhete as far north as Dornes. Montbrun and the cavalry reserve (less certain squadrons lent to Loison), lay at Chão-de-Maçans on the northern skirts of the plain of Thomar; they had one infantry regiment (lent by Ney) to support them, at Cabaços, and their main duty was to watch and restrain Trant and Wilson, with whose advanced posts they were always bickering.

The situation of the French army was remarkably compact: Ney’s division at Golegão was only one long march (eighteen miles) behind Reynier; his second division at Thomar was less than two marches (twenty-six miles) behind Junot. Only Loison could not have been brought up at short notice, supposing that Wellington had attacked the line of the Rio Mayor. If, on the other hand, an Anglo-Portuguese force had debouched from Abrantes to attack Loison—no impossible plan, and one that William Stewart had strenuously urged Wellington to adopt—the division at Punhete could have been reinforced from Golegão and Thomar in one march, since the former of these places is about thirteen miles from the Zezere, and the latter not more than ten.

Masséna’s dispositions, as can be seen at a glance, were purely defensive. They could not be otherwise, when his army had dwindled down by the beginning of December to 45,000 efficient sabres and bayonets, while his hospitals were encumbered by 8,000 or 9,000 sick. All that he aspired to do was to hold on in the Santarem-Rio Mayor position, pinning his adversary down to the neighbourhood of Lisbon, till he should be restored to the power of taking the offensive once more, by the arrival of reinforcements; his aid must come on one side from Soult and the Army of Andalusia, on the other from Drouet’s 9th Corps, whose services had been promised to him by the Emperor long before the invasion of Portugal began. But down to the end of the year he had not the slightest breath of information as to whether this assistance was close at hand, or whether it had, perchance, not even begun to move in his direction. Since he had cut himself loose from the frontier of Spain in September, not a single dispatch had reached him, not even a secret emissary had penetrated to his head quarters. For all that he knew Napoleon might be dead, or engaged in a new war with some continental enemy. It is an astonishing testimony to the efficiency of the screen of Portuguese Ordenança and militia, which Wellington had cast round the French army, to find that nothing had slipped through. And the Marshal’s attempts to send out news of himself had been almost equally well foiled; all his messengers had been intercepted save Foy, who (as it will be remembered) had forced his way over the unfrequented Estrada Nova road on October 31st[11]. And Foy had got through to Ciudad Rodrigo because he had been given such a large escort—600 men—that no mere gathering of local Ordenança could stop him.

Masséna, down to the end of December, did not know in the least whether Foy or any other of his emissaries had got through. He had simply to wait till news should penetrate to him. Meanwhile the one governing preoccupation of his life was to get food for his army, since if food failed he must be driven to the disastrous winter retreat, across flooded streams and between snow-clad mountains, to which Wellington hoped to force him. The English general’s forecast of the time which would be required to starve out the French army was wrong by some eight or nine weeks. He thought that they would have consumed every possible morsel of food that could be scraped together by December—as a matter of fact they held out till the end of February, in a state of constantly increasing privation. It seems that Wellington underrated both the capacity for endurance that the enemy would show, and still more the resources which were available to him. The Portuguese government had ordered the peasantry to destroy all food-stuffs that they could not carry off, when the country-side was evacuated in October, and the people retired within the Torres Vedras lines. Ostensibly the decree had been carried out; but it was impossible to induce these small cultivators to make away with good food, the worst of crimes to the peasant’s mind. The large majority hid or buried, instead of burning, their stores, trusting to recover what they had concealed when the French should have departed. Many of the hiding-places were very ingenious—in some cases caves in the hills had been used, and their mouths plastered up with stones and earth. In others, pits or silos had been dug in unlikely places, and carefully covered up, or cellars had been filled, and their entrances bricked up and concealed. The ingenuity that is bred by an empty stomach soon set the French on the search for these hoards. When it was once discovered that there was much hidden grain and maize in the country, every man became a food-hunter. Whole villages were pulled down in the search for secret places in their walls or under their floors. Parties scoured every ravine or hillside where caves might lurk. We are told that one effective plan was for detachments to go about with full barrels in fields near houses, and to cast water all over the surface. Where the liquid sank in suddenly, there was a chance that a silo lurked below, and the spade often turned up a deposit of hundreds of bushels. But more drastic methods than these were soon devised. In the sort of no-man’s-land between the actual cantonments of the French army and the outposts of Wilson, Trant, and Blunt, the population had not entirely disappeared. Though the large majority had retired, some of the poorest or the most reckless had merely hidden themselves in the hills for a week or two, and came down cautiously when the French had marched by towards Lisbon. A sprinkling of miserable folk lived precariously in or near their usual abodes, always ready to fly or to conceal themselves when a foraging party was reported in the neighbourhood. Hence came the horrid business that one French diarist calls the ‘chasse aux hommes’; it became a regular device for the marauders to move by night, hide themselves, and watch for some unwary peasant. When he was sighted he was pursued and often caught. He was then offered the choice between revealing the hiding-places of himself and his neighbours, and a musket-ball through the head. Generally he yielded, and the party went back with their mules loaded with grain, or driving before them some goats and oxen. Sometimes he was himself starving, could reveal nothing, and was murdered. We are assured by more than one French narrator of these hateful times that it was discovered that torture was more effective than the mere fear of death. If the prisoner could or would discover nothing, he was hung up for a few minutes, and then let down and offered a second chance of life. Sometimes this led to revelations; if not he was strung up again for good[12]. Torture by fire is also said to have been employed on some occasions.

Naturally these atrocities were not practised under the eyes of the officers commanding regular foraging parties[13]. But when a company had dispersed in search of plunder, the men who were separated in twos or threes without control acted with such various degrees of brutality as suited themselves. Moreover, there was a floating scum of unlicensed marauders, who had left their colours without leave, and were in no hurry to rejoin them. These were responsible for the worst crimes: sometimes they gathered together in bands of considerable strength, and it is said that they were known to fire on regular foraging parties who tried to arrest or restrain them[14], and that one troop, several hundred strong, fought a desperate skirmish with a whole battalion sent to hunt them down. But it was not these fricoteurs, as they were called, who were the sole offenders; many horrors were perpetrated within the limits of the cantonments by the authorized raiding companies. Guingret of the 39th, in Ney’s corps, mentions in his diary that he had seen such a detachment return to camp, after having surprised a half-deserted village, with a number of peasant girls, whom they sold to their comrades, some for a couple of gold pieces, others for a pack-horse[15], and assures us that rape was habitual when such a surprise had succeeded. It was in vain that Masséna and the corps-commanders issued general orders prohibiting misconduct of any kind, and even executed one or two offenders caught flagrante delicto. For the regimental officers, who depended on the individual efficiency of their men in marauding for their daily food, were not too eager to make inquiries as to what had passed outside their own vision, and the soldier who brought home much booty was not too closely questioned as to the manner in which he had obtained it. When a foraging party had turned over many bushels of wheat or maize, or a hundred sheep, to the store of their battalion, it could hardly be expected that their colonel would show his gratitude by inquiring whether the happy find had been procured by torture or by simple murder.

Of the three corps which formed Masséna’s army, that of Reynier, in the Santarem entrenchments, seems to have suffered most, because it was concentrated on a narrow position, with no unexhausted country around it, and with other troops immediately in its rear, who had sucked dry the resources of the plain of Golegão. Its foraging parties had to go thirty miles away before they had a chance of finding ground that had not been already picked over most carefully by the men of the 6th or the 8th Corps. Junot’s men were a little better off, as they had the Leiria-Alcobaça country immediately on their flank, and could plunder there without molestation, unless they pressed in too closely upon the outposts of Trant’s or Blunt’s detachments. Nevertheless the 8th Corps lost more men by disease than either of the others during this hard winter. It was composed to a great extent of conscript battalions new to Spain, young and unacclimatized, whose men died off like flies from cold, dysentery, and rheumatism. Clausel’s division, which contained all these raw units, sank from 6,700 to 4,000 men in the three months that preceded the New Year, without having been engaged in any serious fighting—a loss of forty per cent.: while the case-hardened troops of Reynier, who had been in the Peninsula since 1808, and had already gone through the privations of Soult’s marches to Corunna and Oporto, only shrank from 17,000 to 12,000 bayonets in the same three months. Moreover, of the 5,000 lost by them, 2,000 were the casualties of Bussaco, not the victims of Wellington’s scheme of starvation. Ney’s corps and the cavalry reserve were better off than either Junot’s or Reynier’s troops, having at their disposition the fertile country between Golegão, Thomar, and Abrantes, where, at the commencement of their sojourn, food was to be got with comparative ease—many fields of maize were still standing unreaped when they first arrived, and it was not till after the New Year of 1811 that they began to be seriously pinched, and to be driven far afield, up the valley of the Zezere and into the mountains in the direction of Espinhal and Coimbra. The 6th Corps was still 18,000 strong out of its original 24,000 on January 1st, and of the 6,000 missing, 2,000 represented Bussaco casualties in actual fighting.

It must be confessed that the French army displayed splendid fortitude and ingenuity in maintaining itself on the Tagus so long beyond the period of Wellington’s estimate. That it did not altogether dissolve, when it was living from hand to mouth, with a fifth or a quarter of the men habitually absent on foraging expeditions, is surprising. Desertions to the allied lines, save from the foreign battalions in Loison’s and Solignac’s divisions, were very rare; the native French gave many recruits to the marauding fricoteurs, but seldom passed over to the enemy. The regimental officers succeeded in organizing a regular system by which the exploitation of the country-side was made as effectual as could be managed. They repaired and set going the ruined mills, discovered and rebuilt the bakers’ ovens of every village and town, and in most cases organized regimental food-reserves which made them independent of the general commissariat[16]. For there was little or nothing to be got from head quarters. Shoes proved the greatest difficulty, but the men learnt to make rude mocassins or ‘rivlins’ of untanned hide, which served fairly well, though they needed constant replacing[17]. In some regiments a third of the men might be seen wearing this primitive footgear. Another weak point was ammunition—there had been no great consumption of it since Bussaco, or the state of the army would have been perilous indeed, since it had to depend on what it had originally brought down from Spain in September. No more had been received, and attempts to establish a powder factory at Santarem failed for lack of saltpetre. If Masséna had been forced to fight two or three general engagements, his stores would have been so depleted that he would have had to abscond at once, lest the army should be left without cartridges. Meanwhile he hung on to his position, conscious that his power of endurance was limited, but hoping at any moment to see reinforcements break through from the north or the east, to refill his ranks and bring him the needful convoys.

Of military operations, as opposed to mere raids by detachments in search of food, hardly anything was undertaken by the Army of Portugal down to the end of the year. Between the 22nd and the 29th of December, General Ferey, with five battalions and a cavalry regiment, carried out a useless excursion beyond the Zezere, into the desolate region of Castello Branco as far as Cortiçada; apparently he had been sent out because of rumours that a French force was operating in this direction, and he was told to get into touch with it. But these reports were idle—they were tardy echoes of Gardanne’s unhappy march on the Estrada Nova[18] a full month before. The brigade returned, wearied and more than half-starved, on the seventh day, equally destitute of news and of the plunder that it had hoped to find in a hitherto untouched district. The only fruitful action, indeed, which the French carried out in this month was the completion of the great bridge-equipage at the mouth of the Zezere, which Masséna had ordered General Eblé to construct many weeks back[19]. His object was to have at his disposition means for crossing the Tagus, in case he should wish to invade the Alemtejo, or to co-operate with any friendly troops that might appear from that direction. Originally he had intended to make Santarem his crossing-point, but, after some boats had been built there, with immense difficulties owing to the entire lack of appliances, he determined that the place was too near the British lines, and too much exposed to attacks by Wellington’s river flotilla. Obviously a serious attempt to cross the Tagus near Santarem, even if its initial stages succeeded, and the larger part of the army got over, would expose the rear divisions to almost certain destruction, since Wellington could throw 30,000 men upon them within the next twelve hours. There is no more certain way of ruining an army than to allow it to be caught divided into two halves by a broad river spanned by one or two precarious bridges. On the other hand, the mouth of the Zezere was very remote from Wellington’s main army, and a crossing made opposite to it could only be opposed by a part of Beresford’s force, which was not very large, and was spread along fifty miles of the river front. Moreover, the corps executing the passage would not have any great danger on its flank or rear, since there was only the Portuguese garrison of Abrantes to molest it. It was an additional advantage that a bridge-equipage at Punhete could be kept in perfect safety a mile or two up the Zezere, out of range of guns on the further bank of the Tagus, and could be floated down at the last moment: while at Santarem the boats had to be stored on the actual bank of the Tagus, exposed to attacks from the side of the water by Wellington’s gunboats. One effort to sink or fire them by a bombardment and the use of Congreve rockets had already been made[20].

Accordingly Masséna resolved that if he made any attempt to cross into the Alemtejo, he would take Punhete and the estuary of the Zezere as his starting-point. Here he established his dockyard, and hither he transferred most of the busy workers from Santarem. In the course of a month they got ready for him the materials for two bridges broad enough to span the Tagus, besides ninety flat-bottomed boats. The mouth of the Zezere was protected by a number of batteries, to keep down the fire of any guns that Beresford might bring up to sink the bridges when they were being cast across.

These preparations did not long escape Wellington’s notice; he saw that the ground opposite Punhete was the most crucial point in Beresford’s long front, and bade him close up his troops toward it. The detachment beyond the Tagus was reinforced by a Spanish brigade under Carlos de España, drawn from La Romana’s army, which was placed at Barca just opposite the mouth of the Zezere, with William Stewart’s brigade of the 2nd Division close by at Santa Margarida, Tramagal, and Pinheiros. Three batteries were established on the Tagus bank opposite Punhete, and armed with six-pounders; but as these were overmatched by the French guns across the water, nine-pounders were requisitioned from Lisbon[21]. The rest of the 2nd Division and Hamilton’s two Portuguese brigades were to be ready to march to support Carlos de España and Stewart at the shortest notice. These dispositions were sufficient to keep Masséna quiet; he had no real intention of crossing the Tagus unless he heard of Soult’s approach from the direction of the Alemtejo[22].

On that side all was tranquil—as indeed it was destined to remain for many a week more. But just at the end of the month of December the isolation in which the Army of Portugal had so long been living at last came to an end, and reinforcements and news were at last received, though the news was disheartening and the reinforcements inadequate. On the 26th the reconnoitring party under General Marcognet, which had just beaten up Wilson’s quarters at Espinhal, was surprised by the appearance of a party of regular cavalry pushing towards them on the road from Ponte de Murcella. The uniforms were soon seen to be those of French dragoons, and a joyful meeting took place[23]. The new-comers announced that they were the advanced guard of Drouet’s 9th Corps, which was pushing down the valley of the Mondego in search of the Army of Portugal, but had no exact knowledge of where it was to be found.

The 9th Corps, it will be remembered, was a promiscuous assembly of some twenty newly-raised fourth battalions, belonging to the regiments which were already in Spain. Eleven were fractions of corps serving in Soult’s Army of Andalusia, five of regiments of Ney’s 6th Corps, the rest of units under Reynier’s and Junot’s command. Drouet had been originally ordered to do no more than conduct these battalions, which were little better than a mass of drafts, to join the regiments to which they belonged. They were divided into two provisional divisions under Generals Conroux and Claparéde. Thrust, as it were, into Spain without any regular organization, destitute of battalion transport, and with an improvised and insufficient staff, they had made very slow progress since they crossed the Pyrenees, mainly owing to difficulties of commissariat. When Foy passed Salamanca on November 10th, the head of Claparéde’s division had only just entered that city; the tail of the corps was struggling up from Valladolid and Burgos. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Claparéde only reached the neighbourhood of Almeida on the 15th of November, and that Drouet had not concentrated his whole force at that place till December 14th. He had about 16,000 men, having left three of his own battalions to garrison Ciudad Rodrigo, and picked up instead the remains of Gardanne’s column, which had retreated on to the Spanish frontier in such disorder at the end of the preceding month[24]. This detachment, by reason of its losses during its disastrous flight, had been reduced to about 1,400 men fit for service—about the same number that Drouet had left behind him from his own corps. Drouet was acting under stringent orders from the Emperor to move forward at the earliest possible moment[25], and open up communication with Masséna. His original instructions had been to go no further forward than Almeida himself, but to send a column under Gardanne, 6,000 strong, to clear and keep open the way to the Tagus. The march and failure of Gardanne have been already related, and Drouet saw that to carry out the Emperor’s orders he must use a larger force. At the same time his dispatches told him that he must at all costs keep in touch with Almeida, and not merely join Masséna and allow himself to be cut off from Spain[26].

Drouet’s solution of the problem was that with Conroux’s division and Gardanne’s detachment, some 8,000 men, he would march down the Mondego by Celorico and Ponte de Murcella, and cut his way to join Masséna, but that he would leave his second division under Claparéde behind him, about Celorico and Trancoso, to keep in touch with Almeida and maintain his communications. This was about as much as could be done to carry out Napoleon’s instructions, which were essentially impossible to execute. For the Portuguese militia, with which the 9th Corps had to deal, were, when properly managed, a very intangible enemy, who could retire whenever a column passed, and return to block the way when it had gone by. It is impossible to see how Drouet could have kept open the whole road from Almeida to Thomar, without leaving all along the way a couple of battalions, entrenched in a good position, at distances of fifteen or twenty miles from each other. And if he had done this, he would have had no force left at the moment when he joined Masséna. It was useless for Napoleon to tell him in one breath to keep the road open from end to end, and in the next to forbid him to make any small detachments[27]. But the Emperor neither fully understood the military situation in Portugal, nor grasped the relative merits of its roads or the relative resources of its various regions. In a dispatch sent out to Masséna on December 4th (but not delivered till February) he advised that Marshal to try to open his communications with Spain by the awful mountain road from the Zezere by Cardigos and Belmonte to Guarda, and at the same time to use the desolate Castello Branco country ‘pour faire des vivres.’ Ferey’s fruitless expedition up that very road and into that very region, carried out a fortnight before the Emperor’s dispatch was even written, had sufficiently proved the futility of the suggestion.

But to return to Drouet: he left Almeida on December 14th, and crossed the Coa with both his divisions and Gardanne’s detachment. The only enemy near him was Silveira, who with his six militia regiments and the reorganized 24th of the Line (the absconding garrison of Almeida, which had eluded its forced oath to Masséna in the preceding autumn[28]) was lying at Trancoso. To that place the Portuguese general had retired (abandoning the blockade of Almeida) when the 9th Corps arrived on the frontier. Of the other militia brigades of the north Miller with four battalions was at Vizeu, Trant with seven at Coimbra; Baccelar, the Commander-in-Chief, lay at Oporto with the small remainder.

Drouet, copying Masséna’s first dispositions in the preceding autumn, marched from Almeida in two columns; he himself took the high road by Celorico; Claparéde was sent along the more difficult mountain route by Trancoso, which place Silveira evacuated on his approach. At Celorico Drouet cut himself loose from his lieutenant, who (in accordance with Napoleon’s orders) was to stay behind, to remain in touch with Almeida, and (vain thought!) to keep open the communications. Taking Conroux and Gardanne with him, he marched south of the Mondego, past Chamusca and Moita, as far as Ponte de Murcella, which he reached on the 24th. He met with no opposition, for Baccelar, anxious only for Oporto, had told Silveira to keep in front of Claparéde, and Miller to stay at Vizeu, but both to be ready to fall back on Oporto if Drouet’s advance turned out to have that city as its objective. Similarly Trant was to hold on to Coimbra unless the French column took the northern road, in which case he too might be called back to Oporto[29]. Between Drouet, therefore, and Masséna’s army there was only left the weak brigade of John Wilson at Espinhal, and this force had been driven out of its usual position by Marcognet’s flying column on November 23rd, and had retired to Peñacova beyond the Mondego, below the heights of Bussaco. On the 26th Drouet’s advance cavalry came into touch with Marcognet, as has been already related, at Espinhal, just as the latter was preparing to retire to Thomar, with the report that there was nothing stirring in the north.

Thus Drouet’s 8,000 men came into the sphere of Masséna’s operations; but he did not at first seem to realize the fact. He sent on Gardanne’s detachment (which mostly belonged to the 2nd Corps) to join the Marshal, but halted Conroux’s division at Espinhal, and only went forward in person as far as Thomar, where he stopped for two days conferring with Ney. Instead of reporting himself to Masséna, he merely sent on a dispatch, to say that he had opened the communications, and was under orders from the Emperor to keep them safe. With this purpose he intended to return to the Mondego, and get back into touch with Claparéde. Masséna was in no small degree irritated at this pretension of Drouet to act as an independent commander, and sent him a peremptory order to come to head quarters to make his report, and to send on Conroux’s division from Espinhal to occupy Leiria. After some slight friction Drouet obeyed. The communications with Almeida, re-established for a moment, were thus broken again after four days, for John Wilson, the instant that Conroux began to break up from Espinhal, came boldly back towards that place, attacked the French rearguard on December 30th, and, after doing it some little harm, blocked the high-road to the north once more[30]. Drouet was completely cut off from Claparéde, and his arrival brought no profit to Masséna beyond his 8,000 men and the moderate train of ammunition which he had escorted. It was not with such a reinforcement that the Marshal could hope to resume the offensive. Indeed, as Wellington sagely remarked[31], if nothing more came up to join him, his retreat looked more certain and necessary than ever.

While Drouet was on the march to Leiria, his lieutenant, Claparéde, the moment that he was no longer under his superior’s eye, had gone off on a bold and rather hazardous raid of his own. Finding that Silveira’s militia were sticking closely to his skirts, he resolved to make an attempt to surprise them by a forced march. Concentrating at Trancoso on December 30th, he fell upon the enemy on the following day at Ponte do Abbade, and routed them with a loss of 200 men. Silveira, notwithstanding this check, adhered to his orders to keep close to Claparéde, and retired no further than Villa da Ponte, some seven miles away. But the French general made a second sudden sally from Trancoso on January 11th[32], beat the Portuguese much more decisively, and pursued them as far as Lamego on the Douro. Silveira crossed the river in great disorder on the 13th, and the news of his defeat brought terror to Oporto. Baccelar at once ordered not only the brigade from Vizeu (Miller was just dead and no longer commanded it), but Trant from Coimbra, and Wilson from Peñacova, to fall back and join him. They concentrated at Castro Daire, ten miles south of Lamego, with a force of 14,000 bayonets, whereupon Claparéde, who had only 6,000 men with him, began to fear that he would be cut off from Almeida and isolated in a difficult position. He evacuated Lamego and returned to Trancoso by forced marches, having accomplished nothing save the destruction of a few hundred militia and the spreading of panic as far as Oporto (January 18th)[33]. Shortly after he left Trancoso and moved southward to Celorico and Guarda[34], where he commanded the two roads to the Tagus, yet was not too far from Almeida and his base. But he was still completely cut off from Masséna, and the Portuguese at once resumed their old positions around him—Trant returning to Coimbra, Wilson to Peñacova on the Mondego, while Baccelar with the reserves lay more to the rear, at São Pedro do Sul on the Vouga. Claparéde’s movement would have been dangerous for the allies if he had possessed a heavier force, but 6,000 men were too few for a serious march on Oporto, and if the column had not retreated in haste it would probably have suffered complete disaster.

The only use which Masséna could make of Drouet and the division of Conroux was to cover more ground for foraging by their means. When placed at Leiria they much restricted the activities of Blunt at Peniche and Trant at Coimbra, who could no longer push their advanced posts so far to the front, and had to cede to the enemy all the land about the Souré and Alcoa rivers. Here Drouet collected enough food both to feed himself and to give help to Ney; but the resources of the district were, after all, limited, and within a few weeks the men of the 9th Corps were living on the edge of daily starvation like their fellows. The Army of Portugal had got no solid help from this quarter. It remained to be seen whether they would obtain better aid from the other side from which Masséna had hoped to be reinforced—the Army of Andalusia.

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SECTION XXIII: CHAPTER II

SOULT’S EXPEDITION INTO ESTREMADURA. JANUARY-MARCH 1811. THE BATTLE OF THE GEBORA AND THE FALL OF BADAJOZ

In his original scheme for the invasion of Portugal, Napoleon had given no part to the Army of Andalusia, judging that Masséna, supported by the 9th Corps, would be amply strong enough to drive the English into the sea. It is not till the 29th of September that the imperial correspondence begins to show signs of a desire that Soult should do something to help the Army of Portugal. But the assistance which was to be given is defined, in the dispatch of that date, as no more than a diversion to be made against Estremadura by Mortier and the 5th Corps, with the object of preventing La Romana from giving any aid to Wellington[35]. Soult is directed to see that Mortier keeps the Spanish Army of Estremadura in check: he is always to be on its heels, so that it will have no opportunity of sending troops towards the Tagus. Nothing is said about making a serious attack on Estremadura, or of threatening Badajoz with a siege. On the 26th of October comes the next allusion to this subject[36]: the Emperor had learnt from the English newspapers—always his best source of intelligence—that La Romana with a large part of his forces has marched on Lisbon to join Wellington, and that he has been able to do so without molestation. That this should have happened was, he thought, due to direct disobedience on Soult’s part: the Marshal cannot have kept in touch with the enemy. And he is directed in vague terms to ‘faire pousser sur La Romana,’ whatever exactly that may mean. An interpretation for the phrase, however, turns up in the next imperial dispatch[37]—Mortier and the 5th Corps ought to have followed the Spanish general march for march, and to have presented themselves on the Lower Tagus in face of Lisbon shortly after the arrival of La Romana in the Portuguese capital.

