A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 6, September 1, 1812-August 5, 1813

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

WINTER QUARTERS.
DECEMBER 1812-JANUARY 1813

When the Anglo-Portuguese Army halted at Ciudad Rodrigo, and came back once more to regular rations and marches that were no longer forced, it was of course in very bad condition. The cold and wet of the last ten days’ retreat from Salamanca had caused many a man to drop dead by the way, and had sent thousands of sick to the hospitals, riddled with dysentery and rheumatism. And the hospitals and dépôts were even before this last influx loaded up with convalescents not fit for service, from the casualties of Salamanca and Burgos. The December morning states were enough to fill Wellington with dismay; of his 64[251] British battalions there were only 30,397 men present with the colours—an average of much less than 500 bayonets to the battalion. There were no less than 18,000 men in hospital—more than a third of the total strength of the infantry arm. Thirteen regiments had more men ‘sick’ than ‘effective’; twelve were down to under 300 strong[252]. The cavalry had not lost so many in proportion—they had 5,700 present under arms to 1,436 sick, but could not mount more than 5,000, owing to the loss of horses during the retreat, and the surviving horses were for the most part in bad condition.

The first thing necessary was to get the troops under cover and well fed: a very long rest was obviously necessary to allow the way-worn and exhausted men time to recover their strength, and the convalescents to rejoin from the hospitals. With the winter drafts known to be ready and starting from England, to the number of some 5,000[253], beside one or two more complete battalions promised for the Peninsula, there might be an army in April 1813 no less strong than that which had opened the campaign of 1812. But clearly the only movement to be thought of at present was that of getting the divisions into comfortable winter quarters. Accordingly the army broke up a few days after reaching Ciudad Rodrigo, and spread itself out in dispositions not unlike those of the December previous, save that nothing was left so far to the South as had been the custom in other years. For Soult was no longer in Andalusia, and the right wing of the Allied army had no reason to descend as far as the Guadiana.

By December the 1st Division had distributed itself on the upper Mondego around Guarda and Vizeu[254]; the 3rd Division was farther north, about Moimento de Beira; the 4th, with head-quarters at S. João de Pesqueira, occupied cantonments along the Douro; the 5th was a little lower down the same river in Lamego and the neighbouring villages. The 6th Division lay somewhat farther back on the northern slope of the Serra de Estrella, along the high road parallel with the middle Mondego, with head-quarters at Cea; the 7th at Moimento da Serra and Santa Marinha, also under the Estrella. Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese went north of the Douro, to Penafiel and Villa Real respectively. Only the much-enduring Light Division was left in rather cold and bare quarters on the frontier, occupying familiar billets at Fuentes de Oñoro, Alameda, Gallegos, and other villages between the Coa and the Agueda. The cavalry was all sent back to the rear, even so far as the coast-plain at the mouths of the Vouga and the Mondego, save V. Alten’s brigade, which remained on the Agueda in company with the Light Division, and D’Urban’s Portuguese, who went back to Braganza, in the far north-east of the Tras-os-Montes, on the Spanish frontier. Any observer noting these dispositions as a whole could not but conclude that they were most easily explained by an intention to resume in the next spring the old line of the Allied advance of 1812; since all the British troops were conveniently placed for a concentration on the Agueda, and a march on Salamanca. The fact that the three small Portuguese units had been sent north of the Douro would attract little attention. And this no doubt was the impression which Wellington wished to produce on any secret agents of the French who might report the location of his winter quarters.

Meanwhile, as in earlier years, Hill took the old Army of Estremadura, the British 2nd Division, Hamilton’s Portuguese division, and Erskine’s two cavalry brigades, back to the South, but only as far as the Tagus and the Alagon, not to the Guadiana. He fixed his head-quarters at Coria, and distributed the brigades of the 2nd Division in the mountain villages above, covering the great passes of the Sierra de Francia and the Sierra de Gata, the Puerto de Baños and the Puerto de Perales[255]. Hamilton’s division lay inside its own country, at Moraleja, Idanha, and Penamacor. The cavalry head-quarters were at Brozas in the valley of the Tagus, near Alcantara and its Roman bridge. Here Erskine, the cavalry divisional general, committed suicide by jumping out of a high window in a state of frenzy. Wellington had long wanted to get rid of him—though not in this sad way—and for good reason, as is explained by several incidents of 1811 and 1812 which have been noticed in previous volumes. Yet he had never been able to obtain his departure—political influences at home stood in the way. Erskine being thus removed, the Commander-in-Chief at once dissolved the 2nd Cavalry Division, and its two British brigades (Long’s and Fane’s) ceased to have any other connexion with each other, beyond that of being both attached to Hill’s Corps.

The disposition for Hill’s winter quarters was obviously intended not merely to cover the great passes between the valleys of the Douro and the Tagus, but also to give the enemy cause to think that Wellington might some day attack on the southern front, either by a sudden advance up the Tagus on Talavera and Madrid, or by a blow at Avila across the Puente de Congosto defile. Either operation would be equally possible to a force based on Coria. And repeatedly during the spring rumours ran through the French lines that Hill had advanced to Plasencia or the bridge of Almaraz.

Behind the long front that lay between D’Urban’s horse at Braganza and Erskine’s horse at Brozas, the British army settled down for a very protracted period of rest and reorganization—it was to be much longer than Wellington had intended, owing to unforeseen chances. The Spanish auxiliary forces which had marched with the Allies in the autumn also dispersed: Castaños led the Army of Galicia back from the Agueda to its own country, by a long march through the Tras-os-Montes. Carlos de España put part of his division as a garrison in Ciudad Rodrigo, and lay with the rest in the mountain villages of the Sierra de Francia. Morillo, sticking close to Hill’s side, as he had done all through 1812, went back with him to the South, and wintered once more in Estremadura, at Caçeres and the neighbouring places.

On the other side, King Joseph and Marshal Soult had also to place their armies—as worn out as were those of their enemy—in winter quarters. And the choice of theirs was a much more difficult problem than that which lay before Wellington, since King Joseph had to settle not only a military but a political problem. The whole fabric of the French occupation of Spain had been dashed to pieces in the preceding summer by the loss of Andalusia, the temporary occupation of Madrid by the Allies, and the advance of the Anglo-Portuguese Army as far as Burgos. It had now to be reconstructed—but on what lines? There was clearly no possibility of reoccupying Andalusia or Estremadura: to do so would have involved a winter campaign—which was unthinkable—and an intolerable dispersion of the army which had been collected with so much difficulty for the repression of Wellington. The real alternatives possible were either (1) to reconstruct King Joseph’s Spanish kingdom, as it had existed in the spring of 1812, minus Andalusia, making Madrid the political capital and the military base of operations, or (2) to recognize that the total strength of the French armies no longer sufficed for such an ambitious scheme, and to occupy in strength only Old Castile and Leon, with the provinces beyond the Ebro, making Valladolid both the political and the military centre of operations, and abandoning Madrid altogether, or only holding it as an advanced post towards the south, on the extreme limit of French occupation.

After much debate Joseph and Jourdan chose the former plan, influenced mainly, as the Marshal writes in his Memoirs, by the fact that to give up Madrid as the capital, and to remove to Valladolid, would be a death-blow to the prestige of the Franco-Spanish monarchy. It would matter little whether Madrid were actually abandoned, or held as a precarious outpost: in either case Joseph could no longer pretend to be King of Spain[256]. In addition it must be remembered that to give up New Castile and La Mancha would leave Suchet in a position of isolation at Valencia, far too much advanced, and quite out of touch with the other armies, and also that from the administrative point of view Joseph had always regarded the revenues which he drew from Madrid and New Castile as the only solid part of his very modest and irregular budget. That a great error of choice was made is undoubted; but its ruinous nature was only to be revealed by circumstances which the King and the Marshal could not possibly have foreseen on November 20, 1812. When they made their decision neither they nor any one at Paris, or elsewhere in Western Europe, had a notion of the awful débâcle which was in progress in Russia. Napoleon had evacuated Moscow a month back; he was now in disastrous retreat from Smolensk toward the Berezina, with an army that was already crumbling under his hands. But that the whole of it was destined to perish during the next few days, and that France was to be left unguarded by any Grande Armée when the new year came, seemed an incredible contingency. Joseph and Jourdan expected to draw from the Emperor drafts and reinforcements in 1813, as they had even in 1812. If they had guessed that, instead, he would be drawing drafts and reinforcements from them, they would have adopted a different policy. But the celebrated ‘29th Bulletin’ was published in Paris only on December 3rd, and did not get to Madrid till January 6th,[257] and even that dismal document did not reveal the full extent of the ruin. It was not, indeed, till private letters from survivors of the Moscow retreat began to drift in, three weeks later, that the French head-quarters in Spain realized what the month of November had meant in Russia.