Soult had little difficulty in proving that this scheme was absolutely impossible. It argued, indeed, a complete misconception of the situation in Estremadura and Andalusia. To talk lightly of pushing Mortier and the 5th Corps, which comprised at this moment just 13,000 men, right across Estremadura to the mouth of the Tagus, ‘en talonnant La Romana,’ was futile. The Spanish General had gone off to join Wellington with some 7,000 or 8,000 men. But he had left behind him in Estremadura two strong infantry divisions, those of Mendizabal and Ballasteros, with 12,000 bayonets, 6,000 more infantry in garrison at Badajoz, Olivenza, and Albuquerque, and the whole of his cavalry, 2,500 sabres. In addition there were interposed between Mortier and the Tagus about 8,500 Portuguese—a cavalry brigade under Madden which had been lent to the Spaniards, and, near Badajoz, a regular infantry brigade at Elvas, and four militia regiments, forming the garrisons of the last-named place, of Campo Mayor, and of Jerumenha. That is to say, there lay before Mortier, after La Romana’s departure, a field army which, if concentrated, would make up 18,000 men, and in addition six fortresses containing garrisons amounting to 11,000 men more, and covering all the main strategical points of the country. How could he have pursued La Romana? If he had followed, he would have found himself at once involved in a campaign against superior forces in a region studded with hostile strongholds. ‘On this frontier,’ as Soult wrote to Berthier, ‘there are six fortified places—Badajoz, Olivenza, Jerumenha, Elvas, Campo Mayor, Albuquerque, in which there are at least 20,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry. It is clear to me that if I thrust a body of 10,000 men forward to the Tagus, as his majesty has directed, that body would never reach its destination, and would be cut off and surrounded before I could get up to its aid[38].’ This was indisputably correct: Mortier might have beaten Mendizabal and Ballasteros in the open field, if they chose to offer him battle; but if they preferred to concentrate on Badajoz or Elvas, and defied him from under the shadow of those great fortresses, he could not ignore them and march by in pursuit of La Romana. The moment that he was past their positions, they would cut him off from Andalusia, and he would find himself with their whole force at his back, and in front of him anything that Wellington might have sent to the south bank of the Tagus. In December this would have meant 14,000 men under Hill, at the New Year about 16,000 under Beresford. As Soult truly said, the expedition would have been encompassed, and probably destroyed, long before Masséna heard of its having got anywhere near him[39]. Nevertheless the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Portugal was told to expect this diversion as a matter of certainty: in the dispatch that Foy took back to him (dated Dec. 4) he was given the precise statement that the 5th Corps was to be looked for somewhere in the direction of Montalvão and Villaflor, on the Tagus above Abrantes, at no distant date.

After having, as he thought, demonstrated to his master that it would be useless to send Mortier alone, with 10,000 or 12,000 men, to make an impossible dash at the Tagus, Soult made another proposal. He would undertake not a mere raid, but the capture of Badajoz, the conquest of Estremadura, and the destruction of the army of that province; but he must take with him a force much greater than the mere 5th Corps. ‘The enterprise is a big one, but ought to succeed—at least it will produce a happy diversion in favour of the imperial army in Portugal[40].’ It would call back La Romana from Lisbon, and possibly cause Wellington to detach troops in his aid, and Masséna would have less in front of him in consequence, and might resume the offensive.

There was of course another course possible: Soult might have marched for Estremadura not with the 13,000 men of the 5th Corps alone, nor yet with the 20,000 men whom he actually took thither in January, but with the greater part of the French Army of Andalusia, 35,000 or 40,000 men. To do so he would have had to abandon Granada, Malaga, and Jaen on the one side, and his hold on the Condado de Niebla and the west upon the other. He might even possibly have had to raise the siege of Cadiz, though this is not quite certain. Many months after, in the end of March, when all chance of the conquest of Portugal was over, the Emperor told him that this would have been his proper course, and read him an ex-post-facto lecture on the advantages that might have followed, if he had evacuated two-thirds of his viceroyalty and taken an imposing force to sweep across the Alemtejo and assail Lisbon from the southern side[41]. But it must be remembered that in December and January all the orders that were sent him directed him to move no more than a small corps—in one dispatch the Emperor calls it only 10,000 men. A supreme commander-in-chief present on the spot might have seen his way to make the temporary sacrifice of the provinces which had cost so many men to conquer and to hold, in order that every available man might be sent against Lisbon, and the English might at last be expelled from the Peninsula. But Soult was not such a commander-in-chief; he was only one of the many viceroys whom Napoleon preferred to a single omnipotent lieutenant. Was it likely that he would sacrifice half his own territory, when no order to do so lay before him, in order that a colleague, sent on a separate task with forces no less than his own, might have every possible advantage? Soult is often blamed for not having seen that the crushing of Wellington’s army was the end to which all others should have been subordinated, and that it would have been cheap in the end to surrender half or three-quarters of Andalusia, and even to raise the siege of Cadiz, in order to secure that point. He might have replied that his master was no less blind than himself: dispatch after dispatch had ordered him to send a trifling detachment towards the Tagus, not to mass every available man and march on Lisbon, leaving Seville and the Cadiz lines exposed to all manner of dangers. He was primarily responsible for the retention of the Andalusia that he had conquered; it was for the Emperor, not for himself, to order the evacuation of much or all of that great realm. The Emperor gave no such directions: from September to January his whole series of dispatches spoke of nothing more than the movement of a moderate force; those of January 25th and February 6th approved of the course which Soult had actually chosen, and took it for granted that he would not move towards the Tagus till he should have captured Badajoz[42]. It was not till March, when he began to see that all his arrangements were going wrong, and that his scheme of times was erroneous, that the Emperor began suddenly to launch out into criticisms of Soult, and to complain that ‘to try to hold every point at a moment of crisis leads to possible disaster,’ that ‘Seville, Badajoz, and the Cadiz lines were the only necessary things,’ and that the Marshal ought to have 30,000 men or more with him at Badajoz instead of the 20,000 men whom he had actually taken thither[43]. If so, why had the orders not been given to that effect early in December, when Napoleon had just learnt from Foy the state and position of the Army of Portugal, which had so long been hidden from him behind Wellington’s screen of Ordenança?

If we seek deep enough, we find the cause of all misdirections in the fact that the Emperor persisted in guiding the movements of all his army from Paris, and would not appoint an independent commander-in-chief of all the Spanish armies, who should be able to issue orders that would be promptly obeyed by every separate marshal or general in each province. A moment’s reflection shows that the data as to the details of the situation in the Peninsula, from which Napoleon had to construct his scheme of operations, always came to him a month late. And when he had issued the dispatch which dealt with the situation, it reached its destination after the interval of another month, and had long ceased to have any bearing on the actual position of affairs. A single example of how the system worked may suffice. Masséna started Foy for Paris, with his great report on the state of the Army of Portugal, on October 29. Foy reached Paris and saw the Emperor on November 22 and the succeeding days. The detailed dispatches to Masséna and Soult, consequent on Foy’s report, were not sent off till December 4. On January 22nd Soult acknowledges the receipt of the dispatch of that date, along with that of two others dated November 28 and December 10, all of which arrived together, because the guerrilleros of La Mancha had stopped the posts between Madrid and Seville for a full fortnight after the New Year[44]. Of what value to Soult on January 22 could be orders based on the condition and projects of Masséna on October 29? The data at the base of the orders were three months old—while Soult had been already for more than a month engaged on a campaign undertaken on his own responsibility, without any knowledge of the exact requirements of Masséna, or of the intentions of the Emperor.

The Estremaduran expedition of January-March 1811, therefore, must be looked upon as the private scheme of the Duke of Dalmatia[45], undertaken with the general object of giving indirect assistance to Masséna, because the last orders that he had received from Paris (those of October 26), telling him to give direct assistance, by sending Mortier to the Tagus, were impossible of execution[46]. Soult had two leading ideas in his mind when he planned out his campaign. The first was that he was going into a country thickly set with fortresses; the second was that, when once the skirts of the Sierra Morena have been passed, Estremadura is a ‘cavalry country,’ a land of heaths and of unenclosed tillage-fields of vast area. Accordingly he intended to march with a very large force of cavalry, and with a heavy siege-train. At Seville he had at his disposition the greatest arsenal of Spain; but for many months all that it produced had been going forward to Cadiz: no less than 290 pieces had been sent to arm the vast lines in front of the blockaded city. Accordingly it took some time to get ready the heavy guns, and to manufacture the ammunition required for such a big business as the siege of the six fortresses, small and great, into whose midst he was about to thrust himself. The personnel for the siege-train had also to be collected: requisitions were sent, both to Victor at Cadiz and to Sebastiani at Granada, to detach and send into Seville nearly all their sappers, and the men of several companies of artillery. They were also to send to the expeditionary force many regiments of cavalry. Mortier had only two (10th Hussars and 21st Chasseurs), which had sufficed when he was engaged in the heights of the Sierra Morena, but were insufficient when he was about to descend into the plain of the Guadiana. Accordingly half the cavalry of Victor’s 1st Corps was called up—four regiments (4th, 14th, 26th Dragoons, 2nd Hussars), while Sebastiani gave up one (27th Chasseurs); to these was added an experimental Spanish cavalry regiment of ‘Juramentados’ recently organized at Seville. Only one infantry regiment was requisitioned, the 63rd Line, from Victor’s 3rd Division. The putting together of these resources gave a force in which the proportions of the arms were very peculiar—4,000 cavalry, 2,000 artillery and sappers, to only 13,500 infantry; the last, all save the above-mentioned 63rd regiment, drawn from Mortier’s 5th Corps. The orders for the concentration of the troops were issued early in December, but owing to the time required for drawing in units from Granada and Cadiz, and for the preparation of the siege-train, it was not till the last day of the old year that the Marshal took his departure from Seville.

The collection of a field army of 20,000 men, which was to cut itself loose from Andalusia for a time, imposed some tiresome problems on Soult. Since he had resolved not to evacuate Granada or Malaga on the one hand, nor the posts west of the Guadalquivir on the other, and since he was drawing off the 5th Corps, which had hitherto provided for the safety of Seville and found detachments for the Condado de Niebla, he had to make provision for the filling of the gap left behind him. Hence we find him calling upon Victor to spare men from in front of Cadiz—a demand which the Duke of Belluno took very ill—since he truly declared that he had no more troops in the 1st Corps than sufficed to man the lines and to keep posts of observation in his rear. The garrison of Cadiz was always increasing, and included a strong nucleus of British troops. How could he face sorties, or disembarkations in his rear, if he was cut down to a mere 18,000 men in place of the 24,000 on which he had hitherto reckoned? Nevertheless, he was forced to provide a detachment to hold Xeres, as a half-way house to Seville, and to send out a cavalry regiment (9th Dragoons) and one battalion west of the Guadalquivir. Similarly, the brigade of Godinot in the kingdom of Cordova[47] was required to find a skeleton garrison for Seville, which was raised to a somewhat higher figure, in appearance, by the doubtful aid of some ‘juramentado’ companies of Spaniards, and of the dépôts and convalescents of the 5th Corps. The great city, with a turbulent population of 100,000 souls, which formed the centre of his viceroyalty, became at this time Soult’s weakest point—he left it so inadequately held that it was at the mercy of any considerable hostile force which might approach it—and such a force was ere long, as we shall see, to make its appearance. Godinot had also to look after the insurgent bands of the central Sierra Morena, who often blocked the post road to Madrid. Sebastiani (save for the cavalry and artillery borrowed from him) was left with his 4th Corps intact, and his duty was unchanged—to watch the Spanish army of Murcia, and to suppress the guerrilleros of the Sierra de Ronda and the eastern coast—an unending task from which Soult thought that he ought not to be distracted. Napoleon, wise after the event, wrote in March that Soult should have left no more than the Polish division of the 4th Corps in the direction of Granada, and have brought the remainder of it to strengthen or support the troops at Seville and in the lines before Cadiz. In that case the Poles would certainly have had to move westward also ere long, since there were but 5,000 of them, and all Eastern Andalusia would have had to be evacuated. But this idea had never struck Soult as practicable, and Sebastiani’s whole corps was left in its old posts in the kingdom of Granada.

The invasion of Estremadura was carried out in two columns of about equal strength, which used the two main passes between Western Andalusia and the valley of the Guadiana. The right column under Latour-Maubourg took the route by Guadalcanal, Llerena, and Usagre; it was composed of his own regiments of dragoons from the 1st Corps, and of Girard’s infantry division of the 5th Corps, which latter had been cantoned in Llerena since the autumn, and was now picked up and taken forward by the cavalry. The left column, which was accompanied both by Soult and by Mortier, was composed of Briche’s light cavalry and Gazan’s division of the 5th Corps. It had to escort the slowly moving siege-train of 34 guns, which (with the 60,000 kilos of powder belonging to it) was drawn by 2,500 draught oxen, requisitioned along with their drivers from the province of Seville. This column took the route Ronquillo, Sta Olalla, Monasterio, which, if less steep and better made than the Llerena-Guadalcanal road, is longer, and passes through an even more desolate and resourceless country. It was intended that the two columns should join at Los Santos or Almendralejo, in the Estremaduran plain, and lay siege at once to Badajoz, the enemy’s most formidable stronghold. Its fall, so Soult hoped, would lead to the easy conquest of the minor fortresses.

But the two columns did not meet with equal fortune. That commanded by Latour-Maubourg met practically no resistance in its first stages. On arriving at Usagre on January 3, it found in its front almost the whole of the allied cavalry in Estremadura—Butron with 1,500 Spaniards, Madden with nearly 1,000 Portuguese. But this was merely a screen thrown out to cover the retreat beyond the Guadiana of Mendizabal and the division of Spanish infantry which had been cantoned in this region. That officer had been ordered by his chief, La Romana, to break the bridge of Merida, after retiring over it, and then to attempt to hold the line of the Guadiana. He did neither; precipitately marching on Merida, he passed through it in great haste, but forgot to see that the bridge was duly destroyed, and then retired along the north bank of the Guadiana to Badajoz. Latour-Maubourg, according to his directions, did not cross the river, but halted near Almendralejo, to wait for the other column, which was not forthcoming. Only Soult himself and Briche’s light cavalry appeared at Zafra on the 5th, and joined Latour-Maubourg on the 6th of January. Gazan’s infantry and the siege-train were far away, and unavailable for many a day. The plans of the left invading column had miscarried. For when its head reached Monasterio, at the summit of the long pass, its tail, the siege-train, was dragging far behind. In the desolate stages about Ronquillo and Sta Olalla it had met with tempestuous rains, as might have been expected at the season. Many of the oxen died, the unwilling Spanish drivers deserted wholesale, and there was much delay and considerable loss of vehicles. The train and its small escort got completely separated from Gazan’s infantry. At this moment Soult’s cavalry reported to him that a formidable column of hostile infantry was lying a few miles to the west of Monasterio, on the bad cross-road to Calera, and was apparently moving round his flank, either to fall upon the belated convoy or perhaps to make a dash at Seville.

This column was the 5,000 infantry of Ballasteros, who, as it chanced, had begun to march southward at the same moment that Soult had started northward. The Spanish general had just received orders from Cadiz bidding him cut himself loose from the Estremaduran army, and move into the Condado de Niebla, where he was to unite with the local levies under Copons, drive out the weak French detachment there stationed, and threaten Seville from the west if it should be practicable. These orders had been given, of course, before Soult’s plan for invading Estremadura was suspected at Cadiz. But though unwise in themselves—it was not the time to deplete Estremadura of troops—they had the effect of bringing Soult’s great manœuvre to a standstill for some weeks. The Marshal determined that he must free his flank from this threatening force before continuing his march, and ordered Mortier to attack Ballasteros without delay. This was done, but the Spaniard, after a running fight of two hours, retired to Fregenal, fifteen miles further west, without suffering any serious harm (January 4th). He was still in a position to threaten the rear of the convoy, or to slip round the flank of the French column towards Seville. Soult therefore resolved to go on with his cavalry and join Latour-Maubourg, but to drop Gazan’s infantry in the passes, with the order to head off Ballasteros at all costs, and to cover the siege-train in its journey across the mountains. Gazan therefore took post at Fuentes de Leon, but soon heard that Ballasteros had moved south again from Fregenal towards the Chanza river, and was apparently trying to get round his flank. Leaving a detachment to help the convoy on its slow and toilsome route, Gazan resolved to pursue the Spanish column and destroy it at all costs. This determination led him into three weeks of desperate mountain-marching and semi-starvation, at the worst season of the year. For Ballasteros, who showed considerable skill in drawing his enemy on, moved ever south and west towards the lower Guadiana, and picked up Copons’s levies by the way. He at last turned to fight at Villanueva de los Castillejos on January 24th. Gazan, who had been joined meanwhile by the small French detachment in the Condado de Niebla, brought his enemy to action on the 25th. The Asturian battalions which formed Ballasteros’s division made a creditable resistance, and when evicted from their position retired across the Guadiana to Alcoutim in Portugal, without having suffered any overwhelming loss[48]. Gazan therefore resolved to pursue them no further—indeed he had been drawn down into one of the remotest corners of Spain to little profit, and realized that Soult must be brought to a standstill one hundred miles away, for want of the 6,000 infantry who had now been executing their toilsome excursion in the mountains for three weeks.

Accordingly, the French general bade Remond, the commander of the Niebla detachment, watch Ballasteros, and himself returned to Estremadura by a most painful march through Puebla de Guzman, El Cerro, Fregenal, and Xeres de los Caballeros. He reported his return to Soult at Valverde on February 3rd. His services had been lost to his chief for a month all but two days, a fact which had the gravest results on the general course of the campaign of Estremadura[49].

For the Duke of Dalmatia, when he had joined Latour-Maubourg on January 6th, found that he had at his disposition 4,000 cavalry but only the 6,000 infantry of Girard, while the siege-train was still blocked in the passes by Monasterio. With such a force he did not like to beleaguer a place so large and so heavily garrisoned as Badajoz. Accordingly, he was forced to abandon his original intention of forming its siege, and to think of some lesser enterprise, more suited to his strength. After some hesitation, he determined to attack the weak and old-fashioned fortress of Olivenza, the southernmost of all the fortified places on the Spanish-Portuguese frontier. To cover his movement he sent Briche’s cavalry to Merida, which they occupied on January 7th, almost without resistance, finding the bridge intact. From thence they sought for Mendizabal on the north side of the Guadiana, and discovered that he had withdrawn to Albuquerque, twenty miles north of Badajoz. Meanwhile Latour-Maubourg with four dragoon regiments took post at Albuera to watch the garrison of Badajoz, while Soult marched with Girard’s infantry and one cavalry regiment to attack Olivenza, before whose walls he appeared on January 11th, 1811.

Olivenza ought never to have been defended. For since its cession by Portugal to Spain after Godoy’s futile ‘War of the Oranges’ in 1801, it had been systematically neglected. The breach made by the Spaniards at its siege ten years before had never been properly repaired—only one-third of the masonry had been replaced, and the rest of the gap had been merely stopped with earth. Its one outlying work, a lunette 300 yards only from its southern point, was lying in ruins and unoccupied. The circuit of its walls was about a mile, but there were only eighteen guns[50] to guard them. The garrison down to the 5th of January had consisted of a single battalion left there by La Romana, when he marched for Portugal in October. But Mendizabal, apparently in inexcusable ignorance of the condition of the place, had ordered a whole brigade of his infantry to throw themselves into it when Soult began to press forward. He sacrificed, in fact, 2,400 out of the 6,000 bayonets of his division by bidding them shut themselves up in an utterly untenable fortress[51]. The governor, General Manuel Herck—an old Swiss officer—was ailing and quite incapable; a man of resources might have done something with the heavy garrison placed under his orders, even though the walls were weak and artillery almost non-existent; but Herck disgraced himself.

When Soult arrived in front of Olivenza on January 11th, his engineers informed him that the place, weak as it was, was too strong to take by escalade, but that a very few days of regular battering would suffice to ruin it. Unfortunately for him, there was as yet no heavy artillery at his disposition, but only the divisional batteries of Girard’s two brigades; the siege-train was still stuck in the passes. However, the outlying lunette opposite the south front was at once seized, and turned into a battery for four field-guns, which opened their fire on the next day. The old Spanish breach of 1801, obviously ready to fall in on account of its rickety repairs, was visible in the north-west front, the bastion of San Pedro. Opposite this sites for two more batteries were planned, and a first parallel opened. The trench-work went on almost unhindered by the Spaniards, who showed but few guns and shot very badly, but under considerable difficulties from the rainy weather, which was perpetually flooding the lower parts of the lines. But in ten days approaches were pushed right up to the edge of the counterscarp, and mines prepared to blow it in. The siege artillery began to arrive on the 19th, in detachments, and continued to drop in for several days. On the 21st the batteries, being completed, were armed with the first 12-pounders that came up. On the 22nd the fire began, and at once proved most effective: the bastion of San Pedro began to crumble in, and the old breach of 1801 revealed itself, by the falling away of the rammed earth which alone stopped it up. The arrangements for a storm had not yet been commenced when the garrison hoisted the white flag. Mortier refused all negotiations and demanded a surrender at discretion. This the old governor hastened to concede, coming out in person at one of the gates, and putting the place at the disposition of the French without further argument.[52] Soult and Mortier entered next day, and 4,161 Spanish troops marched out and laid down their arms before the 6,000 infantry of Girard, who had formed the sole besieging force. The total loss of the French during the siege was 15 killed and 40 wounded—that of the besieged about 200. The figures are a sufficient evidence of the disgraceful weakness of the defence.

When one reflects what was done to hold the unfortified town of Saragossa, and the mediaeval enceinte of Gerona, it is impossible not to reflect what a determined governor might have accomplished at Olivenza. The place was short of guns, no doubt—but the enemy was worse off till the last days of the siege, since he had nothing but twelve light field-pieces until the siege-train began to arrive. General Herck made no sorties to disturb the works—though he had a superabundant garrison; he made no serious attempt to retrench the breach, and he surrendered actually ere the first summons had been sent in before the storm. At the worst he might have tried to cut his way out between the French camps, which were scattered far from each other, owing to the extremely small numbers of the besieging army, who only counted three men to the defenders’ two. Altogether it was a disgraceful business. The place, no doubt, ought never to have been held; but if held it might at least have been defended—which it practically was not.

Soult was placed in a new difficulty by the surrender of Olivenza. Though his siege-train had begun to come up, he had no news of Gazan, and his infantry was still no more than a single division. He had to spare two battalions to escort the 4,000 prisoners to Seville, and to put another in Olivenza as garrison[53]. This left him only eleven battalions—5,435 bayonets, to continue the campaign, though he had the enormous force of 4,000 cavalry at his disposition, and a siege-train that was growing every day, as more belated pieces came up from the rear. He might probably have waited for Gazan, for whom messages had been vainly sent, if he had not received, on the day that Olivenza fell, one more of Berthier’s peremptory letters, dated 22 December, in which he was told (as usual) to send the 5th Corps to join Masséna on the Tagus without delay. This letter came at an even more inappropriate moment than usual, as Gazan, with half that corps, was lost to sight in the mountain of the Condado de Niebla, more than a hundred and twenty miles away. But it was clear that something immediate must be done, or the Emperor would be more discontented than before; accordingly Soult resolved to take the very hazardous step of laying siege to Badajoz at once with the small infantry force at his disposition. For this move would undoubtedly provoke alarm at Lisbon, and lead Wellington to send off La Romana’s army to succour it, and perhaps some Anglo-Portuguese troops also, so that the mass opposed to Masséna would be more or less weakened.

Accordingly on the 26th of January Soult marched against Badajoz, which is only twelve miles north-west of Olivenza, with under 6,000 infantry, ten companies of artillery, and seven of sappers, to invest the southern side of Badajoz, while Latour-Maubourg, with six regiments of cavalry, crossed the Guadiana by a ford, and went to blockade the place on its northern front.

Badajoz, though owning some defects, was still a stronghold of the first class, in far better order than most of the Peninsular fortresses. It belonged to that order of places whose topography forces a besieger to divide his army by a dangerous obstacle, since it lies on a broad river, with the town on one side and a formidable outwork on the other. Indeed the most striking feature of Badajoz, whether the traveller approaches it from the east or the west, is the towering height of San Cristobal, crowned by its fort, lying above the transpontine suburb and dominating the whole city. Any enemy who begins operations against the place must take measures to blockade or to attack this high-lying fort, which completely covers the bridge and its tête-du-pont, and effectively protects ingress or egress to or from the place. But San Cristobal is not easy to blockade, since it is the end-bluff of a very steep narrow range of hills, which run for many miles to the north, and divide the country-side beyond the Guadiana into two separate valleys, those of the Gebora and the Caya, which are completely invisible from each other.