It was quite natural, then, that King Joseph should have made up his mind, at the end of the Burgos retreat, that he would occupy so much of the regained regions as was possible, and would make Madrid once more his residence and the centre of his operations. He was right in believing that he had at least four months before him for reorganization and reconstruction: Wellington was too hard hit to be able to move before April at the earliest.

It was some weeks before the King was able to spread the three French armies in the final positions which he had chosen for them. He left Salamanca himself at the head of his Guard on November 23rd, and moved on Madrid by way of Peñaranda, Arevalo and the Guadarrama Pass. He reached the capital on December 2nd, to find that it had been occupied a few days after he had left it on his march to Salamanca by the Empecinado and his partida[258]. The guerrillero chief had administered the city with the aid of an extemporized junta for more than three weeks[259]. On the approach of the King he retired, taking with him some citizens who had compromised themselves in the patriotic cause. Joseph, however, showed himself particularly gracious on his return, and endeavoured to produce an impression of the restored solidity of his régime, by holding court functions, reopening the theatres, and visiting hospitals and public institutions. The demonstration had little effect, all the more because it was accompanied by increased market-dues and the collection of arrears of taxation. It was impossible to persuade the Madrileños that the King’s return was for good, and confidence in his power was never restored.

Meanwhile the Army of the Centre reoccupied the provinces of Segovia and Guadalajara with the northern part of that of Toledo. While crossing the Guadarrama a few days after the King, its leading division was caught in a blizzard similar to that which, on the same spot, had impeded Napoleon on December 22nd, 1808, and lost a hundred men frozen or buried in the snow[260]. Soult was directed to place his head-quarters at Toledo, and to occupy that province and Avila, with so much of La Mancha as he thought proper. The Army of Portugal was allotted the provinces of Zamora, Leon, Salamanca, Palencia, and Valladolid, with head-quarters at the last-named city. The front towards Portugal and Galicia was held by one division at Leon, another at Zamora, and two at Salamanca, the rest of the eight divisions of this army being écheloned in reserve at various points in Old Castile. But at the end of December the King determined that there must be a shifting of cantonments, in order to tighten up his connexion with Suchet at Valencia. He ordered Soult to send a division to Cuenca, as a half-way house to the East Coast. To enable him to spare these troops he was relieved of the charge of the province of Avila, which was taken over by Foy, with the 1st Division of the Army of Portugal.

The extent of the French occupation in central and northern Spain at the commencement of the new year, 1813, may best be defined by a list of the Divisional head-quarters of the armies, which were, on January 15, Army of the South, 1st Division (Leval), Toledo[261]; 3rd Division (Villatte), Talavera; 4th Division (Conroux), Madridejos; 5th Division (Pécheux), Daymiel in La Mancha; 6th Division (Daricau), San Clemente in the province of Cuenca. Of the cavalry Pierre Soult’s light horse and Digeon’s dragoons were in a forward position in La Mancha, Tilly’s dragoons in reserve at Toledo. The effective total of Soult’s army was on this day 36,000 officers and men effective, beside men in hospital or detached.

Of the Army of the Centre, Darmagnac’s Division, as also the Royal Guard, was at Madrid, Cassagne’s Division at Arganda (twenty miles farther east), the Franco-Spanish Division of Casapalacios at Segovia, the cavalry dispersed at various points in a circle round Madrid. This army had just lost Palombini’s Italian Division, which had served with it during the autumn campaign of 1812. It was on its way to Burgos, to join the Army of the North, to which it properly belonged. With this deduction the Army of the Centre had still 12,000 French troops, plus Joseph’s Guards and Spaniards, who must have made up at least 5,000 more.

The Army of Portugal was much more widely dispersed. It showed the 1st Division (Foy) at Avila, 2nd Division (Barbot) at Valladolid, 3rd Division (Sarrut) at Leon, 4th Division (Fririon) at Saldaña, 5th Division (Maucune) and 8th Division (Chauvel) at Salamanca, with detachments at Ledesma and Zamora. The 6th and 7th Divisions, both weak, were in process of being cut up to strengthen the others, as will be explained later, when reorganization is in question. Of the two cavalry divisions of the Army of Portugal both Boyer’s dragoons, with head-quarters at Mayorga, and Curto’s light horse, with head-quarters at Medina de Rio Seco, were keeping a line of advanced posts on the Esla, to watch the Spanish army of Galicia. The total effective strength, omitting sick, was 42,000 men.