The city of Badajoz is built on an inclined plane, sloping down from the Castle, which stands on a lofty hill with almost precipitous grass slopes, at the north-east end of the place, down to the river on the north and the plain on the south and west. The castle-hill and San Cristobal between them form a sort of gorge, through which the Guadiana, narrowed for a space, forces its way, to broaden out again at the immensely long bridge with its thirty-two arches and 640 yards of roadway. Below the castle the Rivillas, a stagnant brook with hardly any current,—the home of frogs and the hunting-ground of the city storks,—coasts around the walls, and finally dribbles into the river. The front of the place from the river to the castle was composed of eight regular bastions; along the river edge there lies nothing more than a single solid wall without relief or indentations: but this side of the place is wholly inaccessible owing to the water. There are two outlying works, which cover heights so close into the place that it is necessary to hold them, lest the enemy should establish himself too near the enceinte. These are the Picurina lunette beyond the Rivillas, and the much larger Pardaleras fort, a ‘half-crown-work,’ opposite the south point of the city, which covers a well-marked hill that commands that low-lying part of the place, and is a position impossible to concede to the besieger, since it is only 250 yards from the nearest bastion. It was ill-designed, having a very shallow ditch, and being incompletely closed at its gorge by a mere palisade.

The eight bastions which form the attackable part of the enceinte of Badajoz have (they remain to-day just as they were in 1811, for the place has never been modernized) a height of about thirty feet[54] from the bottom of the ditch to the rampart, while the curtains between them are somewhat lower, about twenty-two feet only. The ditch was broad, with a good counterscarp in masonry seven feet high; beyond it each bastion was protected in front by a rather low and weak demi-lune.

The garrison, not more than enough for such an extensive place, consisted at the New Year of 4,100 men; but Mendizabal threw in two battalions more (1st and 2nd of the Second Regiment of Seville) before he retired to the borders of Portugal, so that the figure had risen to 5,000 before Soult appeared in front of the walls. The governor was a very distinguished soldier, General Rafael Menacho, who had served through the old French war of 1792-5, and had commanded a regiment at Baylen. He was in the full vigour of middle age (forty-four years old) and abounding in spirit, resolution, and initiative, as all his movements showed down to the unhappy day of his death.

Soult’s engineers, after surveying the situation of Badajoz, reported that under ordinary circumstances the most profitable front to attack would certainly be the western—that between the Pardaleras fort and the river; but at the same time they decided that it had better be left alone. For the army was so weak that it could not properly invest the whole city, and if the north bank of the Guadiana were left practically unoccupied, as must necessarily be the case, the Spaniards would be able to seize the ground beyond the bridge-head, and establish batteries there, which would effectually enfilade the trenches which would have to be constructed for approaching the west side of the place. The castle and the north-east angle of the town were too high-lying to be chosen as the point of attack, and the Rivillas and its boggy banks were better avoided. They therefore advised that the south front should be chosen as the objective, and that the first operation taken in hand should be the capture of the Pardaleras fort, for that work appeared weak and ill-planned, while its site would make the most advantageous of starting-points for breaching the enceinte of the town itself. It was the most commanding ground close in to the walls which could be discovered. Soult and Mortier concurred, and placed the army in the best position for utilizing this method of attack. The camps of Girard’s division were placed on and around two low hills, the Cerro de San Miguel on the right of the Rivillas, and the Cerro del Viento on its left. On the former height, about 1,800 yards from the town, nothing was done save the construction of a rough entrenchment—to face the Picurina and restrict possible sallies—in which three small batteries were afterwards inserted. The Cerro del Viento, which is about 1,200 yards from the Pardaleras, was to be the real starting-point of the attack, and under its side the siege-park and engineers’ camp were established. Two batteries in front of it were marked out and begun on the first night of ‘open trenches’ (January 28-9), but it was not till the third night (January 30-1) that the first parallel was commenced, on the undulating ground to the west of the Rivillas. When the work became visible next day, the governor directed a vigorous sortie against it, composed of 800 men. The trenches were occupied for a moment, but soon recovered by the French supports. A small body of Spanish cavalry which had taken part in the sally rode right round the rear of the camp, and sabred the chef-de-bataillon Cazin, the chief engineer, and a dozen of his sappers on the Cerro del Viento. But the total loss of the besiegers was only about seventy killed and wounded, while the men of the sortie suffered much more heavily, while they were being driven back across the open ground towards the city. Their commander, a Colonel Bassecourt of the 1st Regiment of Seville—the corps which furnished the sallying force—was killed. Next day the siege-works were so little injured that the artillery was able to put guns into the first batteries that had been marked out. On the first three days of February incessant and torrential rains stopped further work—the whole of the first parallel was inundated, and the flying bridge by which alone Soult could communicate with Latour-Maubourg on the other side of the Guadiana was washed away.

But despite of the rain February 3 was a day of joy for the French, for on its morning Gazan reported his arrival at Valverde, ten miles away, and at 3 o’clock his division of 6,000 men marched into camp and doubled the force of the besieging army. Their arrival was a piece of cruel ill-luck for the Spaniards, for on that same afternoon, at dusk, Menacho sent out a formidable sortie of 1,500 men—all that he could safely spare from the ramparts—who came out of the river-side gate (Puerto de las Palmas) and stormed the first parallel, driving out the workers and the three companies of their covering party. The Spaniards had already filled up a considerable section of the trench, when they were charged by two battalions of Gazan’s newly-arrived troops, and driven out again, before they had finished their task. The serious nature of the attack may be judged from the fact that the French lost 188 killed and wounded—including eight officers—in repelling it. If only one brigade of Girard had been in the Cerro del Viento camps, instead of Gazan’s entire division, it is probable that the whole first parallel and the batteries behind it would have been destroyed. While the damage was being repaired, on February 4, Soult began to bombard the town from these batteries, but with no good effect. The result, indeed, was rather to the profit of the Spaniards, for a great portion of the civil population fled at the first sign of bombardment, and escaped by night down the Guadiana bank towards Elvas. The provisions left in their deserted houses added appreciably to Menacho’s stores.

The work of extending the first parallel diagonally toward the Pardaleras was still going on, when, on February 5th, the whole situation before Badajoz was changed by the appearance in the neighbourhood of a Spanish army of succour. Even before Soult had started from Seville at the New Year, Wellington had been aware of the imminence of the invasion of Estremadura, and had been consulting with his colleague La Romana as to the measures that it would be necessary to take[55]. As early as the 2nd of January La Romana had sent orders to Mendizabal, to tell him that if the French should cross the Sierra Morena in force, he was to evacuate Southern Estremadura, break the bridges of Medellin and Merida, and endeavour to defend the line of the Guadiana[56]. By later instructions (January 8) Mendizabal was directed to retire into the Sierra de San Mamed if the enemy crossed the river above Badajoz, but to throw himself upon their rear, and to hang on to them, if they crossed below, and seemed to be making for Elvas and Portugal. On the 12th, Wellington, hearing that Soult seemed to be heading towards Olivenza rather than Merida, conceived doubts as to whether he might not be intending to abandon his communications with Seville, to leave the fortresses behind him, and to march to the Tagus to co-operate with Masséna upon the Alemtejo bank of that river. On the 14th arrived the more comfortable news that the French had sat down to beleaguer Olivenza, a sure sign that they did not propose to cut themselves loose from their base and to join Masséna as a flying column. As a matter of fact, as we have seen, Soult, having been deprived of Gazan’s assistance, was too weak at this moment to dream of an incursion into Portugal, and had attacked Olivenza because he could find nothing else to do for the present.

Accordingly, since the enemy had apparently settled down to besiege the Estremaduran fortresses, Wellington and La Romana determined to reinforce Mendizabal up to a strength which would enable him to act as a serious check upon Soult, probably even to foil him completely. On January 14th La Romana ordered Carlos de España and his brigade of some 1,500 or 1,800 men, from opposite Abrantes, to join the small existing remnant of the Army of Estremadura[57]. On the 19th[58], the more important resolve was taken of sending the remainder of the Spanish troops from the Lisbon lines on the same errand—they amounted to about 6,000 men, the rest of La Carrera’s division, and the whole of that of Charles O’Donnell. Starting on the 20th they reached Montemor o Novo on the 24th—where they heard of the disgraceful capitulation of Olivenza,—and Elvas on the 29th. To the same point came in Mendizabal, who, with the remains of his own infantry division—something over 3,000 men, and Butron’s cavalry, had moved from his original post at Albuquerque to Portalegre on the Portuguese border, and had there been joined by Carlos de España’s brigade. Madden’s Portuguese cavalry had already moved back to Campo Mayor and Elvas when Soult first undertook the siege of Olivenza. By the accumulation of all these forces an army of about 11,000 infantry and over 3,000 cavalry was put together[59].

La Romana himself had intended to take charge of the expedition, which under his prudent leadership would probably have achieved its desired end, and have held Soult completely in check. But he was prevented from starting with his troops on the 20th by an indisposition which was not judged to be serious—a ‘spasm in the chest[60],’ apparently a preliminary attack of angina pectoris. He appeared convalescent on the 22nd, but died suddenly of a recurrence of the complaint early on the afternoon of the 23rd, after he had already sent forward his secretary and staff to prepare quarters for him on the way towards the army. His death was a real disaster to the cause of the allies, for two main reasons. The first was that, unlike most of his contemporaries in the Spanish service, he was a very cautious general, who avoided risks and preferred to manœuvre rather than to fight, unless he had a good chance of success. His long marches and many retreats had won him the punning nickname of the ‘Marqués de las Romerías’—the Marquis of Pilgrimages: but even a long ‘pilgrimage’ is better than a defeat, and he had never destroyed an army, like Cuesta, Blake, or Areizaga. The other reason which made him valuable to the allied cause was that, being a man of great tact and obliging manners, he had won Wellington’s personal regard, and always lived on the best terms with him. Indeed, the Marquis was the only Spanish general, save Castaños, who never had any difficulties with his English colleague; and it may be added that Wellington thought much more of his capacity than of that of Castaños, whom he regarded as well-meaning but weak. He wrote of him, in words that may be regarded as entirely genuine and heartfelt, and which were not intended for Spanish eyes, that he was the brightest ornament of the Spanish army, an upright patriot, a strenuous and zealous defender of the cause of European liberty, a loyal colleague, a useful councillor[61].

That the Marquis was not a man of brilliant genius, nor a general of the first rank, is sufficiently evident from the account of his campaigns, duly detailed in the first three volumes of this work. But he had a very high and meritorious record; of all the old nobles of Spain he was the one who served his country best in the day of her distress. His energy and determination were displayed in his romantic escape from Denmark in 1808[62]. Having once unsheathed his sword in the national cause, he never faltered or despaired even in the day of the worst disaster. If his life had been spared he would have fought on undismayed to the end of the war. Though he became involved in the unhappy disputes which preceded the fall of the Supreme Junta, in the winter of 1809-10[63], and did not disdain to accept a command from the illegal Seville government in the January of the latter year[64], he was neither a self-seeker nor a frondeur. If his words or acts sometimes appeared factious, they were inspired by a genuine discontent at the incapacity of the ruling powers, not by a desire for self-advancement; and there seems to be no evidence to connect him with the unwise and autocratic proceedings of his brother José Caro in Valencia. During the last year of his life he was discharging a very invidious task while he commanded in Estremadura under the control of the last regency, which treated him with neglect and regarded him with suspicion. His death is said to have been hastened by scurrilous accusations made against his loyalty in pamphlets and newspapers published at Cadiz[65], which drove him to distraction, for he was a man of a sensitive disposition, keenly affected by any criticism. Albuquerque, it will be remembered, is said to have been helped towards his grave by similar means[66].

The death of La Romana, and the transfer at this same date of Charles O’Donnell to another sphere of operations, caused a general rearrangement of the commands in the Army of Estremadura. Mendizabal, as the sole Lieutenant-General in the province, succeeded to the place and responsibilities of the Marquis, but only as a provisional chief; the Regency, justly doubting his abilities, nominated Castaños as Captain-General. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the victor of Baylen reached Estremadura just in time to hear that his locum tenens had destroyed the army, and left hardly a wreck of it behind him. Meanwhile Mendizabal made over his own old division to a Major-General Garcia, while that of Charles O’Donnell fell to another officer new to us, Major-General José Virues. La Carrera became chief of the staff, or practically second in command, and his ‘vanguard division’ passed to his old brigadier Carlos de España.

As early as January 28th Soult had directed Latour-Maubourg with four regiments of light cavalry to make a reconnaissance in the direction of the Portuguese frontier, and by this movement had become aware that Mendizabal was at Portalegre, with his own infantry and Butron’s cavalry. It was no surprise to the Marshal, therefore, to find, a week later, that a considerable force was pressing in his posts on the north of the Guadiana. The presence of Madden’s Portuguese dragoons in the advanced guard showed that the enemy had been reinforced. Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry-screen was driven in without much fighting, and the French general retired to Montijo, nine miles up the river (February 5th-6th). That night Mendizabal’s army, nearly 15,000 strong, camped on the heights of San Cristobal, and communicated with Badajoz freely, the blockade being broken so far as the northern bank of the Guadiana was concerned.

Wellington and La Romana, when the return of the Spanish troops from Lisbon to Estremadura was ordered, had settled upon a regular plan of campaign[67], which had been communicated to Mendizabal. It required some slight modification when the fall of Olivenza became known, and when Soult’s intention to besiege Badajoz declared itself. But in its essentials it was well applicable to the situation of affairs upon February 6th. After a solemn warning to the Spanish generals that the Army of Estremadura is ‘the last body of troops which their country possesses,’ and must not be risked in dangerous operations, the memorandum suggests (1) that an entrenched camp capable of holding the entire army should be prepared on the heights which lie between Campo Mayor and Badajoz, and which end in the high bluff of San Cristobal above the latter town. (2) That if possible an attempt should be made to break the bridges of Medellin and Merida, so as to restrict the French to the southern bank of the Guadiana. (3) That the Regency should be asked to send back Ballasteros’s division to join the Army of Estremadura, and (4) that the bridge of boats in store at Badajoz should, if possible, be floated down to Jerumenha, to give the Portuguese garrison of Elvas the power of crossing the Guadiana below Badajoz. The last suggestion was impracticable, because the French, when the dispatch reached Mendizabal, were so close to the river that the bridge could not have been transferred. The other three suggestions were all valuable, but none of them were carried out—least of all the most important of them, that which prescribed the entrenching of the San Cristobal heights, and their occupation by the whole of the Spanish army.

Mendizabal had a plan of his own—he resolved not to fortify himself on the heights beyond the river, as Wellington suggested, but to throw a great part of his infantry into Badajoz, and make with them a grand sortie against the French lines. The bulk of his cavalry remained below San Cristobal, and had a skirmish of evil omen with Latour-Maubourg, who drove them in with ease, and pursued them beyond the Gebora to the foot of the heights. But Madden’s Portuguese horse filed into town across the bridge, to join in the sally of the infantry.

At three o’clock on the afternoon of the 7th of February the sortie was made. While Madden’s dragoons and a small infantry support threatened the left of the French lines, without closing, a large force composed of all Carlos de España’s ‘vanguard division,’ with picked battalions from the others, delivered a vigorous—indeed a desperate—assault upon Soult’s right, the entrenchments on the hill of San Miguel. There were apparently four columns, each of two battalions, and making 5,000 men: they came out from the Trinidad gate, drew up under the wing of the Picurina lunette, and then marched straight at the French camp. They pierced the line of entrenchments in their first rush, swept away the guard of the trenches, carried the three batteries which were inserted in them, and then became engaged in a fierce fight with Phillipon’s brigade of Girard’s division, the troops encamped behind this part of the lines. Mortier, who was on the other flank, detecting that the movements in front of him were only a demonstration, promptly sent several battalions eastward to succour the threatened point. These fell upon the Spaniards’ flank, and threatened to cut them off from their retreat into the fortress, whereupon Carlos de España, who was slightly wounded, ordered a retreat, finding that forces equal to his own had now been concentrated against him[68]. His troops suffered severely in fighting their way back into Badajoz—their loss was about 650 men; that of the French, whose front line had been very severely handled, came to about 400. But the besieged could spare the larger number better than the besiegers the smaller, since they had the whole army of succour to draw upon, while Soult had no reserves nearer than Seville. It is hard to see why Mendizabal, if he was resolved upon a sortie, did not double the force engaged in it, as he might easily have done without depleting any part of the enceinte. For, counting the garrison, he had 15,000 infantry—a larger number than the French could dispose of. To send out 5,000 only seems to have been a half-measure, which ensured ultimate failure when the besiegers should have drawn together[69]. The fighting of Carlos de España’s men was most creditable, but there were not enough of them.

On the next day but one Mendizabal withdrew from Badajoz the divisions of Carlos de España and Virues, and part of that of Garcia[70], leaving the original garrison strengthened by the remainder of the last-named unit up to a force of 7,000 men. The field army retired across the river, and encamped on the strong position of the heights of San Cristobal, its right wing resting on the fort, while the remainder of its camps lay along the reverse slope of the range for a distance of a mile and a half. There were some 9,000 infantry on the position, and the 3,000 horse of Butron and Madden were encamped behind it in the plain of the Caya. By some inconceivable folly Mendizabal made no attempt to use this large force of cavalry, which he should have sent forward to seize and hold the valley of the Gebora, in front of his position. All beyond that stream, which flows at the very foot of the San Cristobal heights, was abandoned to Latour-Maubourg. It seems certain that the French cavalry general could have been driven to a respectful distance if a force of all arms had been sent against him, for he had on the north of the Guadiana only five regiments of horse and not a single battalion of infantry. But the Spaniard allowed himself to be cooped up on the hill, and kept no guard of cavalry far out in the plain to shield his front and report the motions of the enemy. What was worse, he made no attempt to entrench the long hillside, though this was a point on which Wellington and La Romana had given very clear and definite instructions. The position was strong, but as no care was taken to keep the enemy at a distance, it was always possible that he might make a sudden dash at it, and the Spanish army—scattered in its camps—would require time to take up its ground and form its fighting-line.

For some days after the sortie, however, Soult paid little attention to Mendizabal, and concentrated all his efforts against the fortress. Having completed the first parallel, and established several new batteries in it, he proceeded with his operations against the Pardaleras fort. His plan was very daring—not to say hazardous—for on the afternoon of the 11th of February, when the work was much battered but still quite defensible, he determined to try to capture it by escalade. At dusk two columns, making about 500 men, issued from the trenches and dashed at the Pardaleras: the left-hand column coasting round its flank made for the gorge, which was only defended by a row of palisades. These were so weak that they were broken down or hewn to pieces by the assailants without much difficulty. At the same time the right column, which had entered the ditch, found an open postern into which it made its way. Attacked on two sides, the garrison evacuated the work, and fled into the city, leaving 60 men killed or prisoners behind them. The French, who had lost only 4 killed and 32 wounded in this reckless venture, established themselves in the Pardaleras. But the governor turned against the fort all the guns of the next two bastions, and the captors had to burrow and lie low, till on the night of the 12th-13th a trench was run out from the first parallel, which gave safe ingress and egress. During the intervening day the besiegers lost more men in holding the work than they had in storming it[71], and the Pardaleras, close though it was to the walls, proved to be ground from which it was most difficult to push forward while the artillery fire of the town was unsubdued. To transform the open gorge in its rear into a base for new approaches was a slow and expensive business, and the siege made a much less rapid progress than had been hoped.

Meanwhile Soult resolved to make a blow at Mendizabal and his field army, which was visible day after day encamped on the San Cristobal heights, in a position imposing but unfortified and ill-watched. The Marshal had intended to cross the Guadiana and deliver his attack even before the Pardaleras was taken, but much rain was falling, and the river had overflowed its banks, so that access to the point where the French flying-bridge had been established, a mile above Badajoz, was difficult. Moreover the Gebora was also in flood, and reported to be unfordable, though usually a slender stream. The only thing which the Marshal was able to do between the 11th and the 18th of February was to shell the nearer end of the heights of San Cristobal from the batteries in his right attack, with the object of inducing the Spanish battalions there encamped to move further from the protection of the fort, which effectually covered their right flank. On February 13th this plan was seen to have been effective: the Spaniards had withdrawn from the neighbourhood, and had left half a mile unoccupied between San Cristobal and their new camp.

On the afternoon of the 18th it was reported to Soult that both the rivers had fallen, and that the Gebora had again become fordable. He made no delay, and at dusk his striking-force began to cross the Guadiana—the operation was slow, since only two flying-bridges and a few river-boats were available. But at dawn nine battalions[72], three squadrons, and two batteries were on the north bank, while Latour-Maubourg had come up from his usual post at Montijo with six cavalry regiments more. The whole force assembled in the angle between the Guadiana and the Gebora amounted to no more than 4,500 infantry[73] and 2,500 horse, with twelve guns, a total so much below Mendizabal’s 9,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry that the adventure seemed most hazardous. But fortune often favours the audacious, and on this day Soult chanced on the unexpected luck of a very foggy morning. He was practically able to surprise the enemy, for the first warning that a battle was at hand only came to Mendizabal when, shortly after dawn, his picket at the broken bridge of the Gebora—a short mile or so in front of the heights—was driven in by masses of French infantry. At the same moment a tumult broke out on his left rear: the 2nd Hussars, sent on by Latour-Maubourg to discover and turn the Spanish northern flank, had been able to mount the heights unseen and unopposed, by making a long détour, and rode unexpectedly into the camp of one of Carlos de España’s regiments. Mendizabal’s troops flew to arms, and began hastily to form their line upon the heights, but they had no time to get into good order, for the enemy was upon them within a few minutes.

Mortier, to whom Soult had committed the conduct of the battle, showed great tactical skill. On reaching the line of the Gebora, infantry and cavalry poured across it without a moment’s delay; all the three fords of which the French knew proved to be practicable, though on the southernmost one, near the bridge, the infantry had to cross with the chilly water up to their waists. The order of battle was very simple: the right wing, composed of the whole of the cavalry, was to pass by the most northern ford and ascend the heights beyond the Spanish left. Arrived at the crest, one brigade was to push along it, and fall on the flank of the hostile line, while the other descended into the valley of the Caya, and charged into the Spanish camps, so placing itself directly in Mendizabal’s rear. Of the infantry three battalions (the 100th regiment) were to ascend the hillside in the gap between the fort of San Cristobal and the nearest Spanish camp, a gap which had been caused (as it will be remembered) by the withdrawal of the Spaniards from the southernmost heights under the stress of bombardment six days before. This column was to risk the fire of the fort, which it had to disregard, and fall on the hostile flank. Meanwhile the centre—very weak and composed only of six battalions of infantry (34th and 88th regiments)—was to attack the Spanish front, when the two turning movements were well developed.

The San Cristobal heights are a most formidable position, two miles of smooth steep slopes with an altitude of 250-300 feet, overlooking the whole plain of the Gebora and with hardly any ‘dead ground’ in their sides. They form an excellent glacis for an army in position ready to defend itself by its fire, for the assailant must come up the hill at a slow pace and utterly exposed. Cavalry could only climb at a walk, and with difficulty; but Mortier had sent all his horse far to the north, where they ascended, and partly crossed, the range at its lowest point, beyond the extreme flank of the enemy. Just at this moment the fog rose, and everything became visible. On gaining the heights unopposed, Briche’s light cavalry formed up across them, and commenced to move along the summit towards the Spanish left wing, while Latour-Maubourg, with three dragoon regiments, descended the reverse slope and moved towards the hostile camp, in front of which Butron’s Spanish horse and Madden’s Portuguese could be seen hastily arraying their squadrons.

It may be said that the battle of the Gebora was lost almost before a shot had been fired, for on seeing themselves threatened in flank and about to be charged by Latour-Maubourg, the Spanish and Portuguese horse broke in the most disgraceful style, disregarding the orders of their commanders, and went off in a disorderly mass across the plain of the Caya, towards Elvas and Campo Mayor. They outnumbered the enemy, and could have saved the day if they had fought even a bad and unsuccessful action, so as to detain the French dragoons for a single hour. But the cavalry of the Army of Estremadura had a bad reputation—they were the old squadrons of Medellin and Arzobispo, of which Wellington preserved such an evil memory, and Madden’s Portuguese this day behaved no better[74]. They escaped almost without loss, for Latour-Maubourg let them fly, and turned at once against the flank and rear of Mendizabal’s infantry.

The combat on the southern part of the heights had not yet assumed a desperate aspect. Though the column which was formed by the 100th regiment had got up the hillside under the fort of San Cristobal, and had penetrated into the gap between that work and its extreme left, the Spanish infantry was still holding its own. The fog having cleared, they were able to estimate the smallness of the number of the hostile infantry, and stood to fight without showing any signs of failing. But the fusilade was only just beginning all along the hillside when the victorious French cavalry came into action. Briche’s light horse came galloping along the crest of the heights, while Latour-Maubourg’s dragoons were visible in the plain behind, well to the rear of the Spanish line. Mendizabal, horrified at the sight, ordered his men to form squares, not as usual by battalions, but vast divisional squares, each formed of many regiments, and with artillery in their angles. If the French cavalry alone had been present, it is possible that in this formation the Spaniards might have saved themselves. But Mortier’s infantry was also up, and well engaged in bickering with Mendizabal’s men. The squares, when formed with some difficulty, found themselves exposed to a heavy fire of musketry from the front at the same moment that the cavalry blow was delivered on their flank. Briche’s hussars penetrated without much difficulty through battalions already shaken by the volleys of the French infantry. First the northern and soon afterwards the southern square was ridden through from the flank and broken. The disaster that followed was complete: some of the Spanish regiments dispersed, many laid down their arms in despair, a limited number clubbed together in heavy masses and fought their way out of the press towards the plain of the Caya and the frontier of Portugal. General Virues and three brigadiers were taken prisoners, with at least half of the army. Mendizabal and two other generals, La Carrera and Carlos de España, got away, under cover of the battalions which forced their passage through toward the west. In all about 2,500 infantry escaped into Badajoz[75], and a somewhat smaller number towards Portugal[76]. The rest were destroyed—only 800 or 900 had been killed or wounded, but full 4,000 were taken prisoners, along with seventeen guns—the entire artillery of the army—and six standards. The French loss, though under-estimated by Soult in his dispatch at the ridiculous figure of 30 killed and 140 wounded, was in truth very small—not exceeding 403 in all. It fell almost entirely on the cavalry—who had done practically the whole of the work. The regimental returns show that only four officers in the infantry were killed or wounded, to thirteen in the mounted arm. In proportion this battle was more disastrous to the vanquished and less costly to the victors than even Medellin or Ocaña. It is difficult to write with patience of the culpable negligence of Mendizabal, in allowing himself to be surprised in such a position, when he was amply provided with cavalry, or of the conduct of the Spanish and Portuguese horse in abandoning their infantry without striking a single blow, when even a show of resistance might at least have given their comrades time to save themselves. For the battalions on the heights could have escaped into Badajoz, or even have retreated along the Guadiana without desperate loss, if they had been granted an hour’s respite: while if the French cavalry could have been detained till the infantry battle on the heights was decided, it is quite clear that Mendizabal in his splendid fighting position, and with double numbers, could have held his own and driven off the attack of the nine battalions of Mortier.

The Army of Estremadura having been practically destroyed,—the demoralized remnant of 4,000 horse and foot which escaped into Portugal counted for nothing,—Soult could at last besiege Badajoz from both sides of the river, and reckon on being undisturbed in his operations. He left three battalions, a battery, and five regiments of Montbrun’s cavalry on the north bank, to invest the fort of San Cristobal, and returned, with the rest of the force that had won the battle, to his lines. There was still much to be done, for the governor Menacho was resolute, and the garrison had been raised to over 8,000 men by the influx of Mendizabal’s fugitives. The siege was destined to last three weeks longer, and might have been prolonged to a far greater duration if Menacho had not been killed on March 4; as long as he lived the defence was vigorous and honourable.

Though Soult could concentrate all his attention on the approaches towards the curtain between the bastions of Santiago and San Juan, they did not progress very rapidly. Menacho brought up all the artillery that could be readily moved on the threatened front, and continued to pound the ruins of the Pardaleras and the trenches leading up to it. It was only on the night of the 24th February that a battery was at last completed under the right flank of the fort, and another under its left, to keep down the fire of the defenders. Nor was it till the 28th of the same month and the 1st of March that the zigzags began to creep forward from the second parallel towards the body of the place. On the 2nd of March the approaches reached the demi-lune outside the bastion of San Juan, and the French could look down into the ditch, but they found the counterscarp in good order, and the palisades intact. On the 3rd they commenced mining, with the object of blowing in the counterscarp and filling the ditch. But their work was stopped by a vigorous sortie, the last which Menacho sent out. A small column of Spaniards passed out of the left bastion, seized and demolished the advanced trenches, and spiked the twelve guns which armed the two nearest batteries. The progress of the besiegers was checked for a day—but at a disastrous cost, for the governor himself, while watching the effect of the sortie from the ramparts, was killed by a chance shot. His place was taken by the senior brigadier in the place, José Imaz, a man of desponding heart and utterly lacking in energy. It was a thousand pities that, when the rout of the Gebora took place, neither La Carrera nor Carlos de España had been driven back into Badajoz, for both these officers were men of desperate resolution, who would have played out a losing game to the last moment with stubborn courage. The French narratives note that from the moment of Menacho’s death the defence slackened; it became partly passive, and was no longer conducted with common skill. No more sorties were made, and there seemed to be a lack of ingenuity in the measures taken to resist the completion of the approaches[77]. All that was done was to keep up a hot fire on the head of the French sap, and to replace one disabled gun by another upon the walls.

On the 4th of March the besiegers had lodged themselves solidly in the demi-lune of the bastion of San Juan, and had commenced on the very edge of the ditch a battery for six heavy guns (24-pounders), which were to work upon the curtain between San Juan and Santiago, the place selected for the breaching. On the 5th the embrasures were completed, on the 7th the guns were got into position, on the 8th the counterscarp was blown in by a mine, and the battery began to play upon the walls at a distance of only sixty yards. Though the besieged kept up a terrible fire upon it, and killed many gunners, its effect was all that the French had desired. The ramparts began to crumble, and on the morning of the 10th there was a breach seventy feet wide in the curtain, near the bastion of Santiago, while the ditch was half filled with débris. The engineers pronounced that an assault was practicable, though another day’s fire would be desirable to finish the business. The Spanish guns on the front attacked were all silenced, but from the flanking bastions a fire was still kept up, which would obviously be very murderous to the storming columns. It was clear that it would be better to subdue it, and to batter the breach into an easier slope, before the assault should be delivered.

Soult, however, was anxious to press matters, for he had received on the 8th two pieces of news which completely changed the strategical situation. The first was that Masséna had given orders for the evacuation of Santarem and his other positions on the Tagus five days before, and had already commenced his retreat towards the north. There was no longer any chance of joining the Army of Portugal and attacking Wellington. Indeed, it was probable that the English general would find himself free to make a large detachment against the besiegers of Badajoz, and that, if the town should not fall within the next ten days, Beresford’s 15,000 men from the south bank of the Tagus would appear at Elvas or Campo Mayor, ready to attack the siege-lines in the rear. And Soult from his experiences of 1809 was quite aware that to meet an Anglo-Portuguese army would not be a business like that of the Gebora.

But this was not all. News of the most disquieting kind had just arrived from Andalusia. Victor reported from in front of Cadiz that a large expeditionary force, comprising an English division, had landed at Algesiras and Tarifa on February 25th-26th, had moved into the inland, and was evidently about to attack his siege-lines from the rear. He expressed grave doubts as to the situation. Daricau, the Governor of Seville, had even a worse report to make: the roving division of Ballasteros, which had been driven into Portugal by Gazan on January 25th, had recrossed the Spanish frontier the moment that its pursuers had retired, had invaded the Condado de Niebla, and had inflicted a severe defeat on Remond, whose small corps had been left to cover that region, on the Rio Tinto (March 2nd). Daricau reported that the Spaniards were marching on Seville, and that, after leaving a skeleton garrison of convalescents and Juramentados in the city, he was moving out with a field force of no more than 1,600 bayonets to rally Remond’s men, and fight at San Lucar la Mayor for the protection of the capital of Andalusia. Ballasteros was believed to have a considerable force, and the result was doubtful.

On the morning of the 10th of March, therefore, Soult was in no small distress concerning the fate of Daricau and Victor, whose last dispatches were now six or seven days old, and who might have suffered disasters, for all that he knew, since those dispatches were written. If modern methods of communication had existed in 1811, he would have known already that Victor had suffered a complete and bloody defeat at Barrosa on March 5th. He was therefore prepared to take great risks at Badajoz, in order to have his army free at any cost for the succour of Andalusia. Mortier was ordered to get all ready for a storm during the course of the afternoon, but meanwhile, when a few hours’ battering after dawn had somewhat improved the slope of the breach, a parlementaire was sent into Badajoz at 9 a.m. to summon Imaz to capitulate. The letter which he bore was couched in such elaborate terms of politeness, complimenting the Spaniards on their long and gallant resistance, and intimating that the most honourable terms would be granted, that the governor should have suspected that Soult was not sure of his ground. But to a man cowed in spirit and weighed down by a responsibility too great for him, such hints were useless. Imaz summoned a council of war, the regular refuge of weak commanders, and called into it a veritable crowd of councillors, not only the three generals and four brigadiers present in the city, the chief engineer, and two artillery officers, but nearly a score of lieutenant-colonels and majors commanding all the battalions represented in the garrison. Unfortunately the engineer colonel, Julian Alvo, who led off the discussion, was the most downhearted man of all: he reported that the breach was from thirty to thirty-two ells (varas) broad, and accessible, as it had an angle of forty-five to fifty degrees; that there had been great difficulty in throwing up retrenchments and inner defences behind it, because at this point the ground-level of the streets of the town was much lower than that of the ramparts. He pointed out that to garrison the whole enceinte with a minimum force would absorb 5,000 men, which would leave only 2,000 to defend the breach. ‘As to the number and morale of the troops, the regimental officers would be able to speak with better knowledge than himself.’ But he held that if the first assault were repulsed, the fall of the town would only be delayed two or three days. If there were evidence that the place might be relieved from outside within that time, it was proper to resist to the last. If not, he thought that the heroic garrison and the city ought not to be sacrificed. For they had fully done their duty, and Badajoz as a fortress was full of defects[78].

Twelve colonels and majors gave their opinions in almost the same terms as the engineer, many repeating his actual phrases, some adding that the rank and file were demoralized[79], others that they were few in number [they actually were only 1,800 less than the infantry of the besieging force]. On the other hand, the commanding artillery officer, Joaquin Caamano, set forth a very different case. ‘The enemy has not yet subdued the fire of the place; the bastions flanking the breach are intact, and have their guns in order; the breach itself has been mined, and a parapet behind it has been thrown up during the last night; in spite of the arguments of the commander of the engineers the assault ought to be resisted, or as an alternative the garrison ought to try to cut its way out by the north bank, towards Elvas or Campo Mayor.’ Caamano was supported by the vote of another artilleryman, the Portuguese João de Mello, commanding a company which Beresford had sent into the city in the preceding year[80], and two major-generals, Garcia and Mancio.

Then came the oddest part of the proceedings. The Governor gave as his opinion that ‘though an inner line of defence has not been contrived, and though very few guns still remain serviceable in the bastions of Santiago, San José, and San Juan, and though we have no succour for sustaining the assault, I think we should defend the place with valour and constancy to our last breath.’ After which he at once commenced negotiations with the French parlementaire, in direct contradiction to his own vote! Apparently he thought that thirteen votes for surrender against four for resistance among his councillors covered his ignominy. The worst part of his conduct was that he was aware that an army of succour was on the march to help him. For Badajoz had semaphore communication with Elvas, and on the preceding day the Portuguese General Leite had telegraphed to him, by Wellington’s orders, that Beresford had been detached with two divisions to hasten to his aid on March 8th[81]. As a matter of fact, Beresford’s movement into Estremadura was retarded, and his corps did not move off for some days later, but Imaz did not know this, and he was certainly guilty of concealing from his officers that prompt succour had been promised, and was actually upon its way. The whole responsibility for the surrender falls on him, because he allowed Alvo, and the other voters for capitulation, to produce uncontradicted the statement that no relief was probable, while he knew himself that it had been promised. It is impossible to deny that this was pusillanimity reaching into and over the border of treason.

After making some foolish hagglings for eighteenth-century ceremonial of honour—the garrison was to march out by the breach, drums beating, with two cannons at its head, with lighted matches, &c.—Imaz surrendered at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and the lofty San Cristobal and the bridge-head fort were occupied by the French before dusk. Next day the troops came forth, not by the breach, because it was found impossible to scramble down it, but by the Trinidad gate, and laid down their arms[82]. They numbered 7,880 men, and there were 1,100 sick and wounded in the hospitals; the total loss in the town during the siege had been 1,851 casualties, almost the same as that of the French, which came to just under 2,000. But the 800 killed and wounded, and 4,000 prisoners of the Gebora must, of course, be added to the balance.

Badajoz was found by the victors to contain rations for 8,000 men sufficient to last for over a month, more than 150 serviceable cannon, 80,000 lb. of powder, 300,000 infantry cartridges, and two bridge equipages. There is not the slightest doubt that if Menacho had lived the place would have held out till it was relieved by Beresford. For the latter, who was finally ordered to move to its relief on March 12th, would have reached its neighbourhood on the 18th, if he had not been checked on the first day of his start by the news that the city had fallen[83]. After the need for hurry had been removed by this disheartening intelligence, he moved slowly, but was in front of Campo Mayor, less than ten miles from Badajoz, on the 24th.

There is hardly ever an excuse for a governor who surrenders without having withstood at least one assault, and Napoleon laid down the general rule that any officer so doing should be sent before a court martial. Imaz with his large garrison, his immense artillery resources, and his certainty of being relieved in ten days was least of all men in a condition to plead justification. It is only necessary to compare him with Alvarez at Gerona, who with a smaller garrison and a far weaker fortress held out for three months, after not one but three large breaches had been made in his weak mediaeval enceinte. The Regency very properly ordered Imaz to be put on his trial, but the proceedings, which only commenced when the French liberated him, dragged on interminably, and had not come to an end when the war ceased in 1814. If ever there was a case where an example in the style of Admiral Byng, pour encourager les autres, could have been rightfully made, this was one.

Soult, relieved from desperate anxiety by Imaz’s surrender, had no other thought than to return as quickly as possible to Andalusia. Leaving Mortier at Badajoz with sixteen battalions and five regiments of cavalry, about 11,000 men, he started back for Seville on the third day after the capitulation, taking with him two regiments of dragoons and the bulk of Gazan’s division[84]. As he marched he was in fear that any hour might bring the news that Daricau had lost Seville, or that Victor had been forced to abandon the siege of Cadiz, for the report of the bloody defeat of Barrosa (March 5) had reached him on the 12th of March, and heightened his anxiety. But he reached Seville on March 20th, to find that the situation might yet be saved, and that Andalusia was still his own.

His achievements during the two months of his Estremaduran campaign had indeed been splendid. With an army not exceeding 20,000 men, and operating in the worst of weather, he had taken two fortresses, won a battle in the open field, and captured 16,000 prisoners. The Spanish Army of Estremadura, which had seemed so powerful at the commencement of his campaign, was almost exterminated, and the frontier of Portugal was laid open. Soult had redeemed his promise to make a powerful diversion in favour of Masséna, and it is hard to see how he could have done more. For he could not have moved to the Tagus before Badajoz fell, and (thanks to the courage of Menacho) that city had held out till eight days after the date on which Masséna ordered the Army of Portugal to commence its retreat to the north. Wellington’s plan of starvation had, after all, achieved its effect, and Masséna had been driven out of his position before Soult was in a position to come to his aid. Even if Masséna had stayed a little longer at Santarem, it seems hard to believe that Soult could have joined him, considering that Elvas, a place stronger than Badajoz, was in his front, and that the news from Andalusia spelt utter ruin unless he should return to save it. He must have done so, even if on March 11 the Army of Portugal had still been in its old position.

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SECTION XXIII: CHAPTER III

MASSÉNA’S LAST WEEKS AT SANTAREM
JANUARY-MARCH 1811

After the arrival of Drouet and his division of the 9th Corps at Leiria in the early days of the New Year, there was no serious movement of any part of the French or the British armies for some weeks. The weather was bad, and the troops on both sides remained in their cantonments, save such of the French as were detailed for the perpetual marauding parties up the line of the Zezere or in the southern slopes of the Serra da Estrella by which alone the army was kept alive. The ranks of Masséna’s battalions continued to grow thinner, but not at such a rate as in November and December—for the weakly men had already been weeded out by the dreadful mortality of the preceding period. Provisions had daily to be sought further and further afield, but they were not wholly exhausted. The Marshal waited anxiously for further news from Paris, and for tidings that the Army of Andalusia was coming to his aid. But after the arrival of Drouet’s column no further information got through for five weeks, for Wilson and Trant were blocking the northern roads with their militia as effectually as in the time before the 9th Corps started from Almeida.

Wellington, for his part, was waiting for his great scheme of starvation to work out to its logical end. He had, as has already been observed, somewhat underrated the time for which the French would be able to live on the resources of the country that he dominated. More than once in December and January he thought that he had detected the signs of a coming retreat, and had been disappointed[85]. The enemy still remained in his old cantonments, and nothing more than petty movements of small units had taken place. This anxious waiting was, as might have been expected, trying to Wellington’s temper. He was not shaken in his belief that he had made the right decision, but it was exasperating to see the deadlock on the Tagus continuing far beyond his expectations, and the Estremaduran campaign developing behind his back. During the long weeks of tension the strain on his mind vented itself in criticism, reasonable and unreasonable, of the authorities with whom he had to work—the British and Portuguese Governments.

The administration of Spencer Perceval had done its best to maintain the war and to support its general, under great difficulties. It had not shrunk from making financial exertions of the most unprecedented kind in order to keep up the war in Portugal. As Lord Liverpool pointed out to Wellington[86], the army in the Peninsula had cost £2,778,796 in 1808, £2,639,764 in 1809; in 1810 the sum asked for had risen to £6,061,235—more than double the total of either of the preceding years. And this did not include either ordnance stores, supplies sent out in kind, or the hire of transports, which were calculated to make out £2,000,000 more. The Government had provided these sums in face of a bitter and carping opposition on the part of the Whigs, and despite of much lukewarmness among their own followers, of whom many considered that the limit of reasonable expense had been reached. As Lord Liverpool observed, the increase of the Portuguese subsidy, and the taking into British pay of the larger half of the Portuguese army, had been ‘carried by a small and unwilling majority[87].’ The Government had driven the money bills through the House of Commons only by smart cracking of the whip of party loyalty. They had promised Wellington that his army should be increased by 14,000 men during the course of the winter, and the promise was in the course of fulfilment. Many regiments had already arrived; all were to reach the Tagus before March was out. This had been done in a time of dire distress to the Tory party, George III had been prostrated by his last attack of insanity, which was destined to be permanent, in October 1810. As it became certain that his recovery was not to be looked for, the appointment of the Prince of Wales as Regent was the obvious and necessary corollary. But the Prince was still reckoned a Whig, and it was believed with reason that his first act on coming into power would be to dismiss the Perceval Ministry, and to call upon Grey, Grenville, and Sheridan to form an administration. The Tories all through the winter thought that they were destined to immediate expulsion from office, and had before them a long strife with the Crown. It was only at the beginning of February 1811 that the younger George, who had taken the oath as Regent on the 6th of that month, announced, to the general surprise of the nation, that he had no intention of dismissing the Ministry, and was prepared to work with them. Perceval and Liverpool, during the three preceding months, were doing their best for the army in Portugal while they believed that a political disaster was hanging over their heads. They did not yet realize that the Prince’s Whig principles had worn thin of late, and that he was tired of the dictatorial manners which Grey and Grenville had adopted towards him.

It is terrible to contemplate the results which might have followed had the Whigs come into office at this juncture. They were pledged to the theory that the Peninsular War was hopeless and ought to be abandoned. Grey and Grenville had stated that Wellington was a failure; they had denied that Talavera was a victory. Brougham had summarized the feelings of the party in a savage attack upon both Government and general in the Edinburgh Review. At this very moment—February 1811—Ponsonby, the leader of the opposition in the House of Commons, was preaching that ‘France cannot be prevented from overrunning Spain by continuing a war in Portugal, ... so that neither in Spain or Portugal has anything happened that can give reason to believe that the war will ever terminate to our advantage[88].’ Freemantle, another leader, maintained that ‘Bonaparte, having conquered the rest of the Continent, must also conquer the Peninsula, because he has greater numbers to bring up after every defeat, and therefore defeat of one of his armies was vain[89].’ Every Whig journal was prophesying the expulsion of Wellington from Portugal within a few weeks, as indeed they had been doing ever since October 1809.

All honour, therefore, is due to the statesmen who continued in the midst of all their own troubles, constitutional and financial, to give a steady support to Wellington, and to redeem the pledges which they had made to him. When Napier in his great history declares that the Ministry betrayed Wellington, that ‘Perceval had neither the wisdom to support nor the manliness to put an end to the war in the Peninsula; his crooked contemptible policy was shown by withholding what was necessary to continue the contest and throwing upon the General the responsibility of failure,’ he is merely venting the malignant folly of the Whigs of his day, which ought to have been forgotten by the time that he took his pen in hand, long after the war was over.

It is unfortunately true that Wellington, in the stress of waiting hours during the winter of 1810-11, used querulous and captious language concerning his supporters at home. The main point of his complaint was that he was not supplied rapidly enough with specie, that bills were sent him when he wanted dollars or guineas, and that so the pay of the army was falling into arrears. The fact was deplorable; but on a consideration of the condition of the English monetary system at this date it is hard to see how the difficulty could have been avoided. Since the suspension of the coinage of guineas in 1797, and the introduction of an almost unlimited issue of bank-notes, gold had gradually become an almost invisible commodity in Great Britain[90]. The guinea, when seen, commanded an ever-increasing premium; by 1809 it was worth £1 5s., or more, in paper. British silver was equally deficient; there had been none coined at the Mint since 1787, and the internal trade of the country was being transacted with difficulty, by means of Spanish dollars or half-dollars stamped with the king’s head, or by local tokens struck by banks and corporations, which only served in the immediate neighbourhood of their place of issue[91]. The Bank of England dollar, the only coin which circulated generally, passed for 5s., though it had only the value of 4s. 2d. in its weight of silver. When Great Britain could find no specie for its own internal business, the Government was required to send enormous remittances in cash to the Peninsula, because all transactions therein were made in silver or gold, and English paper was not negotiable[92]. That the coin was sent at all seems marvellous, rather than that it was sent late and in insufficient quantities. The worst time of all was in the early spring of 1811, when there was a severe commercial crisis at home, and the Government was issuing exchequer bills, to the amount of £6,000,000, as an advance to merchants and manufacturers to stave off general bankruptcy in London[93].

It was certainly an unhappy thing that Wellington could look upon the whole situation as one in which ‘the Government chooses to undertake large services, and not to supply us with sufficient pecuniary means[94],’ and could write that the present ministers complained so much of the expense of the war, that he considered it not impossible that the army might be recalled bag and baggage—a remark made not in February but in March, when Masséna had actually retreated from the Tagus[95]. This rather unjustifiable complaint was probably the direct result of Lord Liverpool’s letter of February 20, in which he had set forth at length the enormous burden of the war, and expressed his doubts as to whether the augmentation of the Peninsular army by 14,000 men, for which he had just provided, could be permanently kept up[96]. He suggested that when the ‘present crisis’ (i. e. Masséna’s presence at the gates of Lisbon) had come to an end, the army should send home some of its less effective regiments, and that the ideal of 30,000 effective rank and file (not including the garrison of Cadiz) would probably have to be kept in mind. But long before the dispatch of February 20 Wellington thought that he had detected an intention on Liverpool’s part to bring the whole Peninsular War to an end, on financial grounds, and wrote most bitterly to his kinsman Pole, accusing the Secretary of State of being half-hearted, and showing a deep-rooted distrust of his influence in the Cabinet[97]. All this was forgotten when the firmness of the Ministry in support of the war became evident, and in later years Wellington wrote to acknowledge in the most handsome style the support that he had received from the Perceval administration[98].

During all these weeks of waiting Wellington was also troubled by problems with regard to the internal state of Portugal. Two main sources of worry can be traced in his correspondence. The first was the inefficiency of the Portuguese commissariat, which bid fair to cause absolute starvation among those brigades of the national army which were not incorporated with British divisions and supplied from the British stores. Slow and irregular forwarding of provisions to the corps stationed in advanced or remote positions led to a dreadful increase in the number of sick. We find Wellington complaining that regiments which had 1,200 men in line at Bussaco could only show 1,000 or 900 under arms in February, although they had received considerable drafts from their dépôts at midwinter. D’Urban’s daily notes bear out the statements of the Commander-in-Chief. He asserts with indignation that by ‘the villany of commissaries,’ the same quantity of flour which provided 15½ rations for the British soldier was returned as having given only 9 to the Portuguese—the balance having been embezzled. Allowances, of course, must be made for the difficulties of a government of whose territory a good third had been depopulated by the orders of Wellington. But the trouble does not seem to have been so much the actual want of food-stuffs at head quarters[99]—great quantities were got from the Alemtejo and the north—as the inefficiency of distribution, which left outlying brigades sometimes foodless for two or three days at a time. Clothing and shoes were also very slow in arriving at the front. At the bottom the cause of all this inefficiency was probably (as Wellington observes in one letter[100]) the want of money to keep up an adequate transport service, and it might be pleaded that in the distressful condition of the country the deficit was no fault of the government, but unavoidable. Wellington’s view was that with greater economy in civil expenses, and more careful supervision of commissaries and contractors, there was money enough to pay for all necessary military objects. He was probably right, but there is small wonder if a provisional government like the Regency found it hard to introduce administrative reforms in the midst of a crisis, and with the enemy almost at the gates of the capital. After all, the effort which Portugal had made was splendid, and the whole nation had accepted the awful necessity of the depopulation of its central provinces with a loyalty that was surprising, if we consider the magnitude of the sacrifice.