The three armies had thus about 95,000 men under arms to cover the enormous block of territory which they occupied. The distance from Salamanca to San Clemente is 250 miles; that from Leon to Daymiel 280 miles. It is clear that a concentration on Madrid or Valladolid would be comparatively easy. On the other hand there would be an intolerable distance for the Army of the South to cover, if Salamanca were the point chosen by an enemy for assault, or for the remoter divisions of the Army of Portugal to traverse, if Talavera were selected. But, as was obvious, there was no chance of any such blow being delivered at present, since Wellington could not possibly stir till the spring, while the Spanish regular forces in Andalusia and Murcia were negligible quantities until the Anglo-Portuguese army should be able to move.

All round the position of the French there was at this moment a broad ‘no man’s land’; for their farthest outposts were nowhere in direct touch with the enemy, but separated from him by many miles of unoccupied ground, in which neither party kept permanent posts. Between Astorga—the farthest advanced post of the Galicians—and the line of the Esla, between Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo, between Avila and Bejar, between Talavera and Coria, between Daymiel and San Clemente and the northern foot-hills of the Sierra Morena, this broad debatable land was in possession neither of the French nor of the regular armies of their enemy, but of the guerrillero bands, under a score of leaders small and great. And the difficulty of the situation for King Joseph was that, while Wellington and Castaños and Del Parque and Elio were quiet perforce at midwinter, the guerrilleros were not. Having ample spaces of unoccupied border, in which they could take refuge when pursued, and many mountain recesses, even within the zone of French occupation, where they could lie safe against anything less than a considerable flying column, they seemed to defy extermination. Even in King Joseph’s most prosperous days, when the final triumph of the French seemed probable, there had always been guerrilleros; but since Wellington’s march to Madrid and Soult’s evacuation of Andalusia, it no longer looked as if the national cause was hopeless. To collect the army which drove Wellington back to Portugal in November every district in Spain, from Biscay to La Mancha, had been stripped for a time of its army of occupation. Regions long tamed had been out of hand for four or five months, enjoying an unruly and uncomfortable freedom, in which local juntas and guerrillero chiefs, who took the pose of military governors, contended for authority. And when the French came back they found that their old prestige was gone and that it could only be restored, if it could be restored at all, by ceaseless acts of repression of the most drastic sort. For if any town or village showed any signs of willing submission, the guerrilleros descended upon it when its garrison was absent, and hung or arrested ‘Afrancesados’: while if the population (as was more usual) showed ill-will and offered passive resistance, the French imprisoned or shot the magistrates, and imposed heavy fines for disloyalty[262].

But while the whole of northern and central Spain was full of punitory raids and executions, there was one region where the trouble passed the limit of unrest, and could only be called insurrection, where the French garrisons were practically blockaded in their cantonments, and where the open country was completely out of hand. This was the sub-Pyrenean district comprising Navarre, the three Basque provinces, and the mountainous lands between Santander and Burgos. And from the strategical point of view this was the most important tract in all Spain, since the main communication with France lay through its midst, by the great road from Madrid to Bayonne through Valladolid, Vittoria, and Tolosa. We have seen in earlier pages that trouble had been endemic in these lands ever since Mina’s appearance in 1810, and the permanent establishment of those active partisans, Porlier and Longa, on the Cantabrian coast-line. The creation of Reille’s ‘Army of the Ebro’ in 1811 for the special purpose of making an end of the northern bands had failed in its purpose. But things only came to a crisis in the summer of 1812, when Sir Home Popham’s operations on the Biscay coast cleared the French out of most of the smaller ports, and gave the insurgents for the first time free communication with the sea, and the inexhaustible supplies of Britain. We have seen in the last volume[263] how the co-operation of Caffarelli with Marmont in the Salamanca campaign was completely prevented by this diversion, how Longa and Mendizabal retook Santander and for a space Bilbao, and how Mina held the Governor of Pampeluna blockaded in the strongest fortress of northern Spain. Caffarelli had recovered Bilbao in August; but when Wellington marched on Burgos in September, and the Army of the North was compelled to abandon all other operations, in order to succour the retreating Army of Portugal, the capital of Biscay and all the surrounding district passed back into the power of the Spaniards. In the whole region nothing remained in the hands of the French save the ports of Santoña, Guetaria, and San Sebastian, and a line of fortified posts along the high road from the Bidassoa to the Ebro. And in Navarre Mina held full possession of the open country, raised the taxes, established courts of justice, and (what appears more strange) set up custom-houses on the French frontier, at which he allowed non-military goods to pass into Spain on the payment of regular dues[264]. He had raised his original partida to a strength of nine battalions of infantry and two regiments of cavalry, possessed cannon, and had a munition factory working at the head of the Pyrenean valley of Roncal.