There was, however, a small minority of traitors still left in Portugal, and their intrigues seem to have given Wellington much concern, not because there was any danger from their personal action, but because they conveyed to Masséna the intelligence as to the condition of affairs in Lisbon, and in Europe at large, which he could not obtain in any other way, owing to the strict blockade kept up around his rear. On the last day of the old year four officers, two colonels and two majors, had fled out of Lisbon and joined the French[101]. They were all men who had quarrelled with Beresford, and deserted in revenge: but that four field officers could turn traitors at once was a most distressing sign. Wellington had fears of a general plot against the English, and was inclined to suspect the Bishop of Oporto and President Sousa of knowing more about it than befitted members of the Regency. He was apparently mistaken, though their petulance and intermittent protests against all his actions seemed to him to justify any doubts. But minor persons in Lisbon, old friends of Alorna and his Francophil policy, had contrived to open up communication with the renegade General Pamplona, and to send him newspapers, reports of the movement of troops, and other miscellaneous information, using as their intermediaries smugglers, who passed the lines at night to sell coffee, sugar, and other luxuries to the French[102]. For there was a ready market for such things in the army of Masséna. Fortunately this illicit correspondence was of little importance, since there was no solid party in Portugal in favour of Napoleon, and the information conveyed by newspapers as to affairs in Lisbon was not, at this time, at all encouraging to the French; while that as to events in England or remote parts of Spain was too old in date to be of any great profit to them.

Meanwhile Wellington regarded his position as secure for the moment. The Army of Portugal, even after Drouet’s arrival, was too weak to attack him. Soult’s movement from Andalusia at first caused him some uneasiness, for he had conceived a notion that the expedition from Andalusia, leaving Badajoz and Elvas on its left, and ignoring the Spanish Army of Estremadura, might be intending to march by Merida and Truxillo to Almaraz, and from thence to join Masséna by the circuitous route through Coria and Castello Branco[103]. He was reassured as to this possibility when the news came that Soult, unable to undertake anything bold so long as Gazan had not joined him, had sat down to besiege Olivenza on January 11th. If the Marshal intended to take all the Estremaduran fortresses before moving on, occupation could be found for him for many a week, and when La Romana’s two divisions had been sent to join Mendizabal on January 22, Wellington imagined that he might regard the situation on this side as secure. It will be remembered that he gave Mendizabal elaborate advice as to the course that he was to pursue, and he was justified in believing that if that advice was followed Badajoz would never fall, and Soult for the moment would become an almost negligible quantity.

There was always the chance, however, that Soult might turn against the Alemtejo after all, and that Masséna might make a desperate effort to cross the Tagus and join him. Hence Wellington spent much thought in devising means to prevent this danger from coming into being. Beresford received elaborate orders as to the conduct that he was to pursue, with his corps south of the Tagus, in case Masséna attempted a passage, or Soult appeared before Elvas. In the latter case the French would be fought by an army composed of Mendizabal’s Estremadurans, Beresford’s corps, and the brigade of Portuguese line troops in Elvas, a mass of over 30,000 men. This force ought to suffice, but if the worst came, and a defeat were suffered, the army south of the Tagus would try to defend first the passages of the Zatas river (or the Benevente river as Wellington usually calls it), then those of the Almansor, and lastly the line across the neck of the Setubal peninsula, opposite Lisbon, where there was a short front of ten miles from Setubal itself (which was fortified) past the castle of Palmella to Moita on the Tagus estuary. But behind this again was the strongest defensive position of all, a Lines of Torres Vedras on a small scale[104]. The works erected here were an afterthought: they had formed no part of the original scheme for the fortification of Lisbon, but when it had been proved to Wellington that batteries on the Heights of Almada, beyond the broad Tagus mouth, might incommode the shipping in the harbour, and possibly the town itself [the range was 2,300 yards], he had ordered, early in December, that the Portuguese labourers set free from work on the old lines by Masséna’s departure should be transferred to the Almada front[105]. Here a line of 8,000 yards from sea to sea was marked out, and strengthened with no less than seventeen closed redoubts, connected by a covered way. Eighty-six guns were allotted to them, and their defence was to be given over to the marines of the fleet, and the local militia and trained Ordenança (Atiradores nacionaes) of Lisbon. It was calculated that Beresford would find a garrison of 7,500 men already placed in these forts if he were ever forced back on to them. It seemed impossible that such a short front, so strongly held, could ever be broken through.

But all this was a precaution designed to face a very unlikely—if a possible—situation of affairs. It was much more probable that Masséna would try to pass the Tagus higher up, than that Soult would fight his way to its mouth across the Alemtejo, and every precaution was taken to give Masséna a hot reception if he should make the attempt. It was clear that his starting-point for such an enterprise must be Punhete and the mouth of the Zezere, for there were collected the ninety boats and the materials for the floating bridges which had been created by the energy of General Eblé. At Santarem, the other place where Masséna had boats, the stock of them was known to be too small for a passage in force. Beresford, it will be remembered, had already established batteries which commanded the mouth of the Zezere, and had several times stopped small explorations by the French boats. Only on one occasion did a few succeed in running past down-stream. On the whole it was considered unlikely that Masséna would attempt such a serious matter as the crossing of the Tagus opposite Punhete. D’Urban, Beresford’s chief of the staff, reported ‘It is altogether improbable that he will commit himself, unless in combination with the army arriving from the south. The stream is very rapid. The boats cannot return to the original point of embarkation for a second load of men, nor to the second point for a third load, but must cross at each time to a point lower down, owing to the current. This must and will occasion great disunion and scattering among the parts of the division who first pass, all the more because they will be vigorously opposed from the beginning. It appears to me that no attempt of the kind can succeed. The Zezere-mouth alone is their place d’armes, and leaves little else for us to watch: hence arises for them a difficulty of accomplishing this enterprise that would appear almost unsurmountable.’[106] It is most interesting to compare this judgement from the English side with the discussion of the problem by the French generals, which followed a few days later, and with which we shall presently have to deal[107].

Meanwhile both parties were decidedly nervous as to the possible movements of their adversaries. If Wellington sometimes thought that Masséna might make an attempt to cross the Tagus, Masséna was very reasonably suspicious that Wellington might make a surprise-attack upon Junot’s corps along the upper Rio Mayor, and try to cut it off, before it could be succoured by Ney from Thomar and Golegão. This suspicion led to the only skirmish that marked the month of January. On the 19th the Marshal ordered Junot to make a reconnaissance in force beyond the river, along the Alcoentre road, to see whether a rumour that an English division had been brought up behind Pack’s Portuguese outposts were true. The Duke of Abrantes conducted the affair himself, at the head of 3,000 infantry of Clausel’s division and 500 horse. He pressed in the cavalry screen in front of Pack, consisting of a squadron of the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion, and occupied the village of Rio Mayor, from which he drove out two Portuguese companies. Discovering nothing in reserve save Pack’s brigade, drawn up for resistance on the heights to the rear, and noting no red-coated battalions, the French withdrew after a little skirmishing, and returned to their lines. During this trifling affair Junot received a painful but not dangerous wound from the carbine of a hussar vedette. The ball struck him on the side of the nose, broke the bone there, and lodged in his cheek; but it was extracted with no difficulty, and he was able to resume command of his corps within a few days[108]. Nothing further occurred on this front till February 10, when the English cavalry paid a return visit to the French outlying picket east of the Rio Mayor, drove it in, and retired with an officer and ten men prisoners.

On February 5th the third and final period of Masséna’s stay on the Tagus may be said to have begun, with the arrival of the last orders from Paris which he was destined to receive. He had been more than a month without any official intelligence of what was going on behind him, the latest dispatches to hand having been those brought by Drouet at the end of the old year. But General Foy now appeared with the orders which the Emperor had issued on December 22nd. He had cut his way from Ciudad Rodrigo across the eastern mountains, and along the Estrada Nova, at the head of a column of 1,800 men, mostly composed of drafts belonging to the 2nd Corps, which he had found waiting on the Spanish frontier. The rains had been continuous, the badness of the road was notorious, and Colonel Grant with a small party of local Ordenança hung about the route of the column for the last five days of its march, and slew or captured more than a hundred stragglers. The total loss by fatigue and sickness was much greater[109].

The orders brought by Foy were not particularly comforting to Masséna. He was bidden to hold on to his position till he had received succour from the Army of the South, and also from the Army of the Centre. Mortier’s corps, as he had already been assured, would at some not-distant date make its appearance on the Tagus, in the direction of Montalvão and Villaflor. A column from the Army of the Centre was to advance to Plasencia, and communicate with the Marshal via Coria and Castello Branco. He was not expected to take the offensive till he should have received these reinforcements, but he must use Drouet’s troops to keep open communications with Almeida, and ‘regularize’ the war. There was no order for him to cross the Tagus into the Alemtejo in search of Mortier: it was Mortier who was to come to him. Practically all this amounted to a command to wait and endure—the initiative was to come from outside, with the arrival of reinforcements from the south and east. ‘L’empereur appelait son armée à une lutte de fatigue et de persévérance,’ as Foy commented.

But this ‘strife of toil and perseverance’ had already been going on since November, the dispatch was forty-four days old when it reached Masséna, and the co-operation by the Armies of the South and Centre, which it promised, showed no signs of coming to pass. As a matter of fact, when Foy arrived, Mortier’s divisions were absorbed in the siege of Badajoz, and Soult, with Mendizabal upon his hands, could have moved neither a detachment nor the whole 5th Corps to the Tagus. The promised assistance from the Army of the Centre, a mere column of 3,000 men under Lahoussaye, had advanced first to Truxillo and then to Plasencia, as was promised, but had turned back for want of provisions long before reaching the Portuguese frontier. Masséna pushed several reconnaissances towards the upper Tagus, in the hope of getting information as to the appearance of friendly troops on either side of the river, but could learn nothing. He says that he judged from the tranquillity shown by the English south of the Tagus that there could be no French force near enough to cause them disquietude. Meanwhile the power of the Army of Portugal to live by plundering the country-side was being reduced every day. The distance at which food had to be sought was ever increasing, and the loss suffered by the parties which were cut off while raiding was growing daily more serious. The number of prisoners taken by the British cavalry on Junot’s flank and Drouet’s front amounted to several hundreds in January and February[110]. Many more were destroyed by the Ordenança, who were goaded to ferocious activity by the ever-growing cruelty of the marauders, and dogged every expedition that set out with an ever-increasing skill. They avoided the main bodies, but trapped and shot small parties that strayed more than a few hundred yards from the column, with patient persistence.

After waiting for a fortnight after the arrival of Foy and the imperial dispatches, and learning nothing of any approach of the long-promised troops of Mortier, Masséna assembled the corps leaders and certain other generals at Golegão on February 19th, at a meeting which he carefully refrained from calling a council of war. That he should do so was in itself a sign of flagging confidence; he had shown himself very autocratic hitherto, and had asked the advice of none of his lieutenants. Now he regarded the situation as so desperate that he thought that he must either give up the game and retreat from the Tagus, or risk an attack on the allied forces south of that river, with the object of crossing into the Alemtejo and going off to join Soult. His own mind was practically made up in favour of the former alternative; but he knew that if he took it without consulting his lieutenants, they would probably report him to the Emperor as having despaired before all was lost. The council of war was really called for the purpose of arguing them down, and committing them to the policy of retreat[111], so that they should not be able to protest against it at a later date.

The three corps-commanders came to the meeting each with a scheme of his own to develop. Ney proposed to pass the Tagus by force, with the whole army, to abandon Portugal for the moment, and to join Soult. The united armies should establish themselves on the Guadiana, complete the conquest of Estremadura, and then, after calling in all possible reinforcements, take in hand the invasion of the Alemtejo, and an attack on Lisbon from the south. Junot hotly combated this scheme: to pass into the Alemtejo meant the surrender of all Portugal to Wellington, who would chase the 9th Corps out of the Beira; it would be ‘giving up the whole game.’ He wished to establish a bridge-head on the other side of the Tagus, but not to send the whole army across, merely to occupy it with a strong detachment, and then to wait for Mortier’s promised appearance. Reynier’s scheme was a variant of Junot’s, but infinitely more dangerous, for he was a general of second-rate capacity. He would throw one corps across the Tagus, to scour the Alemtejo for provisions, and to try to find Mortier. The other two should hold on at Santarem, in the entrenched positions which had already checked Wellington for three months. The English general, he said, was timid, and would never dare to assault these formidable works, even in the absence of one-third of the army.

Masséna had no difficulty in demolishing this last proposal. The passage of the Tagus would be a dangerous and difficult operation in face of an enemy who was upon the alert, who had fortified all the obvious landing-places on the opposite bank, and who was known to have established a perfect system of signals and communications. It might very probably end in a bloody repulse. But granting that it succeeded, and that a corps of 15,000 men got over into the Alemtejo, victory would have consequences more disastrous than failure. For Wellington would fall upon the two corps left north of the Tagus with his main force, perhaps 60,000 men; and when separated from the troops detached in the Alemtejo the Army of Portugal would have only 30,000 in line. ‘N’est-il pas à craindre que cette portion de l’armée, séparée de l’autre, ne soit attaquée, battue, détruite, par un ennemi à qui, pour nous faire beaucoup de mal, il ne manque que de le vouloir?’ This was absolutely irrefutable logic; nothing could be more insane than Reynier’s proposal to separate the French army into two parts by the broad stream of the Tagus. Wellington could have destroyed with ease the two-thirds of it left north of the river, unless that portion should be ready to evacuate all else that it held and shut itself up to be besieged in Santarem—the only possible centre of resistance. But to be shut up in Santarem meant starvation on a worse scale than had been hitherto endured. For the army, losing its old broad foraging-ground, would be compelled to live entirely upon what might be sent it from the northern Alemtejo by the detached corps; and that region was known to be barren and thinly peopled, and had probably already been stripped of its resources by Wellington’s orders. (As a matter of fact such orders had been issued some time back.) ‘Faut-il pour un intérêt si modique que celui de manger un mois dans l’Alemtejo risquer une pareille opération?’ asked the Marshal. And any dispassionate judge must decide that his question could only be answered in the negative. Ney’s proposal, to take the whole army across the Tagus into the Alemtejo, was not quite so easy to dispose of. But there stood against its first necessary preliminary—the passage of the river—the same objections that were registered against Reynier’s plan. The passage might end in a repulse, and the position of the army would be very bad if, having concentrated at Punhete (or at Santarem) for the crossing, it found itself encircled by all Wellington’s forces, which would march in upon it the moment that Ney’s and Junot’s corps were withdrawn from their present cantonments. The Marshal disliked the idea of having to fight a battle, with the Tagus at his back, and all his possible lines of retreat intercepted[112]. Or again, the crossing might succeed, so far as the throwing of a vanguard across to the Alemtejo bank went. But Wellington would close in upon the army while it was actually passing, and might easily destroy its rearguard, or even its larger half, by attacking when the rest was across the water, and unable to return with sufficient promptness.

If the army were so lucky as to get off entire into the barren Alemtejo, and to unite with the 5th Corps on the Guadiana, Wellington, as Junot had pointed out, would have a free hand in northern and central Portugal, and would sweep Claparéde out of it, while he need not be seriously alarmed at any attack on Lisbon from the south of the Tagus, for the city was covered by the Almada lines[113] and could not be harassed from this quarter. Meanwhile the Army of Portugal would be cut off from all the supplies and reinforcements which were accumulating for it on the frontier of Spain, at Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca; ‘it would be going off to a distance from its real line of operations and of communications.’

Masséna then came to the point: having argued down the schemes of Reynier and Ney, he developed his own determination, which was to hold on for the few days more that seemed possible. The marauding operations that fed the army were rapidly growing less productive, and the moment was approaching when the daily plunder would no longer meet the daily consumption, and then, in case the long-expected Soult did not appear, the army must retire on to the line of the Mondego[114]. There, in a country comparatively undamaged, Masséna hoped to hold out some fifty or sixty days at the least: the whole 9th Corps would be available for opening and maintaining the communications with Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo, and reinforcements and stores would easily be brought forward[115]. But no further offensive movements could be contemplated; the army was exhausted and needed a long rest; in the end it would probably have to retire within the borders of Spain—perhaps to Alcantara on the Tagus, perhaps into Leon.

Ney and Reynier seem to have retired from the conference rather talked down than convinced, and the latter sent in to his Commander-in-Chief a sort of protest, taking the form of a précis of the meeting, in which the arguments used and the result arrived at were so misrepresented that Masséna caused a formal document to be drawn up and signed by five other generals present at the council, in which it was declared that the précis was wholly incorrect. Apparently Reynier had intended to get his protest to the Emperor’s hands, in order to free himself from any responsibility in approving a retreat which he thought that his master would condemn[116].

The few weeks for which the Army of Portugal retained its position after the conference at Golegão, were spent by all its units as a mere period of preparation for the retreat, for the generals had long made up their minds that Soult would never appear on the Tagus. They seem even to have thought that he might have retired from Estremadura, for the distant thunder of the bombardment of Badajoz, which had been audible at Punhete during the first half of February, seemed to have ceased. This must have been due to some change of atmospheric conditions, for it was going on with redoubled energy in the last days of the month. But Masséna and his lieutenants argued that either the siege had been raised, or else Soult had taken the place, and yet was not marching to the Tagus. They seem to have regarded his doings as a negligible quantity, when coming to their final resolve.

During the last days of February all the corps received preliminary orders, which could have no other meaning than that a retreat had been decided upon. The divisions were ordered to send their parks and heavy baggage to the rear, and the divisional batteries were told to complete as many gun-teams with good serviceable horses as was possible, by destroying caissons, and drafting their animals on to the guns. In some cases batteries had to be reduced to three or four pieces, even when half the caissons had been burnt. The 8th Corps destroyed fifty-one caissons on the 24th-27th February, yet still could find only four horses each for those remaining, including animals that were sick or barely fit for service[117]. But the transport of food was even more important than that of artillery material; in the central magazines there was gathered together some fifteen days’ of biscuit for the whole army, the flour for which had been procured with the greatest difficulty in small quantities, and had been hoarded to the last. This was issued to the regiments, with stringent orders not to use it till the actual retreat began. Some units were so pressed by starvation that they began to consume it, and ultimately started with only eight or ten days consumption in their packs or on their waggons. The whole of the transport was in a deplorable state; if the cavalry and artillery had lost 5,088 horses since November, the train had been depleted of draught-beasts in a still greater proportion, since they were both weaker to start with, and less carefully kept. Some regiments had no longer any horses attached to them, and could only show a few pack-mules and asses, quite insufficient for carrying their reserve ammunition and food[118]. Two things were certain—the one that if the army could not pick up provisions on the way by marauding, it would ultimately have to retire to its base within the frontiers of Spain. And no food could be collected for some days, since the first five stages of the retreat would be through a region already stripped bare. The second was that the ammunition might suffice for one general engagement, supposing that there was heavy fighting during the retreat, but that it would hardly be able to serve for two.

On March 3rd Masséna issued the orders which marked his determination to retreat at once. Ney was directed to march on the next day from Thomar, with Marchand’s division and some cavalry, and join Drouet at Leiria in the rear—they were ultimately to be the covering force of the retiring army. On the 5th Reynier was directed to send back his first division (Merle) from Santarem towards the rear, while the second division (Heudelet) continued to hold the old lines. On this same day Ney’s second division (Mermet) evacuated Torres Novas, and marched northward to Ourem near Leiria, while one of Junot’s divisions (Solignac) massed itself at Pernes, to await the arrival of the other (Clausel), which was to hold the outposts till the last moment. This was the critical day of the concentration, for of the eight divisions forming the Army of Portugal five had started off, leaving three (Heudelet at Santarem, Clausel on the Rio Mayor, Loison at Punhete) to hold the old positions. If Wellington had attacked in force on the 5th, it seems certain that he must have destroyed these covering forces, which in their scattered position could not possibly have held their ground. But the British general, as we shall see, was engaged in a scheme of his own, and did not at first detect the full meaning of the French movements.

For Wellington at this moment was busy in developing an encircling attack on the whole of the French positions, and it was not yet ready[119]. On February 23rd he had made up his mind to strike the moment that a large body of reinforcements, already overdue from England and the Mediterranean, should have arrived. The plan was that the main army, while holding Reynier in check at Santarem with one or two divisions, should attack Junot on the Rio Mayor with the bulk of its force. At the same time Beresford, drawing his corps to the north of the Tagus by the boat-bridge at Abrantes, was to fall upon Loison at Punhete, and (as it was hoped) thus distract Ney, whose duty would be divided between the succouring of Junot and that of the division on the Zezere. But, even if he turned most of the reserves in the direction of the Rio Mayor, the long distance would prevent them from arriving in time. Junot would almost certainly be overwhelmed by superior numbers, while Reynier was being ‘contained,’ and while Ney’s columns were still far off.

Preparations and reconnaissances in view of this great attack began to be made, but the reinforcements were slow to arrive. Six thousand men were due, mainly the troops which afterwards formed the 7th Division and the second British brigade of the 6th. But on March 1 only the Chasseurs Britanniques from Cadiz, and half of the 51st had yet landed[120]. Of the other expected regiments the bulk turned up in Lisbon harbour on the 4th-6th March, viz. the 2nd, 85th, 1/36th, 2/52nd, but the light infantry brigade of the King’s German Legion did not come in till the 21st of the same month. It was undoubtedly the accidental delay of a few days in the arrival of these seven battalions that caused Wellington to hold back; if Masséna had postponed his move for a week more, all would have been in line save the two belated German battalions, and the attack would have been delivered about the 10th-12th of March.

Set on the carrying out of his own plan, which could not begin to work for a few days more, Wellington was evidently not fully prepared for the suddenness of Masséna’s retreat. On the 4th of March, the day when Ney’s corps began to file to the rear, he wrote to Beresford, ‘I think it likely that the enemy is about some move, but have been so frequently disappointed that it is impossible to be certain. There is no alteration whatever in their front.’ This was true, for Junot and Reynier had not moved on a man upon the 4th. On the next—the critical—day he himself made a survey of Reynier’s lines in front of Santarem, found them still manned by Heudelet’s division, but thought that he could detect that the artillery in the French works was less numerous than on the previous day. There were no howitzers in the great work across the high road, but only what appeared to be pieces of small calibre. He could not perceive guns any longer upon the main heights in front of Santarem; bushes seemed to have been laid to cover the stations which they had occupied. But the outposts were the same, and he did not observe any other change on the heights, excepting that all the troops visible upon them were fully accoutred. He concluded that no general movement of Reynier’s corps had taken place. ‘It is probable that baggage and heavy artillery may have been sent off, but the effective part of the army still remains in position.’ There was no obvious alteration visible along Junot’s front, where Clausel was that day holding all the outposts, Solignac having marched back to Pernes.

If Wellington had attacked at once that day, with the troops that were up in his front line, the Light Division and the 1st Division, in front of Santarem, while demonstrating with Pack’s Portuguese and the cavalry brigades along the Rio Mayor to detain Clausel, it is probable that he might have made great havoc of Heudelet’s division, which was holding a front too long for its strength, and had no supports, since the rest of the 2nd Corps was a march to the rear by now. But he was still thinking of his own plan; the fleet, with the bulk of the expected battalions, was reported at the mouth of the Tagus, and one regiment had actually landed. Wherefore he wrote to Beresford, ‘the reinforcements have arrived, and we shall be able in a few days to attack the enemy, if he retains this position, or possibly to attack him in any other which he may take up.’ Meanwhile the rear divisions of the army were ordered to close in; on the evening of March 5th Cole (4th Division) was brought up to Cartaxo, while Campbell (6th Division) moved out from the old lines to Azambuja, which Cole had left. The 3rd Division was ordered up from Alcoentre to join Pack’s Portuguese on the Rio Mayor. Beresford was directed to bring the 2nd Division across the Tagus at Abrantes, and to attack the French on the Zezere (Loison’s division) the moment that he saw any signs of their being about to move off[121].

But all this was too late: the only chance of destroying Masséna’s rearguard would have been to have attacked on the morning of the 5th with the troops that were already on the spot. And this Wellington would not do, because he thought that Reynier and Junot were still in position ‘with the effective part of the army.’ On the following morning it was too late: Heudelet had evacuated Santarem, and Clausel the line of the Rio Mayor, after dusk; and each having made a long night-march, the one was at Ponte de Almonda near Golegão, the other near Torres Novas, before noon on the 6th. Heudelet had blown up the bridge of Alviella, Clausel that of Pernes, to detain the pursuers. The enemy had gained a full march upon the British in this direction. On the other flank Beresford brought the 2nd Division over the Tagus on the 6th, but finding that Loison had made no movement had not attacked him, his orders being to fall on only when he saw the enemy break up from his positions.

On the early morning of the same day Wellington had found that Santarem was empty and occupied it. The Light Division and Pack were sent in pursuit of Junot, and reached Pernes: the 1st Division followed Reynier, and had the head of its column at the broken bridge of the Alviella by the afternoon. The 4th and 6th Divisions, coming up from the rear, entered Santarem, while the 3rd Division reached the line of the Rio Mayor and followed the Light Division. The 5th Division and Campbell’s Portuguese were still far to the rear. On this day Wellington made up his mind, from the signs before him, that Masséna was in full march for Coimbra and the north, and did not intend to fight a battle[122]. The only puzzling sign was that Loison’s division still remained stationary on the Zezere. Was it even now possible that the other corps were going to join him for an attack on Abrantes, an attempt to cross the Tagus near it, or a retreat into Spain via the Castello Branco road? This was not likely: for if such had been Masséna’s plan, Ney would have arrived to join Loison already, and they would have commenced their movement beyond the Zezere. Wellington, however, did not feel quite certain as to what was the French scheme till Loison burnt his boats and bridges on the night of the 6th-7th, and moved off towards Thomar, in the same direction as the rest of the French army. It is clear that if Beresford had been ordered to fall upon Loison in force upon the afternoon of the 6th, he might have done him much harm, for there lay upon the Zezere only a single French infantry division and a cavalry brigade, while Beresford had at Abrantes, beside the garrison, an English and a Portuguese division of infantry, and as much cavalry at least as Loison possessed.

On the 7th Ney and Drouet were halted at Leiria to cover the arrival of the rest of the army. Reynier marched from Golegão to Thomar; Junot from Torres Novas to Chão de Maçans; Loison was at dawn close to Thomar, after a night march, leaving his boats and bridges blazing behind him as a beacon for Beresford’s benefit. It was clear that the French were all making for the Coimbra roads, and had no designs west of the Zezere. The English cavalry, following on the heels of both Reynier’s and Junot’s columns, informed Wellington that the enemy was apparently about to use both roads towards the Mondego, that by Leiria and Pombal, and that by Chão de Maçans and Ancião. The British general expressed some surprise at this, remarking in a letter to Beresford that the latter road was so bad that he marvelled that everything had not gone by the infinitely superior Leiria chaussée, the main road to the north[123]. Meanwhile, of his own troops Beresford had crossed the Zezere, but did not reach Thomar; Nightingale’s brigade of the 1st Division moved on from the bridge of the Alviella to Atalaya beyond Golegão, the Light Division from Pernes advanced to Arga and La Marosa on the Torres Novas-Thomar road. The 4th and 6th Divisions reached Golegão in the afternoon. But hearing of Ney’s and Drouet’s concentration at Leiria, and doubtful whether he would not find that the rest of the enemy was about to take shelter behind them, Wellington resolved not to push any more troops in the Thomar direction, but to keep a large mass upon the Santarem-Leiria-Coimbra road. The bulk of the 1st Division (all save Nightingale’s brigade) and the 3rd Division were halted at Alcanhede and Pernes, and thither too the 5th Division and the Portuguese brigades from the rear were directed. It must be confessed that this was not a very rapid or vigorous pursuit: Wellington was waiting on the enemy’s movements, rather than forcing them to take such directions as best suited himself. But it must be remembered that he had been compelled to advance ere yet his own preparations were made, four or five days before he had intended to make his great concentric attack, and two factors were against him. The first was the eternal food-problem; the divisions had marched unexpectedly, with such supplies as they had in hand; they were unable to get anything from the country, which the French had stripped bare during the last three months. The rations for them were being brought up from the rear, but if they outmarched them they must starve: hence there were reasons against hurry. The second cause of delay was that Wellington wished to have his whole army in hand, if the enemy should turn and show fight, and the divisions which had started from the Torres Vedras Lines on the first notice of Masséna’s departure on the 5th were still far to the rear, viz. the 5th and the Portuguese battalions which had once been Le Cor’s and was now under Campbell. The new 7th Division, which had just landed, had not yet commenced its march from Lisbon.

The aspect of the region through which the army was marching was piteous in the extreme. Santarem town was a wreck, ‘the houses torn and dilapidated, the streets strewn with household furniture half-burnt and destroyed, many streets quite impassable with filth and rubbish, with an occasional man, horse, or donkey rotting, and corrupting the air with pestilential vapours: a few miserable inhabitants like living skeletons[124].’ The country-side was worse—cottages burnt and unroofed, and corpses of murdered peasants, some fresh, some mere heaps of bones, lying in every ravine. The survivors were just emerging from woods or caverns to cut up the French sick and stragglers. A single quotation may suffice to give some idea of the wayside sights of this distressing march. It comes from a 3rd Division chronicler, who is describing the village of Porto de Mos, south of Leiria: ‘When we entered the place, there was a large convent fronting us, which, as well as many of the houses, had been set on fire by the French. I never before witnessed such destruction: floors torn up, beds cut in pieces, their contents thrown about intermixed with kitchen utensils, broken mirrors, china, &c. There was a large fire in the chapel, on which had been heaped broken pieces of the altar, wooden images, picture frames, and the ornamental woodwork of the organ. Searching for a clean place to put down bags of biscuit, we found a door leading to a chamber apart from the chapel. It was quite dark, so I took up a burning piece of wood to inspect it. It was full of half-consumed human bodies, some lying, others kneeling or leaning against the walls. The floor was covered with ashes, in many places still red-hot. Such an appalling sight I have never witnessed. Of those who had sunk on the floor nothing remained but bones: those who were in a kneeling or standing posture were only partially consumed. The expression of their scorched faces was horrible beyond description. In a bag lying at the upper end of the apartment was the dead body of a young child, who had been strangled: the cord used was still tight about its little neck[125].’

It was on the morning that followed his arrival at Torres Novas (March 8th) that Wellington, encouraged by the reports of his cavalry scouts, to the effect that the French were marching day and night, and showed no wish to fight, issued the orders already alluded to in a previous chapter, which bade Beresford turn back the 2nd Division, and march with it and the 4th to the relief of Badajoz[126]. The report of Menacho’s death and of the rapid advance of the French siege-works had just reached him. Beresford was to take with him Hamilton’s Portuguese division, which had not yet passed the Tagus, and De Grey’s cavalry brigade. The boat-bridge at Abrantes was floated down to Tancos near Punhete, in order to save the 2nd and 4th Divisions some miles of march in their journey to the Alemtejo. These troops turned back, and were nearing Tancos on the following day, when they received orders to halt. The French, so the advanced cavalry reported, after marching hitherto day and night, had come to a stand at Pombal, north of Leiria, where Ney, Junot, and Drouet were now all massed. Though Reynier was said to have taken another road, that by Espinhal, Wellington was not sure that Masséna did not intend to fight, and if so, he wished to have the 4th Division with him, and De Grey’s heavy dragoons. ‘In this case it is desirable,’ he writes, ‘that I should be a little stronger, and as Badajoz is not yet pressed ... I have sent to Cole to desire that his division and the dragoons march to-morrow for Cacharia. I shall then be as strong as the enemy, or very nearly.’ The 2nd Division was to halt and wait further orders. It was not till the 12th that it was let loose, and told to resume its march to the Alemtejo: Cole and De Grey were not sent back from the main army till the 16th. Meanwhile Badajoz, as we have already seen, fell by Imaz’s pusillanimity on March 10—a date too early for Beresford to have saved it, even if he had continued the march originally prescribed to him on the 8th of that month.

Before Wellington sent on their southward journey the three divisions which were to form the future Army of Estremadura, stirring events had begun to occur on the Leiria-Coimbra road, and the general course of Masséna’s retreat had already been settled.

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SECTION XXIII: CHAPTER IV

EVENTS IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN. THE BATTLE OF BARROSA.
JANUARY-MARCH 1811

In the second chapter of this volume we dealt with Soult’s expedition to Estremadura and its results, but had to defer for later consideration the events which brought him back in haste to Andalusia the moment that Badajoz had fallen (March 12th). These must now be explained.

When his 20,000 men, collected from all the three corps which formed the Army of the South, set out on the last day of the old year 1810, Soult left behind him three problems, each of which (as he was well aware) might assume a dangerous aspect at any moment. We have already indicated their character[127]. Would Victor, with 19,000 men left to him for the blockade of Cadiz, be able to hold with security the immense semicircle of lines and batteries which threatened the island stronghold of the Cortes? Would the provisional garrison which had been patched up for Seville prove strong enough to defend that capital and its arsenals against any possible attack of roving Spanish detachments, from the mountains of the west and south? Would Sebastiani and the 4th Corps be able to beat back any attempt by the Army of Murcia to trespass upon the limits of the broad and rugged province of Granada? We may add that it was conceivable that all these three problems might demand a simultaneous solution. For if all the Spanish forces had been guided by a single capable brain, nothing would have been more obvious to conceive than a plan for setting them all to work at once. If a sortie from Cadiz were taken in hand, it would have the best chance of success supposing that Sebastiani were to be distracted by an invasion of Granada, and Seville threatened by any force that could be collected in the Condado de Niebla, or the mountains above Ronda.

Soult, as Napoleon pointed out to him two months later[128], had committed a considerable fault by not putting all the divisions left behind in Andalusia under a single commander, responsible for all parts of the kingdom alike. Victor was given no authority over Sebastiani, nor even over Daricau, who had been left as governor of Seville, or Godinot, whose depleted division occupied the province of Cordova. Napoleon, always suspicious of Soult, accused him of having neglected this precaution because he was jealous of Victor, and would not make him as great as himself[129]. Whether this was so or not, it is at any rate clear that the position was made much more dangerous by the fact that each of the three problems named above would be presented to a different commander, who would be prone to think of his own troubles alone, and to neglect those of his colleagues. If all three dangers became threatening at the same moment, each general would regard his own as the most important, and bestow comparatively little care on those which menaced the others. As a matter of fact, Victor was almost destroyed, because Sebastiani did not come to his help, when the sally from Cadiz took place early in March; and Seville was in serious danger a few days later, because there was no one who could order Godinot to march to its aid from Cordova without delay.

Soult was fully aware of all the possible perils of his absence. Apparently he thought Sebastiani was in the greater danger, for he requisitioned only a few cavalry and artillery from the 4th Corps, and left it practically intact to defend the province of Granada against the Army of Murcia. As to Seville, he considered that it could only be endangered by Ballasteros, and for that reason did his best to destroy that general’s division, by causing Gazan to hunt it as far as the borders of Portugal—a diversion which nearly wrecked the Estremaduran expedition for lack of infantry[130]. When Gazan had driven Ballasteros over the Guadiana, after the action of Castillejos (January 25), the Marshal thought that the Spaniard was out of the game, and no longer in a position to do harm—in which he erred, for this irrepressible enemy was back in Andalusia within a few weeks, and was actually threatening Seville early in March.

But the greatest danger was really on the side of Cadiz, where Victor, deprived of nearly all his cavalry and one regiment of infantry for the Estremaduran expedition, had also to furnish outlying detachments—a garrison for Xeres and the column with which General Remond was operating in the Condado de Niebla, far to the west[131]. He had only 19,000 men left for the defence of the Lines, of which a considerable proportion consisted of artillery, sappers, and marine troops, needed for the siege but useless for a fight in the open, if the enemy should make a sally by sea against his rear. The Duke of Belluno was anxious, and rightly so: for the nearest possible succours were Sebastiani’s troops in Granada and Malaga, many marches away, while the garrison of Cadiz was very strong, and indeed outnumbered his own force. At the beginning of February it comprised, including the urban militia, nearly 20,000 Spanish troops; Copons had just been withdrawn from the west to join it. There was also an Anglo-Portuguese division. General Graham had been left a considerable force, even after Wellington withdrew certain regiments to join in the defence of the Lines of Torres Vedras. He had two composite battalions of the Guards, the 2/47th, 2/67th, 2/87th, a half battalion of the 2/95th, the two battalions of the 20th Portuguese, and a provisional battalion of German recruits[132], as also two squadrons of the 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion, and two field batteries. The whole amounted to between 5,000 and 6,000 men. It is curious to note that Napoleon, in the dispatch by which he spurred Soult on to his Estremaduran expedition, assured him ‘that there had never been more than three English regiments at Cadiz, and that they had all gone to Lisbon,’ so that the Isle of Leon and city were only defended by ‘ten thousand unhappy Spaniards without resolution or power to resist[133].’ When the Emperor’s directions were based upon information so utterly incorrect as this, it was hard for his generals to satisfy him!

Within a few days of the withdrawal of the detachment taken by Soult from Victor, the news came to Cadiz that the 1st Corps had been weakened: and when the destination of the expedition was known, it seemed probable that no reserves had been left at Seville on which the besieging force could count. The idea of an attack on Victor was at once broached by the Regency, and accepted by General Graham; after some discussion, it was considered best not to assail the lines by a disembarkation from the Isle of Leon, but to land as large a force as could be spared in the rear of the enemy, at Tarifa, Algesiras, or some other point of Southern Andalusia which was in the hands of the Allies. Such a movement, if properly conducted, would compel Victor to draw backward, in order to hold off the Allies from the Lines. He would have to fight at some distance inland, leaving a minimum garrison to protect his forts and batteries, and it was proposed that the fleet and the troops left in Cadiz should fall upon them during his enforced absence.

The execution of this plan was deferred for some weeks, partly because of the difficulty of providing transport by sea for a large expeditionary force, partly because Gazan was unexpectedly drawn back into Andalusia by Ballasteros’s division, and was at the end of January in a position from which he might easily have reinforced Victor. When he had gone off to Estremadura, in the wake of Soult, the problem became simpler. After drawing back Copons’s division from the Condado de Niebla to Cadiz (as has already been mentioned), the Regency found themselves able to provide 8,000 men for embarkation, while leaving 7,000 regulars and the urban militia to hold Cadiz. Graham was ready to join in, with all his troops save the battalion companies of the 2/47th and the 20th Portuguese, and the doubtfully effective German battalion, which were to remain behind, for he did not wish to withdraw the whole British force from Cadiz at once. But he procured the aid of an almost equivalent number of bayonets from an external source: he wrote to General Campbell, commanding at Gibraltar, begging him to spare reinforcements from the garrison of that fortress and of the minor stronghold of Tarifa, at the extreme southern point of Europe, which was then maintained as a sort of dependency of Gibraltar. Campbell eagerly consented to take part in the plan and promised to lend 1,000 infantry. This assistance would bring up the British contingent to 5,000 men. The Spaniards were also to collect some small reinforcements: there was an irregular force under General Beguines operating in the Ronda mountains, and basing itself on Gibraltar. It was ordered to join the expedition when it should come to land, and (as we shall see) actually did so, with a force of three battalions or 1,600 men. The total of the troops whom it was proposed to collect amounted, therefore, to 9,600 Spaniards and 5,000 British, a force almost equal in numbers to Victor’s depleted corps. But it was clear that the Marshal would have to leave some sort of a garrison in the Lines before Cadiz, and that the Allies would have a numerical superiority, if they could force on a fight at a distance from the sea and the French base.

One cardinal mistake was made in planning the expedition. Its command was to be entrusted to General Manuel La Peña, then the senior officer in Cadiz, a man with a talent for plausible talking and diplomacy, but one who had already shown himself a selfish colleague and a disloyal subordinate. This was the same man who in 1808, nearly three years back, had sacrificed his chief Castaños at the disastrous battle of Tudela[134], by refusing to march to the sound of the guns, and securing a safe retreat for himself and his 10,000 men, while the main army was being crushed, only four miles away, by Marshal Lannes. Though not personally a coward, he was a shirker of responsibilities, and incapable of a swift and heroic decision. He was ambitious enough to aspire to and intrigue for a post of importance, but collapsed when it became necessary to discharge its duties. He treated Graham in 1811 precisely as he had treated Castaños in 1808, and it was not his fault that the sally from Cadiz failed to end in a disaster[135]. The English lieutenant-general had discretionary authority from his Government to refuse to act in any joint expedition of which he was not given the command. But anxious to bring matters to a head, and deceived by La Peña’s mild plausibility, he consented to take the second place, on the ground that the Spaniard contributed the larger body of troops to the enterprise.

If Graham himself had headed the united force, it is certain that the siege of Cadiz would have been raised for the moment, though what would have followed that success no man can say, for it would have brought about such a convulsion in Andalusia, and such a concentration of the French troops, that the whole of the conditions of the war in the south would have been altered. Graham had all the qualities which La Peña lacked—indomitable resolution, swift decision, a good eye for topography, the power of inspiring enthusiastic confidence in his troops. He was no mere professional soldier, but a crusader with a mission; indeed his personal history is one of extraordinary interest. When the French Revolution broke out he was a civilian of mature years, a Whig Member of Parliament, aged forty-four, mainly known as a great sportsman[136] and a bold cross-country rider. Yet certainly if the war of 1793 had not come to pass, he would only be remembered now as the husband of that beautiful Mrs. Graham whose portrait is one of Gainsborough’s best-known masterpieces.

Driven to the Riviera in 1792 by the failing health of his wife, who died at Hyères, Graham was an eye-witness of the outbreak of violence and blind rage in France which followed Brunswick’s invasion. He himself was arrested—his wife’s coffin was torn open by a mob which insisted that he was smuggling ‘arms for aristocrats’ therein. He narrowly escaped with his life, and returned to England convinced that the French had become a nation of wild beasts, hostes humani generis. ‘I had once deprecated,’ he wrote at the time, ‘the hostile interference of Britain in the internal affairs of France, but what I have seen in my journey through that country makes me consider that war with her has become just and necessary in self-defence of our constitution[137].’ Widowed and childless, he thought it his duty to go to the front at once, despite of his forty-four years and his lack of military training. He devoted all his available funds to the raising, in his own county, of the 90th Foot, the ‘Perthshire volunteers,’ of which he became the honorary colonel. He could not take command of the corps, because he had no substantive military rank, but he could not keep at home. He went out to the Mediterranean as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave, and afterwards, being found useful owing to his gift of languages—he knew not only Italian but German, a rare accomplishment in those days—he was entrusted with a special mission to the Austrian army of Italy. He served through all the disasters of Beaulieu and Würmser, starved in Mantua, and froze in the Tyrolese Alps.

From that time onward we find him wherever there was fighting against the French to be done—in Sicily, Minorca, Malta, Egypt, Portugal. So great were his services that, contrary to all War Office rules, his honorary colonelship was changed to a regular commission on the staff, and in 1808-9 he served first as the British attaché with Castaños’s army, and later as one of Sir John Moore’s aides-de-camp. In reward for brilliant service in the Corunna campaign he was given in 1810 the command of the British force at Cadiz. And so it came about that this Whig Member of Parliament, who had commenced soldiering at forty-four (like Oliver Cromwell and Julius Caesar), was at sixty-two leading a British division in the field. He had an iron frame[138], and his spirit was as firm as his body—the crusade had to be fought out to the end, though the enemy was now the Corsican Tyrant, not the Atheist Republic against which he had first drawn his sword. It was in keeping with all his previous career that he consented to take the second place in the Tarifa expedition; to get the army started was essential—his personal position counted for nothing with him. Before a month was out he had good reason to regret that he had been so self-denying.

After many tiresome delays[139] the English contingent sailed from Cadiz on February 21st, but met with such fierce west winds, when it neared Cape Trafalgar, that the convoy could not make the difficult harbour of Tarifa, and was blown past it into Gibraltar Bay, where Graham landed on the 23rd at Algesiras. Here he found waiting for him a ‘flank battalion’ of 536 bayonets, which General Campbell had made up for him out of the six flank companies of the 1/9th, 1/28th, and 2/82nd. From Algesiras the troops marched on the 24th to Tarifa, where they picked up another reinforcement provided by Campbell, the eight battalion companies of the 1/28th, which had been doing garrison duty in that little fortress—460 men in all. Having now just 5,196 men, Graham divided the infantry into two brigades. The first under General Dilkes numbered 1,900 bayonets: it was composed of the two composite battalions of the Guards, together with the flank battalion from Gibraltar and two companies of the 95th Rifles. The second brigade, under Colonel Wheatley, had 2,633 bayonets, and consisted of the 1/28th, 2/67th, 2/87th, and another ‘flank battalion’ under Colonel Barnard, composed of the two light companies of the 20th Portuguese (the only troops of that nation which served in the expedition), those of the 2/47th, with four more companies of the 95th Rifles. There were only 206 cavalry—two squadrons of the 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion—and ten guns under Major Duncan.

The Spanish contingent had sailed three days after Graham, had met with the same rough weather, and had been much beaten about. But the troops began to arrive at Tarifa on the 26th, and were all ashore on the 27th. La Peña assumed command, was all politeness, and made over to Graham two unbrigaded battalions of his own, to bring up the force of the two small British brigades to a higher figure[140]. The rest of his troops were organized in two divisions under Lardizabal and the Prince of Anglona, the first five, the second six battalions strong[141]; he had brought fourteen guns, and four squadrons of horse under an English colonel in the Spanish service, Samuel Whittingham, an officer who did not add to his laurels during this expedition.

On arriving at the bridge of Facinas and the village of Bolonia, ten miles outside Tarifa, La Peña had to make up his mind whether he would march against the rear of the French lines before Cadiz by the track nearer to the coast, which passes through Vejer de la Frontera, Conil, and Chiclana, or by the inland road through the mountains, which runs past Casas Viejas to Medina Sidonia. The two roads at their bifurcation are separated by the long lagoon of La Janda, a very shallow sheet of water, seven miles long, which nearly dries up in summer, but was at this moment full to overflowing from spring rains[142]. To take the inland route across the mountains was by far the better course. The road was not good, but if the Allies could reach Medina Sidonia with their army intact, Victor would be forced to come out and attack them, at a great distance from his Lines. For it would be practically impossible for the Marshal to allow La Peña and Graham to establish themselves at Medina, in the rear of his head quarters, and backed by the Sierra de Jerez, from whose skirts they could send out as many detachments as they pleased, to cut the communication between Seville and the Lines. There was little danger of being taken in the rear by troops sent by the distant Sebastiani, whose nearest forces were at Marbella, eighty miles away, and whose attention was at this moment fully taken up by the local guerrilleros, who had been turned loose on him. Indeed, Sebastiani for some time thought that the expedition was directed against himself, and was preparing to concentrate and take the defensive. The only drawbacks to the Medina Sidonia route were there would be no chance of communicating along it with the garrison of Cadiz, and that the question of provisions might grow serious if the campaign were protracted, for the region was barren and the army ill provided with transport. But a few days would settle the affair—Victor would be compelled to come out at once and fight, with every man that he could bring, and while he was engaged at Medina, there would be nothing to prevent the 7,000 Spaniards in Cadiz from crossing the harbour and destroying the ill-garrisoned Lines. This in itself, even if the Allies failed to hold back the Marshal, would have an immense effect all over Andalusia[143].

La Peña originally intended to take the right-hand road, and ordered Beguines, who was now in the high hills to the east, about Ximena, to join him with his roving brigade at Casas Viejas. The column left Facinas late in the evening, for La Peña had a great and misplaced belief in night marches, by which he always hoped to gain time on the enemy, since his moves could not be discovered or reported till the next morning. He overlooked the corresponding disadvantage of the extreme slowness of progress over bad roads in rugged country, the very real danger that the troops (or some of them) might miss their way in the dark, and the inevitable fatigue to the men from losing their proper hours of sleep. Graham’s laconic diary shows how this worked out. ‘Marched in the evening, very tedious from filing across water (the stream which fills the head of the lagoon of La Janda) and other difficulties. Misled by the guides on quitting the Cortigo de la Janda (farm at the head of the lagoon): the counter-march made a most fatiguing night.... It was twelve noon before the troops halted, having been nineteen hours under arms.’

The troops of Lardizabal, at the head of the column, had reached Casas Viejas in the morning, but the English division in the rear of the army had got no further than the northern end of the lagoon, some thirteen miles from their starting-place at Puente de Facinas. There was a violent east wind, the night had been very cold, and the men were much fatigued.

Lardizabal on reaching Casas Viejas had found the convent, which was the only solid building there, occupied by a French post, two companies sent out by General Cassagne from Medina Sidonia to watch the high-road. Thinking at first that he was only about to be worried by guerrilleros, the French captain shut himself up behind his barricades, instead of retreating at once. When he found out his mistake, and saw that a whole army was about him, it was too late to get off without loss. La Peña ordered that the convent should be left alone, as he did not wish to waste time in battering and storming it. The whole of his troops had come up, including the roving force of 1,600 men from the hills under Beguines, when the French unwisely made a bolt eastward, in the hope of escaping. The little column was pursued and cut up by a squadron of Busche’s German Hussars, many being killed and captured. From the prisoners and Beguines’s scouts La Peña learnt that Medina Sidonia was (contrary to his expectation) held by a serious force of French—Cassagne’s detachment being now composed of five battalions of infantry, a battery, and a cavalry regiment, about 3,000 men. The walls had been repaired, it was said, and the place was in a state of defence.

The Spanish general should have rejoiced to learn that Victor had sent an appreciable part of his army so far afield—fifteen miles from Chiclana—and by advancing he could have forced the Marshal to come to this distance from his lines in order to support Cassagne. A battle would no doubt have followed—but it was for a battle that the army had sailed to Tarifa. And by drawing Victor’s whole fighting force so far away from Cadiz, La Peña would have given a unique opportunity to the garrison to come out and destroy the siege-works. Meanwhile, if the French lost the battle they would be annihilated, being off their line of retreat; if they won it, they would return to find the greater part of the siege-works destroyed.

But this was not the line of thought that guided La Peña; he was, as his previous record showed, a shirker of responsibilities, and the prospect of a battle on the morrow, or the day after, seems to have paralysed him. To every one’s surprise he gave orders that the army, waiting till dusk had come on, should leave the Medina road, and march across country by a bad bridle-path to Vejer, on the other route from Tarifa to Cadiz. Graham protested against a second night march, after the experience of the first, and rightly, for news came in ere night that the road along the north side of the Barbate river, which La Peña had intended to use, was absolutely under water from inundations. La Peña therefore consented to wait till the next morning (March 3rd) and to use another country road, that between the north end of the La Janda lagoon and the river into which it falls. The army marched at 8 o’clock—Lardizabal as before in front, the English division in the rear. But on reaching the intended crossing-place, it was found that this road, like that north of the river, was flooded, the lagoon having overflowed at its northern end, and joined itself in one shallow sheet of water to the Barbate. Graham, on arriving at the passage, found the Spaniards halted at the edge of the flood, and apparently at a nonplus. The energetic old man took the business out of La Peña’s hands—he and his staff rode into the water, and sought personally for the track of the submerged causeway, which they fortunately found to be nowhere more than three feet under the surface of the flood. He placed men along the track at intervals, to guide those who should follow, and sat on his horse in the middle of the ford encouraging the troops as they marched past him. ‘I set the example of going into the water,’ he remarks in his diary, ‘which was followed by Lacy, the Prince of Anglona, and others. The passage lasted three hours, and would have taken double that time but for the exertions made to force the men to keep the files connected.’ It was 12 o’clock at night before the army reached Vejer—having taken fifteen hours to cover ten miles, owing to the delays at the inundation. Every one was wet through and much fatigued, for the weather was still very cold.

It remained to be seen what the enemy would make of this move; a squadron of French dragoons had been found in Vejer by the advanced guard, and driven out, so that it was certain that Victor would get prompt news that at any rate some part of the allied army had now appeared on the western road. The Marshal, as a matter of fact, was puzzled. On the night of the 2nd he had heard from Cassagne that the enemy was in force on the Medina Sidonia road, and had cut up the post at Casas Viejas. He accordingly sent orders to Cassagne to bid him stand firm, and promised to support him with his whole disposable force. But before dawn on the 4th he got news, from the dragoons expelled from Vejer, that there was a heavy force on the western road. Had La Peña transferred himself from one route to another, or were the Allies operating in two columns? Cassagne reported a little later that the column opposed to him had advanced no further, but that there were still Spanish troops on the Casas Viejas road; and this was true, for La Peña had left a battalion and some guerrilla horse at that place, to give him news of Cassagne, if the latter should move.

But there was also the garrison of Cadiz to be watched, and it was showing signs of activity. On the night of the 2nd-3rd, when the field army had been lying at Casas Viejas, General Zayas had, in accordance with the scheme of times left with him, thrown his bridge of boats across the Santi Petri creek, and passed a battalion across it, which entrenched itself on the mud-flat, facing the French works that cut off the peninsula of the Bermeja. They threw up a strong tête-du-pont, undisturbed, being under the protection of the heavy guns in the castle of Santi Petri, and other batteries on the Isle of Leon. The move could only mean that the garrison of Cadiz intended to come out. Accordingly Victor resolved to stop its egress; waiting for the dusk on the night of the 3rd-4th, he sent six companies of picked voltigeurs to storm the tête-du-pont. This they accomplished, the heavy guns failing to stop them in the dusk: the Spanish battalion in the work (Ordenes Militares) was nearly annihilated, losing 13 officers and 300 men killed or taken. But the bridge itself was saved by the prompt sinking of two of its boats, and was hastily floated back to the island, where Zayas laid it up for further use. He had been much chagrined at seeing and hearing nothing of allied forces behind the French, which he had been told to look for on March 3rd[144].

Putting together the movement of Zayas, and the fact that some at least of the allied army was now on the Vejer road, the Marshal came to the correct conclusion that the army in the field was intending to get into communication with Cadiz and its garrison. Accordingly he made a new plan to suit this hypothesis: of his three divisions one, that of Villatte, was to block the neck of the peninsula along which the track from Vejer and Conil leads to the Santi Petri creek and the Isle of Leon. The other two, concentrated at Chiclana, were to wait till the allied force had found itself blocked in front by Villatte, and then to fall upon its flank, in the space of three miles that lies between the hill of Barrosa and the position where Villatte had been posted. This plan would place the intercepting division in obvious danger, since, while attacked in front by the head of the allied army, it might find Zayas attempting once more to lay his bridge, and to take it in the rear. Such a movement by the garrison could not be stopped, because the end of the peninsula, by the bridge-place, was under the guns of several heavy batteries. But Victor directed Villatte not to fight to the last, but to be contented with holding the Allies in check long enough to enable the main body to fall on their flank. The sound of his guns would be the signal for the two striking divisions to move out from the wood of Chiclana, and dash at the long column whose head would be engaged with Villatte, while its tail would still be coming along the coast many miles to the rear. For 14,000 men had only the single line of communication along which to move.

Meanwhile Cassagne, at Medina Sidonia, was sent orders to find out exactly what was in front of him, and if there was no solid force, to march to join the main body on the morning of the 5th. He must have received the order to do so somewhere in the afternoon of the 4th.

Victor’s force was not so large as he would have wished. Soult had taken from him six battalions of infantry and three cavalry regiments, reducing the total of the 1st Corps left at or near Cadiz to twenty-three battalions of infantry, three regiments of cavalry, and four or five field batteries, about 15,000 men in all. There were also present in the lines 3,500 men more not belonging to the corps, viz. about 1,000 artillery and 800 engineers and sappers belonging to the siege train, and 1,600 marine troops from the flotilla which had been constructed in Cadiz bay. These of course were useless for field operations; but they served to man the lines, with the addition of three battalions—2,000 men—from the fighting force, the least that Victor thought he could spare. For the garrison of Cadiz and the English fleet might attack in force any point of the Lines during the absence of the main body. This left 13,000 men available for field operations: but Cassagne was still absent at Medina Sidonia, with five battalions, a battery, and one of the three cavalry regiments, making 3,100 men in all. There were therefore only 10,000 men left to face La Peña and Graham, till Cassagne should come up. Victor, according to his own dispatch, much over-estimated the force of the Allies, which he states as 8,000 English and 18,000 Spaniards, so that he went to work in rather a desperate mood, thinking that he had to fight very superior numbers, and that his only chance was to make a sudden and resolute attack when he was not expected. As a matter of fact he overstated the enemy by nearly a half, since there were really marching from Vejer only 5,000 English and under 10,000 Spaniards altogether, and no help could come to them from Cadiz till Villatte should be driven off.

Each of the three divisions which Victor had under his hand was short of several battalions; Ruffin’s, the 1st Division, and Leval’s, the 2nd, had each a battalion in the Lines and another detached with Cassagne at Medina. Villatte’s, the 3rd, had one in the Lines and three with Cassagne. Hence they took the field, Ruffin and Leval with six battalions each, Villatte with five only. The respective forces were 3,000, 3,800, and 2,500 bayonets[145]: each unit had its divisional battery with it. Of the two cavalry regiments, the 1st Dragoons, 400 sabres, was with Ruffin, the 2nd Dragoons, 300 sabres, with Villatte. On the evening of the 4th Ruffin’s and Leval’s men were concentrated at Chiclana, hidden behind the woods which cover it; Villatte was on the ridge of the Torre Bermeja, between the Almanza creek and the sea, right across the track leading from Vejer to Cadiz, and looking both backward and forward, with his attention ready for Zayas as much as for La Peña.

Meanwhile the Allies were marching straight into the middle of the trap which Victor had prepared for them. After passing Conil, the road on which their army was moving turns inland towards Chiclana, while a mere track follows the beach towards the Santi Petri. It was along this that La Peña was intending to move. But in the dark the head of the column followed the main road, and went several miles along it. At dawn the error was discovered, and the army, cutting across an open heath, got down to the beach[146].

The point which the allies had now reached was a mile or so south-east of the coast-guard tower of Barrosa, where an isolated eminence called the Cerro del Puerco (Boar’s Hill), crowned by a ruined chapel, looks out upon the heathy plain of Chiclana to the north, and a scrubby pine wood (covering much of the ground towards the beach) to the west[147]. The advanced cavalry got upon the hill unhindered soon after daybreak, and met no enemy, nor did patrols sent into the wood discover him for some time. Presently, however, news came back from the front that a French force had been discerned, drawn up between the Almanza creek and the sea, and blocking the way to Cadiz. Being outside the wood it was very visible, and seemed to be about a strong brigade of infantry with a squadron or two of horse. This was, of course, Villatte, waiting for the advance of the Allies. No other hostile troops were to be seen.

La Peña now told Graham that, despite of the fact that the men had been under arms for fourteen hours, and had marched as many miles in the dark, he was about to thrust this French force out of the way without a moment’s delay. Lardizabal, with the vanguard division, was to attack it at once, while the rest of the army took up a position to cover him from any possible movement of the enemy from the direction of Chiclana.

About nine in the morning Lardizabal with his five battalions reached Villatte’s front, deployed and attacked him. The forces were about equal, and the attack was repulsed with some loss; La Peña then ordered up the leading brigade of Anglona’s division to support the vanguard. A sharp engagement was going on, when a new fire broke out behind Villatte. Zayas, from the Isle of Leon, had recast his bridge across the Santi Petri, and was advancing to take the French in the rear. Villatte saw his danger, gave up his position across the peninsula, and hastily fell back towards the passage of the shallow Almanza creek, near the mill of the same name. He recrossed it, not without some difficulty, and then drew up to defend the passage. Lardizabal was prevented by La Peña from pursuing him, and halted opposite. The skirmish had been hot: Villatte had lost 337 men, the Spaniards a few more. But they had achieved their purpose, and the connexion with Cadiz had been duly established.

About noon La Peña sent orders to Graham to evacuate the Barrosa position, and draw in closer to the Almanza creek, to join the rest of the army. Meanwhile he would be relieved on the hill by five battalions of Cruz Murgeon and Beguines[148], to which rearguard there was added one British battalion, Browne’s composite unit consisting of the six flank companies of the 9th, 28th, and 82nd. Whittingham and the cavalry were to flank this force on the coast track, somewhere near the tower of La Barrosa. This force was to move off in its turn, when Graham should have reached the main body, for the Spanish general had resolved not to hold the Cerro, considering that an army of 14,000 men should not be spread out over four miles of ground, but be kept more concentrated. Graham entirely disagreed with this movement; if the Allies came down and crammed themselves into the narrow peninsula between the sea and the Almanza creek, there was nothing to prevent Victor from seizing the Barrosa heights, and placing himself across their front, in a way which would block them into the cramped position which they had assumed. The move practically threw them back on Cadiz, and sacrificed all the results of the toilsome flank march in which they had been so long engaged. Graham had in the morning urged on La Peña the all-importance of retaining the hill, but now saw his advice rejected. Obeying orders, however, he set his column in march towards the Torre Bermeja and the Almanza creek, through the pine wood. At the same time the rearguard under Beguines and Cruz Murgeon ascended the Cerro, and took up the post which the British division had left.

The British column did not descend to the rough track along the coast, but used a fair wood path right through the middle of the pine forest, which saved them a couple of miles of détour, and was practicable for artillery. They were soon filing along between the pines, lost to sight, and themselves unable to see a hundred yards in any direction.

At this moment, about 12.30 p.m., Victor suddenly broke out of the woods in front of Chiclana with the 7,000 men of Ruffin’s and Leval’s divisions. He was tired of waiting for Cassagne, for he had now got news that the force at Medina had started late in the morning, instead of at dawn, and would not be up for two or three hours more. His cavalry had just reported to him that the Cerro seemed to be abandoned, and that the troops formerly holding it were marching across his front through the forest. Since the main body of the enemy had been located opposite Villatte, on the Almanza creek, there seemed to be a good chance of seizing the important Barrosa position unopposed, and of striking the rear division of the Allies while it was defiling, strung out helplessly in a wood road, across the front of the advancing French. The orders given by the Marshal sent his cavalry regiment (three squadrons of the 1st Dragoons) to turn the heights by their south-eastern flank, and seize the coast track, while Ruffin ascended the Cerro by its gently sloping northern front, and Leval struck at the troops known to be in the wood. The French, being quite fresh, came on at a great pace; the Marshal had explained to his subordinates that haste was everything. They were clearly visible to the rearguard left on the heights, partly visible to La Peña, who could see their flank up the trough of the Almanza creek, but wholly invisible to Graham and his troops in the wood.

A great responsibility now fell on the Spanish officers on the Cerro; they were under orders to evacuate the heights when Graham should have got away westward. What were they to do when it suddenly became clear that they were themselves about to be attacked? They might attempt to defend the hill with the one British and five Spanish battalions which lay, unseen to the French, under the seaward slope of the Cerro: or they might simply obey orders, and retire towards the main body, abandoning their dominating position. The latter course was the one taken. The five Spanish battalions streamed down the seaward face of the hill in no very good order, and fell in there with the baggage of the whole army. All together began to retire northward; there was a block on the beach, the baggage mules were driven right and left, and many got loose and bolted. Meanwhile Whittingham with the cavalry (three Spanish[149] and two K.G.L. squadrons) ranged himself across the track, where he was soon faced by the French dragoons, who had galloped round the south-eastern face of the heights with remarkable celerity.

Whittingham’s retreat was not made without a protest against it by Colonel Browne, who urged, firstly, that it was madness to abandon the height, secondly that he had Graham’s orders to stand there, and could obey no others. The cavalry general replied that, for his part, he had resolved to retire, and offered to lend Browne one of his squadrons to cover his retreat towards the British division, if he would not follow him to the coast track. The fiery colonel made no reply, but turned to his battalion and ordered it to occupy the ruined chapel on the top of the Cerro and the neighbouring thickets, and to prepare for action. But in half an hour, seeing Whittingham’s column far off at the foot of the hill, and six French battalions coming in upon him, Browne gave way and descended into the pine wood in search of Graham[150]. The French—Ruffin’s division—took possession of the heights, and planted a battery upon them.

Meanwhile we must return to Graham, concealed in the wood, and marching (as it were blindfold) across the front of Leval’s approaching column. He had no cavalry with him, but presently two mounted guerrilleros rode up in haste, and told him that the French were close on his flank. Riding back to the rear of his division, he saw from the edge of the forest Beguines’s troops pouring down the near side of the Cerro, and Ruffin’s mounting its northern ascent. Leval was also visible to the left.

Graham’s mind was made up in a moment: ‘A retreat in the face of the enemy,’ he writes, ‘who was already in reach of the easy communication by the sea-beach, must have involved the whole allied army in the danger of being attacked during the unavoidable confusion, while the different corps would be arriving on the narrow ridge of Bermeja at the same time,’ i. e. he saw that he himself coming out of the wood, Whittingham and Beguines from the shore track, and the main body returning from the Almanza creek bridge, would meet in disorder on the narrow neck of the peninsula by the Torre Bermeja, and would be unable to form an orderly line of battle. Even if they did, and then held their ground, the object of the whole expedition was lost, and the French, in possession of the Cerro del Puerco, once more blocked the army into Cadiz.

The alternative was to take the offensive before the two French columns had united, and to attack them while they were still coming upon the ground, and before they had drawn up in any regular order. It was evident that they were hurrying forward without any notion that they were liable to be thrown on the defensive at a moment’s notice. In three minutes Graham had made up his mind to attack himself, instead of allowing himself to be chased into the Bermeja position. The wood, in which his division lay concealed, enabled him to hide his movement, though it made that movement perilously disorderly. The orders given were simple: the leading brigade, that of Colonel Wheatley, was to push straight through the wood till it reached the northern edge, and then form there, and attack Leval. The rear brigade, that of General Dilkes, was to counter-march down the wood-path on which it was engaged, till it too cleared the wood, and then to form up and attack Ruffin on the slopes of the Cerro del Puerco. The ten guns, in the centre of the marching column, were to push up a side track which seemed passable, and to form on Wheatley’s right, in the centre between the two brigades. Meanwhile these movements would take some time to execute, and the French were coming closer to the wood every minute. It was necessary to hold them back at all costs till a line could be formed. With this object Graham resolved to throw forward on each front a light infantry force, which should engage the enemy, regardless of order and of losses, till the main body got up. On the left Barnard’s four companies of the 95th Rifles and the two companies of the 20th Portuguese under Colonel Bushe, about 700 men in all, were ordered to break through the wood directly before them, without any attempt at formation, and when they reached its edge, to sally straight out at Leval’s front, in the best skirmishing line they could make. On the right there was a force already to the front—Browne’s flank battalion, 536 muskets, which had just descended unwillingly from the Cerro, and was visible at its foot.

This last force was near Graham as he sat on his horse among the trees at the wood’s end. He cantered up to Browne, and asked him why the Cerro had been abandoned. ‘Because five battalions of Spaniards went off before the enemy came within cannon-shot,’ was the reply. ‘Well, it’s a bad business, Browne; you must instantly turn round again and attack.’ The flank battalion began to extend into skirmishing order, when Graham, after a moment’s reflection, said, ‘I must show something more serious than skirmishing. Close the men into compact battalion! And then attack in your front and immediately.’ Dilkes’s brigade was coming up, but was still a mile away in the wood, and Browne came out of the trees into the open absolutely isolated, to attack uphill six battalions and a battery with a two-deep line of just 536 men[151]. Blakeney says that his colonel rode into action singing the old naval song—

‘Now cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,’

a tune to which he was much addicted at all times in and out of season.

About the same time, or a few minutes later, Barnard’s and Bushe’s scattered and uneven line burst out of the northern edge of the wood a mile away, and found themselves facing Leval’s division at the distance of only some 400 yards. This force, quite unaware that any enemy was yet near, was advancing in two columns each of three battalions, the right one composed of the 54th regiment and a battalion of grenadiers réunis, the left of the 8th regiment followed by a single battalion of the 45th. Their divisional battery was following on their left rear. Barnard, who got a little further to the front than the Portuguese, was facing the French 54th, Bushe, who was drawn back a little in échelon, was opposite the French 8th. They had hardly opened their fire, which had great effect because the enemy had no screen of voltigeurs out to cover him, and was caught unprepared for an infantry fight, when Duncan’s ten guns, which had made extraordinary good pace through the wood, appeared, and unlimbering at its edge began to fire shrapnel into the leading battalions of the French. Behind them the two companies of the 47th, which properly belonged to Barnard’s provisional battalion, took post as their supports.

Thus the battle was suddenly begun on both fronts, but Graham had only 500 men up on one side, and 900 with the guns on the other. The main body was coming on through the wood behind in an extraordinarily mixed order. When Graham gave orders to Wheatley’s brigade to face to their right flank and push through the wood northward, and to Dilkes’s brigade to turn about on the road and return to the Cerro by the way they had come, there was no small confusion. By some misunderstanding the rear companies of the 67th, which was the last battalion in Wheatley’s brigade, faced about and followed Dilkes, though the leading companies went off with their proper companions, the 28th and 87th. On the other hand, by a compensating mistake, the two companies of the Coldstream Guards, which belonged to Dilkes, turned north into the wood and followed Wheatley[152]. The brigades exchanged, as it were, 250 men with each other. In addition the battalions, owing to the sudden inversion of their column of march, were all out of their proper order in their brigades, and went into action ‘almost anyhow.’

But while a line of some sort was being formed, the screen of light troops which Graham had thrown forward, to detain the enemy, during the deployment of the main body, had done its duty by allowing itself to be knocked to pieces while attacking fivefold numbers. It had to be sacrificed to gain time, and carried out its orders completely. We will take the fortunes of the right-hand force first.

Browne’s composite battalion had started from a position close under the edge of the pine wood; it had first to cross a broad but shallow ravine, and then to climb the gentle slope of the Cerro, where it became fully visible to the enemy, though there was a little cover here and there upon the hillside, in the form of scattered bushes and slight dips in the ground. The French allowed the line to advance a little way up the ascent, and then opened upon it both with a field battery placed close to the chapel on the summit, and with the musketry fire of the three battalions which formed their right wing. Blakeney, our ever-useful authority for this side of the battle, says that the first salvo of the French knocked over more than 200 officers and men out of 536 forming the line. Browne ordered the men to close to the centre, and endeavoured to continue his climb; this was done with much difficulty, but, before the advance could be resumed, more than fifty men more were killed or wounded. All the exertions of the colonel could not form a third line—fourteen officers out of twenty-one were down, and more than half the rank and file. The remainder now scattered; the men did not retreat, but threw themselves down, and commenced independent firing from behind bushes, hillocks, and any other cover they could find. The French made no attempt to fall upon them by descending the hill, as would have seemed natural. The reason was that by the time that the flank battalion had been disposed of, the main body of Dilkes’s brigade had come out of the wood, and was visible forming up at the foot of the hill to deliver the real assault.

The Guards had obtained the necessary time to come up and choose their ground through the absolute martyrdom of the flank battalion. Dilkes did not repeat the attack on the same slope over which Browne had advanced, but pushed some distance to the right, where the hillside showed more cover in the way of scattered bushes and trees, and some dead ground hid the men by its steepness from the fire of the battery on the crest above. Blakeney describes them as strung out on a most irregular front, a confused mass rather than a formed line. The whole, while advancing, kept taking ground to their right, so as to come up the hillside opposite Ruffin’s left wing. Their extreme flank was covered by Norcott’s two companies of rifles in more extended order. Partly owing to the cover, partly to the difficulty found by the French guns in getting their fire to bear, Dilkes’s brigade got wellnigh to the top of the hill before it suffered any very serious losses. But on clearing the last underwood, and reaching smooth ground, it was charged by the four battalions of Ruffin’s left—two of the 24th Line supported by the two reserve battalions of grenadiers réunis. This was the crisis of the battle in the southern half of its progress. By all the rules of French military art four battalion columns, fresh and well ordered, charging down hill, should have been able to break through a disordered line of decidedly inferior strength pushing upwards against them. Dilkes had only 1,400 men, the four French battalions just over 2,000. Nevertheless, the impossible happened. When the two columns of the 24th Ligne came down, with drums beating and levelled bayonets, against the centre of the firm, if disorderly, line in front, they were checked by the furious fire that broke out against them from the semicircle into which they had pushed. This was one more example of the fact established at Maida five years before, and reaffirmed at Vimiero, Talavera, and Bussaco, that no column could break the British line by mere impetus. In this case the French had every advantage, since they were absolutely intact troops, and had the ground entirely in their favour, while the Guards and the wing of the 67th opposed to them had marched two miles in haste, had then climbed a steep 200-foot slope under fire, had lost their order, and were firing up hill. But the fire was delivered with astounding accuracy, considering that the men were blown with their climb and dreadfully exhausted. The whole head of each of the descending columns was blown to pieces. The rest came to a standstill, and crowding together in a disorderly clump, opened an irregular fire against the British line.

The Marshal, who was present in person on the top of the Cerro, then brought up his reserve, the two battalions of grenadiers under General Chaudron Rousseau. He himself and the brigadier were both distinctly seen leading on the column, the Marshal waving his large white-plumed hat over his head. This charge was delivered against the right of Dilkes’s line, where the 3rd Guards and wing of the 67th lay, that of the 24th Ligne had been more against the centre and the 1st Guards. But the result was the same, though the contest was more long and bloody. The grenadiers are said to have struggled forward, losing heavily at each step, till their front was within a very few yards of Dilkes’s line: it was only then that they halted and began to fire—a fatal step in such a contest, where impetus was the sole chance of the attacking mass, and superiority in musketry fire (owing to the longer front) was on the side of the English line. This of course was a terribly murderous business to both sides, as the figures presently to be quoted will show. But as in all similar contests during the Peninsular War, the line hit harder than the column. The four French battalions began at last to give way, and could not be kept together. Then Victor tried to bring in the two left battalions of his line to their aid, but these two units were pestered and impeded, when they began to move off from their first position, by the remains of Browne’s flank battalion, which (though reduced to under 300 muskets) began to press forward again, when the troops hitherto in their front commenced to move off to the right. ‘They darted from behind trees, briars, brakes, and out of hollows,’ says Blakeney. ‘I could imagine myself like Roderick Dhu upon Benledi’s side—it was a magic effect. We confidently advanced up the hill and, unlike most advances, in this one our numbers increased as we proceeded, soldiers of the flank battalion joining at every step.’ This scattered little force hung on to the flank of Victor’s right, and prevented it from rallying the broken force now recoiling from in front of Dilkes. The flankers had even the good fortune to capture a howitzer from the left of Victor’s battery placed by the chapel on the hilltop; another gun was taken by the 1st Guards in their forward progress.

It must have been just at this crisis that the whole French mass broke; up to this moment it had been recoiling sullenly, still keeping up some fire from its rear. But now the observer saw[153], ‘with loud and murmuring sounds, Ruffin’s division and Rousseau’s chosen grenadiers rolling with a whirling motion down into the valley below, leaving their two brave generals mortally wounded on the hill, which was left in possession of their bloodstained conquerors.’

The exhausted victors halted for a short time to re-form, and were in a more orderly line than they had hitherto shown when they commenced to follow the enemy down the slope. The casualties in this part of the field may now be stated, for neither party was to lose many more men in the last episode of the fight. Dilkes’s brigade and Browne’s flank battalion had gone up the hill with 76 officers and 1,873 men. They lost 25 officers and 588 men—about 10 men out of every 31 in the fight. The French loss was positively more, proportionately not quite so great. In the six battalions of Ruffin and Chaudron Rousseau there seem to have been about 108 officers and 3,000 men present; of these 36 officers and 840 men were left on the hill, i. e. 10 men in every 35. The trophies remaining with the victors were two guns and 107 unwounded prisoners, beside the multitude of disabled men left on the slope[154].

While this bloody business had been going on upon the Cerro del Puerco, it may be asked what were the Spaniards on the coast road doing—Whittingham’s squadrons and the five battalions of Cruz Murgeon and Beguines. The last named, with his three battalions, shepherding what was left of the baggage-train, quietly marched off along the sea, and joined La Peña by the Torre Bermeja. Whittingham was of a little positive use; he continued all through the fight to ‘contain’ and occasionally to bicker with the French cavalry regiment (1st Dragoons) that faced him near the Torre Barrosa. The two battalions of Cruz Murgeon supported him. This force certainly did not do its share—180 German Hussars, 300 Spanish horse, and 1,000 Spanish foot simply kept out of action 400 French horse. This was something, but not much, for the dragoons could not have interfered very effectively on the hill against Dilkes’s advance, because the south side of the Cerro is too precipitous for horsemen. In short, Whittingham’s statement in his report to La Peña, that ‘all the cavalry fulfilled its duty brilliantly’ is a sad overstatement of the case.

Let us turn now to the other half of the fight, where Wheatley’s brigade and Duncan’s guns were facing Leval on the open plain just outside the edge of the wood. At the moment when Browne attacked the Cerro, Barnard’s rifles and Bushe’s Portuguese were throwing themselves in a no less resolute fashion upon the six French battalions in their front. They had the advantage of being invisible to the enemy till they emerged from the wood, only 300 yards in his front, and of being supported, within a few minutes of their arrival, by Duncan’s ten guns, while Browne had no artillery assistance whatever, and was seen by the French for half a mile before he got near them.

The confusion in Leval’s division on being suddenly attacked by an unexpected swarm of skirmishers pouring out of the wood was extreme. So much were they taken aback, that Vigo-Roussillon of the 8th Line assures us in his memoirs that a false alarm of cavalry was raised, and that his regiment, and the first battalion of the 54th, formed square before the mistake was recognized, and caught some shells from Duncan’s guns in that uncomfortable situation, before they had time to deploy for action against infantry. This they had to do under a heavy fire from Barnard’s riflemen, who had advanced quite close to them. Leval’s fighting formation was the usual ‘column of divisions,’ i. e. a front of two companies and a depth of three in each battalion, or (since these units averaged 650 men each, and the companies over 100 bayonets) a front of seventy-two men and a depth of nine. The length of Barnard’s skirmishing line, with his 400 rifles, seems to have covered the front of the right battalion of the 54th and the left battalion of the 8th—some 1,300 men. The 95th did considerable execution on them while they were getting out of square formation: but when the columns advanced firing, the skirmishing line had to fall back. Its loss was heavy—sixty-five killed and wounded; among the latter Barnard, commanding the battalion. The next troops whom the French encountered were the flank companies of the 20th Portuguese—330 men only, who had advanced on the right rear of the 95th, supporting them in échelon. This was a new corps, which had been sent to Cadiz the moment it was raised in 1809, and had never been under fire before. Considering their hopeless position, alone in front of an advancing division, the Portuguese behaved very well; they held their ground for some time, while their colonel, Bushe, as is recorded by an eye-witness, rode slowly backward and forward behind them with his spectacles on, crying as the balls whistled past, ‘Que bella musica,’ to encourage his men. But he was soon mortally wounded[155], and after his fall the line melted away and drifted to the rear, after having kept a battalion of the French 8th engaged for some minutes: proportionately its loss was much the same as that of the Rifles—56 killed and wounded out of 332 present—one man in six.

The first act of the drama on this front was thus complete; the detaining force sent out by Graham had been, as he expected, driven in with loss, though not an appalling loss of 50 per cent., such as Browne’s gallant flankers had suffered on the Cerro. But the main body was now up, and had formed in the edge of the wood, to the left of Duncan’s guns, with no loss or interruption, since it had been well covered all the time. There were now some 1,400 men in line: the 28th, 450 strong, on the left, then the 211 bayonets of the Coldstreamers, the 87th, nearly 700 strong, in the centre; beyond them the right wing of the 67th, about 250 bayonets, next to the guns, which were still under the protection of the flank companies of the 47th which served as their escort throughout the fight. The broken screen of light troops which had just retired was by no means out of action; the 95th formed up again behind the 28th, the Portuguese behind the 87th, and both were used again before the battle was over.

The formation of the French at this moment was an uneven line of four battalion columns,—counting from their left, 1/8th, 2/8th, 2/54th, 1/54th; the other two battalions were in reserve, the 1/45th behind the French battery, which was now engaged with Duncan’s guns, the provisional battalion of grenadiers more to the right, and some distance behind the 54th regiment. The whole was advancing, but slowly: the battalions in the front line were firing; the centre was a little more to the front than the wings, the 2/8th being ahead of the other battalions because (as its chef de bataillon remarks in his memoir) he only allowed his men to fire volleys by order, while the units on his right and left were using independent fire. All had suffered in the previous fight with Barnard and the Portuguese, and much needed time to re-form, which was not granted them, because the English main line charged the moment that the light troops had cleared off from its front. It is curious to note in the French memoirs that the authors all write as if they had an oppressive feeling that the superiority of numbers was against them, and that they were being led to a forlorn hope. This was caused partly by the immense extent of the British line in proportion to its depth, still more by the happy existence of the wood behind Wheatley’s brigade. It had already vomited out two lively attacking lines, and the enemy presupposed a third in reserve; nearly all the French narratives definitely say that they were attacked by three lines, while really there was only one, with the screen of light troops, which had already been used up. As to the complaint concerning inferior numbers, it is certain that Leval’s division had 3,800 men, and Wheatley’s brigade only 2,500. The only superiority of the British was that, in the artillery duel now going on to the right of the line, they had ten guns to six, and soon crushed the French battery, so that it gave no effective support to its infantry. Only one of the French battalions attempted to deploy into line—this was the 2nd of the 54th, which lay opposite the British 28th—the others kept on from first to last in column of divisions. An eye-witness (Surtees of the 95th) remarks, ‘they never got into line, nor did they ever intend to do so, I believe, but advanced in solid bodies, firing from their front[156].’

The fight, owing to the French centre being slightly advanced, began a little earlier there than on the wings, the first clash being between the column of the French 2/8th, led by Vigo-Roussillon, and the line of the 2/87th, led by that enthusiastic fighter, Major Gough. We have narratives from both of them, and each insists that he kept down the fire of his men till they were within a very short distance of the enemy—sixty yards, says Vigo-Roussillon, twenty-five, says Gough. There was then a single volley exchanged, and the French column, much the harder hit of the two, broke up. ‘As they were in column when they broke,’ says Gough, ‘they could not get away. It was therefore a scene of most dreadful carnage, and I must own my weakness; as I was in front of the regiment I was in the very middle of them, and I could not cut down one, though I might have twenty, they seemed so confounded and confused[157].’ There was indeed a fearful crowding and mêlée here, for the 1st battalion of the French 8th, yielding before the fire of the British guns and the troops to the right of Gough, the wing of the 67th, fell back sideways against their own second battalion, and became mixed in one mass with them. Thus the 87th were sweeping before them, and ploughing through, a crowd of some 1,400, or allowing for previous losses, 1,200 men, while the companies of the 67th were firing into its flank and rear. The 8th Ligne suffered worse losses than any other troops on the field that day, save Browne’s heroic flank battalion, losing about 50 per cent. of the men who went into action—726 killed, wounded, and taken out of 1,468 present. The colonel, Autié, was killed, and one of the two battalion chiefs, Lanusse, while the other, Vigo-Roussillon, was wounded and taken prisoner. The eagle was captured from the middle of the 1st battalion after a desperate struggle with the colours-guard; Ensign Keogh of the 87th, who first got hold of it, was bayonetted twice and killed; Sergeant Masterson[158] then ran the aquilifère through with his pike, dragged the eagle away, and kept it during the rest of the mêlée. This was the first eagle captured by the British during the Peninsular War, and its arrival in London was rightly made an occasion of considerable pomp and ceremony. The eagle was presented to the Prince Regent in person, who granted to the 87th the right to bear an eagle and a laurel wreath above the harp on the regimental colours and appointments, and the title of the ‘Prince of Wales’s Own Irish Regiment.’ Gough was given a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy at once, and Sergeant Masterson, who had captured the eagle, received a commission in his own regiment; he and his descendants have served in it almost throughout the nineteenth century.

The rout of the 8th Ligne was not the last triumph of the 87th on that day; driving the remains of that unfortunate corps in front of them, they came upon the battalion of the 45th Ligne, which had hitherto been standing in reserve behind the French battery, and which Leval had just ordered up to support the broken first line. Gough, with the greatest difficulty, succeeded in forming about half his scattered though victorious regiment to face this new enemy. But there was hardly a collision: all the other French units were broken by this time, and the 45th hesitated. ‘After firing until we came within about fifty paces of them,’ writes Gough, ‘they (for us fortunately) broke and fled, for had they done their duty, fatigued as my men were at the moment, they might have cut us to pieces.’ That this battalion cannot have behaved well is sufficiently shown by the casualty list—out of 700 men present it only lost 55—far the smallest proportional loss in the whole French army that day. Probably the weakness of its resistance is partly to be accounted for by the fact that it was being outflanked by the wing of the 67th, who must have been extending in this direction at the moment, prolonging the line of the 87th eastward. In its double victory the 87th lost 173 men out of 700 in the field. There remains the left wing of this fight to be dealt with. Here the French 54th, in two battalion columns, was facing the British 1/28th and the 200 Coldstreamers on their right. This was the only part of the field in which the French tried at all to manœuvre: the right battalion of the 54th began to deploy and to turn the British flank, by moving westward into the edge of the pine wood, but with little effect. We have a short account of this fight in the memoirs of Cadell of the 28th.

‘We had formed line under cover of the 95th, and then advanced to meet their right wing, which was coming down in close column—a great advantage—and here the coolness of Colonel Belson was conspicuous: he moved us up without firing a shot, close to their right battalion, which just then began to deploy. The Colonel then gave orders to fire by platoons from centre to flanks, and low; “Fire at their legs and spoil their dancing.” This was kept up for a short time, with dreadful effect. The action being now general all along the line, we twice attempted to charge. But the enemy, being double our strength (since our flank companies were away), only retired a little on each occasion. Finally, giving three cheers, we charged a third time, and succeeded: the enemy gave way and fled in every direction.’ Of all Leval’s division there now remained unbroken only the single battalion of grenadiers réunis under Colonel Meunier behind the right rear. The routed 54th fled diagonally to take cover behind it. Belson did not pursue very rapidly, and this wing of the beaten division moved off to the flank, covered by the grenadiers, and presently met the wrecks of the 8th and the 45th not far north of the Laguna del Puerco, the pool which lies beyond the heath, to the east. It may not be out of place to give the losses: the 54th, with 1,300 men present, lost 323—about one man in four. The grenadiers hardly suffered at all, never having come into close action. Of the British opposite them, the 28th, with 450 men in the field, had 86 casualties; the Coldstream companies lost 58 out of 211[159].

Just as Leval’s division arrived near the Laguna, it was joined by the wrecks of Ruffin’s, descending in disorder from the northern slope of the Cerro. It says much for the resolution of Victor that he succeeded in halting the two disorganized masses, and deployed two or three comparatively intact battalions and the ten guns which remained to him, to cover the rallying of the rest. At the same moment his cavalry, the 1st Dragoons, which had galloped away round the east side of the Cerro when Ruffin was beaten off it, came in and drew up on the right and left of the whole. It was a bold bid to secure an unmolested retreat, for no more could be hoped. Some time was available for rallying the troops, for Graham had also to get his exhausted men into order. They came up at last, Wheatley’s brigade on the left, Dilkes’s on the right, the guns in the centre. The latter were set to play on the new front of the French, which they did with great effect, the enemy being in a cramped mass. The skirmishers went forward, and a third separate engagement seemed about to begin, when a small new force intervened. This was one of the two squadrons of German hussars, which had followed the French dragoons around the back of the Cerro, not on the orders of Whittingham, who made no haste to pursue, but on those of Graham’s aide-de-camp Ponsonby, who had carried them off on his own responsibility. Coming like a whirlwind across the lower slope of the hill, this squadron upset the French squadron of the 1st Dragoons which formed Victor’s flank guard on this side, and drove it in upon the infantry. Small though the shock was, it sufficed to upset the equilibrium of the demoralized French divisions. They went off in a sudden rush, leaving behind them two more guns, and streamed across the plain towards Chiclana.

The battle was over; there was no pursuit, for the cautious Whittingham came up ten minutes too late with the rest of the cavalry, in time to see the last of the enemy disappearing in the woods. With him came up also the two infantry battalions under Cruz Murgeon, and these were the only Spanish troops that Graham saw during the battle.

It may be noted that we have hitherto not had occasion to say one word of General La Peña or his two infantry divisions since the main action began. On being informed, at the same time as Graham, of the approach of Victor from Chiclana, La Peña had no thought save to defend the isthmus by the Torre Bermeja against the approaching enemy. He drew up his own eleven battalions across it in a double or treble line, while Zayas, with those which had come out of Cadiz, watched Villatte across the Almanza creek. When Beguines appeared from the Cerro by the coast-track, he was put into the same mass, which must have risen to something like 10,000 men. Presently news came from the wood that Graham had faced about and was fighting the French. La Peña, as his own dispatch shows, concluded that the English must inevitably be beaten, and refused to stir a man to support them or to bring them off. Zayas repeatedly asked leave to march up to join Wheatley’s flank, or to cross the Almanza and to attack Villatte, but was refused permission. The first report, to the effect that Graham was driving the French back, La Peña refused to credit. It was not till the fugitives of Leval’s division were seen retreating past the head of the Almanza creek, that he could be got to accept the idea that Graham was victorious. And when pressed to join in the pursuit by Zayas, he merely said that the men were tired, and the day far spent. The reaping of the fruits of victory might be left for the morrow.

When it is remembered that La Peña was only two miles from Wheatley’s fighting-ground, and three from the Cerro, his conduct seems astounding as well as selfish. Graham’s fight lasted nearly two hours. La Peña could have ridden over, to see what was going on, in a quarter of an hour. He refused to stir, and deliberately sacrificed his allies, because he had got a comfortable, almost an impregnable, position across the narrow isthmus, and would not move out of it, whatever might happen to Graham. This timid and selfish policy was an exact repetition of his betrayal of Castaños at Tudela in 1808. With his 10,000 men he could have crushed Villatte if he had advanced on one front, or have annihilated the remnants of Ruffin and Leval, if he had chosen to act on the other.

He had his reward: next morning Graham, after collecting his wounded and his trophies, recrossed into the Isle of Leon, formally giving notice that in consequence of yesterday’s proceedings, he was forced to withdraw his consent, given in February, to serve under La Peña, and to fall back on the discretional orders given by the British Government not to undertake any operations in which he was not himself in chief command. It is impossible to blame him; no one could deny, after what had happened on the 5th, that it was absolutely unsafe to go out in La Peña’s company. Wellington sent his complete approval to Graham, well remembering his own experiences with Cuesta in 1809. ‘I concur in the propriety of your withdrawing to the Isla on the 6th,’ he wrote, ‘as much as I admire the promptitude and determination of your attack on the 5th[160].’

The division marched back into the Isla with only 4,000 men in the ranks; 1,238 had fallen or been disabled at Barrosa—almost one casualty among every four men in the field. But Victor had been hit much harder; out of 7,300 men in the divisions of Leval and Ruffin much more than one in four, viz. no less than 2,062, were hors de combat; 262 had been killed, 1,694 wounded, 134 unwounded prisoners were taken, along with the eagle and five guns[161]. The units that had fought in the Cerro and on the heath by the wood were absolutely demoralized; it would have been impossible to put them in line again for several days.

If the slightest push forward had been made on the 6th, it is certain that the siege would have been raised. Victor had rallied the broken troops behind the wood of Chiclana on Villatte’s comparatively intact division, and had been joined in the late afternoon by Cassagne’s 3,000 men, who had at last come up from Medina Sidonia. But there was panic all along the Lines: while the battle had been going on, English and Spanish gunboats had threatened their garrison, and had made small disembarkations at one or two points; a battery had been captured near Santa Maria. If a more serious attack were made from the sea next morning, it was clear that the line would break at some point. ‘The sinister phrases “destruction of the forts” and “abandonment of the position” flew from mouth to mouth[162].’ Victor called a council of war, and proposed to offer a second battle behind Chiclana; but he found little support among the generals. It was finally decided that, if the Allies should come on in full force next morning, only such resistance should be made as would allow time to blow up most of the forts, and burn the stores and the flotilla. The 1st Corps would retreat on Seville. Victor proposed that one or two positions, where there were solid closed works, like Fort Sénarmont and the Trocadero, should be left garrisoned, and told to defend themselves until the army should return, strengthened by Soult and Sebastiani, to relieve them. It is doubtful whether he would really have risked this move, since the time of his return would have been most uncertain, and he might very probably have been making a present to the enemy of any troops left behind in isolated posts.

On the morning of the 6th the French retired behind the Saltillo river, leaving the 3rd Division (now commanded by Cassagne, for Villatte had been wounded) on the further side, with orders to retire when seriously attacked, and to issue a signal for the blowing up of all the forts of the south wing of the Lines, at the moment that the retreat should begin. Cassagne was then to rejoin the Marshal behind the Rio San Pedro, beyond Puerto Real, skirmishing as he went. But no trace of the Allies was to be seen on the morning of the 6th, and Cassagne was not forced to move back, though by mistake one battery was blown up without the signal being given[163]. The only sign of life on the part of the enemy was that a swarm of English gunboats and launches appeared at the north end of the lines, and threw ashore 600 seamen and marines, who occupied Puerto Santa Maria for some hours, and destroyed all the smaller batteries between that place and Rota unhindered. For the French had concentrated in the fort of Santa Catalina and abandoned all their minor posts. But the flotilla withdrew at dusk, leaving Victor much puzzled as to the purpose of his adversaries. On the morning of March 7th he sent out a cavalry reconnaissance of several squadrons, which brought back the astonishing news that it had explored the whole of the country between Chiclana and the sea, including the battlefield, and had seen no hostile troops, save a large encampment on the Bermeja isthmus, just above the bridge of boats leading into the Isla de Leon.

What had happened was that La Peña had determined to give up the expedition and retire to Cadiz. He had declined to listen to a proposition made by Graham and Admiral Keats that he should advance cautiously towards Chiclana, while the British naval and land forces made a combined attack upon the Trocadero[164]. He did not even send out cavalry patrols to discover what had become of Victor; if they had gone forth, they would have found that the Marshal had retired beyond the Saltillo, and would have discerned his preparations for a general retreat. But after remaining encamped by the Torre Bermeja during the whole of the 6th and the greater part of the 7th, the Spanish army crossed the bridge of boats into the Isla, and took it up behind them. Only Beguines and his three battalions were left on the continent, with orders to return to their old haunts in the Ronda mountains. This little force retired to Medina Sidonia on the 8th, and repulsed there a French column of 600 men which came up to occupy the town. But next day a whole brigade marched against them, whereupon Beguines evacuated Medina and went off towards San Roque and Algesiras.

Victor was therefore able on the 8th to reoccupy the evacuated southern wing of his lines, and to issue an absurd dispatch, in which he claimed that Barrosa had been a victory. But for the loss of 2,000 men, and a severe shock inflicted on the morale of his troops, he was in exactly the same position that he had held on the 4th. The whole fruits of the battle of Barrosa had been lost. What they might have been it is possible up to a certain point to foresee. Supposing that Graham and not La Peña had been in command, the army, raised to nearly 20,000 men by the junction of Zayas and of the 2,000 Anglo-Portuguese still in Cadiz, would have marched on Chiclana upon the 6th. Victor would have blown up the Lines and retired towards Seville, but there would have been no reinforcements for him there, and he could only have been brought up to fighting strength by the calling in of Sebastiani and Godinot. But, if these generals came up to his aid, Granada and Cordova would have had to be evacuated, and the insurgents would have swept all over Eastern Andalusia. The Allies could not have held the field, for even before Soult’s return from Badajoz there were still 50,000 French troops south of the Sierra Morena. The siege of Cadiz would ultimately, no doubt, have been recommenced, Granada and Cordova reoccupied. But meanwhile the immense work spent on the Lines would have had to be recommenced de novo, and the ascendancy of the French arms in the south would have received a rude shock. Possibly Soult might have blown up Badajoz after its fall on March 12th, instead of holding it, for he would have required all his strength to reconquer Andalusia. But further than the immediate result of the inevitable raising of the siege of Cadiz it is useless to make speculations.

The alarms of the French in Andalusia did not end with Victor’s reoccupation of the lines. Another episode was still to be played out before matters settled down. The indefatigable Ballasteros, having rested for a short time in Portugal, came back into the Condado de Niebla in the end of February with 4,000 men. He defeated on the Rio Tinto General Remond, whose weak column was the only French force left west of the Guadalquivir since Gazan’s departure (March 2). He then marched promptly on Seville, having good information of the weakness of the garrison that had been left there. On March 5th, the day of Barrosa, he was at San Lucar la Mayor, only twenty miles from the great city. The governor, Daricau, came out against him and joined Remond with 1,600 men and three guns, all that he could dispose of, leaving Seville in the hands of a miserable garrison, composed of convalescents and Juramentados of doubtful faith. If Daricau had been beaten, the city and all its establishments must have been lost in a day. But Ballasteros refused to fight, and retired behind the Rio Tinto, having had false news that a force sent from Estremadura by Soult was on his flank. Daricau returned to Seville on March 9th, leaving Remond to observe Ballasteros, and was joined by some detachments sent very tardily by Godinot to strengthen the garrison. But he had received such alarming accounts of the results of the battle of Barrosa, that he sent these troops on to Victor, and remained with a very weak force in the city. But on March 9th Ballasteros, suddenly coming back from the Rio Tinto, surprised Remond at La Palma, took two guns from him, and drove him back into Seville. On the 11th the Spanish general was back at San Lucar, and causing great dismay to Daricau, who sent urgent demands for help to Soult. Since Barrosa he could look for no help from elsewhere. He was saved by the rumour of the capitulation of Badajoz, which frightened Ballasteros away, for the Spaniard rightly judged that Soult could, and must, send a considerable force against him, now that his hands were freed.

When, therefore, the Marshal, as we have already seen[165], came back in haste to Andalusia with Gazan’s division, fearing that he might find Ballasteros in Seville, and Graham pursuing Victor from the evacuated lines of Cadiz, he was agreeably surprised to find that both dangers had been avoided, and that the crisis in Andalusia was at an end. His further movements belong to a different campaign, and will be related in their due place.

Meanwhile Graham and La Peña were engaged in a violent controversy. The British general had sent the most scathing comments on his colleague’s conduct to the ambassador, Henry Wellesley, and to Wellington, and made his complaints also to the Regency. La Peña on the other hand claimed the credit of the victory of Barrosa for his own skilful management; according to his magniloquent dispatches all had gone well, till Graham spoilt the campaign by taking his division back to Cadiz. The Regency seemed partly to believe him, as they conferred on him the Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III, though at the same time they offered Graham the title of a grandee of Spain, which he refused, for he would not be honoured in such company. But Spanish as well as British public opinion was so much against La Peña, that he was almost immediately deprived of his command, which was given to the Marquis Coupigny; while Graham, whose strong language had made it impossible for him to be left in contact with the Regency, was withdrawn to serve with Wellington in Portugal, and made over the charge of the Anglo-Portuguese troops at Cadiz to General Cooke. Summing up the results of the Barrosa campaign, we may say that all it had accomplished was so to alarm Soult that he came back in haste from Estremadura, leaving there under Mortier a force far too weak to threaten any harm to Wellington and Portugal. But even if Barrosa had never been fought, Soult would have been harmless in any case, because Masséna was gone from Santarem before Badajoz fell.

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