Before Wellington commenced his retreat from the Douro to the Portuguese frontier, or the armies of Soult and of Souham had joined, to bring their overpowering force against the Anglo-Portuguese, Souham, as we have already seen, had released the troops of the Army of the North, and sent them back by Burgos to the Ebro, in order that Caffarelli might reoccupy the lost districts, and make safe once more the high road from Bayonne to Miranda, and the almost equally important route along the Ebro from Miranda to Saragossa, by which he had to keep up his connexion with Suchet and the East Coast. Turning back from Valladolid on November 1st, the commander of the Army of the North spent some time in opening up the high road, on which many convoys were lying blockaded in the garrisons and unable to move, and not till December was come did he clear Bilbao, and drive the coast-land guerrilleros out of all the Biscayan harbour towns save Castro-Urdiales, which had been fortified and was firmly held. Putting off its siege for a time, he then pushed along the coast to relieve Santoña, which had been blockaded for many months by Mendizabal and Longa. He cut his way thither, and threw in a convoy and reinforcements; but as soon as he was gone the Cantabrians came back and resumed their former positions around the place. By the end of the year Caffarelli had done nothing conclusive—some shadow of occupation had been restored in Biscay, but when this was completed the new garrisons had reduced his troops available for active service to a very modest figure. And on January 7 he had to part with the best unit of them—the brigade of the Young Guard under Dumoustier, which had been left in Spain when all the rest of the Guards went off for the Russian campaign in the preceding year. He was also directed to give up to their proper owners three provisional regiments composed of drafts for the armies of Portugal and the South, which had been intercepted on their way to Valladolid, and used to stop gaps in the line of communication. In return for these deductions he was told that he should be given Palombini’s Italian Division, taken from the Army of the Centre, three depleted regiments from the Army of Portugal,[265] and one from Soult’s Army,[266] which he might fill up with drafts from the Bayonne reserve. But it took some time to move these units northward, and meanwhile Caffarelli was left with no more than 10,000 movable troops—though the Army of the North was theoretically about 40,000 strong. The Bayonne chaussée was again out of control—so much so that in January and February there were two complete breaks of some weeks, during which neither convoys nor couriers could get through from Tolosa to Burgos. Bitter complaints about this interruption of communications are to be found in the correspondence of Napoleon and King Joseph. The famous ‘29th Bulletin’ sent off from Paris on December 4th only reached Madrid on January 6th—the Emperor’s order for the reorganization of the Spanish armies, dispatched on January 4th, came to hand only on February 16th; and the reply acknowledging its receipt was not received in Paris till March 18th![267] It had travelled by the circuitous route of Valencia and Barcelona.

This was intolerable to both parties, and they joined in placing the blame for delay on the shoulders of Caffarelli, who was denounced as dilatory and wanting in energy. Jourdan accused him of deliberate disregard of all military obedience. ‘He was ostensibly under the orders of the King, but rarely corresponded with Madrid. When he did send a report, he seemed to do so rather as a matter of politeness than as the duty of a subordinate towards his hierarchical superior[268].’ On January 14th the Emperor ordered him to quit the command of the Army of the North and return to Paris. Transmitting this welcome piece of news to Joseph, the Minister of War remarked that Caffarelli had insufficient numbers, but that ‘with more activity, continuity, and method in his operations he might have been much more successful[269].’ In his place the Emperor nominated Clausel, who was on sick-leave in France, but was able to rejoin almost at once. This choice was generally approved, as his operations with the Army of Portugal after the battle of Salamanca had won him a well-deserved reputation. But all concerned, from Paris to Madrid, were destined to discover that it was not Caffarelli’s incapacity, but the difficulty of the problem, that was responsible for the unsatisfactory condition of affairs in Biscay and Navarre. The capable Clausel made little more of the game than the short-sighted and mediocre officer whom he superseded. But this could hardly have been foreseen at midwinter; the fact was not obvious till May, when (as we shall see) Clausel, though he had been lent many thousands of troops much wanted elsewhere, had to confess that his task was not completed, despite of four months of energetic effort, countless marches and counter-marches, and a dozen bloody but inconclusive defeats inflicted on the Northern insurgents.

SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER II

THE TROUBLES OF A GENERALISSIMO.
WELLINGTON AT CADIZ AND FRENEDA

Having sent his war-worn divisions into winter quarters, where they were to remain with little change of billets till the next April, Wellington could turn to the consideration of many political and military problems for which he had been granted little leisure during the long stress of the autumn campaign. He fixed himself down at his old frontier head-quarters of 1811 and 1812, the village of Freneda near the Coa, between Almeida and Fuentes de Oñoro. It was a small and bleak place: observers often wondered why, with the whole of Portugal before him, he chose it for month-long residence in the worst time of the year. But in the winter of 1812-13 he remained stationary there from the end of November to the latter half of May—save for one rapid excursion to Cadiz and Lisbon, which took him away from December 12th to January 25th—an odd time for cross-country travelling in the Peninsula. Freneda had no amenities of any kind—save indeed that it was in the midst of a good fox-hunting country, a rare thing in Portugal. The Commander-in-Chief, on returning to his old base of operations, picked up his pack of hounds, and treated himself not infrequently to the one sort of field-sport in which he had a real delight. In other respects the village was dull and inconvenient—it could only just house his very small general staff; it was by no means a central point among the cantonments of his army; and its remoteness from Lisbon caused a delay of two or three days in all his correspondence to and from home. The only things to be said in its favour were that it was so close to the front line of the army on the Agueda that there would be no possibility of missing any information as to hostile movements, and that its remoteness and inaccessibility preserved the Commander-in-Chief from many interviews with useless and inconvenient visitors, who would have thronged around him if he had lodged in Lisbon. The intriguer, the man with a grievance, or the man with a job in hand, could not easily get to windy Freneda.

Only a steady perusal of Wellington’s Original and Supplementary Dispatches can give the chronicler an idea of the varied nature of his troubles and worries, during the winter that followed the Salamanca campaign. They were not merely those of an ordinary general in command of an army: his political position had now grown so important that not only did all happenings in the Peninsula fall within his sphere, but the Cabinet at home was continually consulting him on questions of general European importance. And in the months after Napoleon’s Russian débâcle the politics of Europe came to a crisis, such as had never been seen since first he assumed the Imperial crown. His domination was breaking up: his prestige had received a mortal wound: alliances were shifting: the wildest enterprises were advocated. There were those at home who proposed that Wellington should take his Peninsula army to Germany—or to La Vendée—and others who wanted to saddle him with a large Russian auxiliary force to be brought by sea from Reval or Odessa. On every scheme, however wild, he had to give his opinion.

But, placing in order of importance the many worries that beset Head-Quarters at Freneda, it would seem that the most constant and prolific source of trouble was a circumstance which ought rather to have lessened than increased Wellington’s military difficulties—if only men had been other than they were. It will be remembered that as early as 1809 the project of making him Generalissimo of all the Spanish armies had been mooted and rejected[270]. He had expressed his opinion that Spanish national pride made it impossible. ‘I am much flattered,’ he had written to the British Minister, ‘by the notion entertained by some of the people in authority at Seville of appointing me to the command of the Spanish Armies. I believe it was considered an object of great importance in England that the Commander-in-Chief of the British troops should have that situation. But it is one more likely to be attained by refraining from pressing it, and leaving it to the Spaniards themselves to discover the expediency of the arrangement, than by any suggestion on our parts.’

Much water had flowed under the bridge since 1809. The appointment had not come after Talavera or Bussaco, nor after the horrible disasters of Ocaña, the Sierra Morena, and the surrender of Valencia. But the summer campaign of 1812 had at last convinced the Cortes that the British general, who had so often been criticized and accused of selfishness and reluctance to risk anything for the common cause of the Allies, was the inevitable man. In the full flush of joy and confidence that followed the battle of Salamanca and the triumphal entry into Madrid, a bill was laid before the Assembly to appoint Wellington generalissimo of all the Spanish forces. It was supported by most of the leading men of the ‘Liberal’ party, introduced by the ex-regent Cisgar, and barely opposed by the ‘Serviles’, though one clerical member—Creux, afterwards Archbishop of Tarragona—raised objections to giving such a command to any foreigner, and expatiated on the selfish character of British commercial policy. Despite of such murmurs, the motion was carried by an immense majority, and the President of the Cortes was authorized to direct the Council of Regency to make the offer to Wellington. The form of words ran that considering the advantages of unity in command, and the urgent necessity for utilizing to the full the recent glorious triumphs of the allied arms, it was decreed that as long as the allied forces were co-operating in the defence of the Peninsula ‘Captain-General the Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo’ should have conferred upon him the supreme command of all of them, to be exercised in accordance with general orders, his authority to extend over all the provinces of the Peninsula. And the ‘illustrious chief’ was directed to correspond with the National Government through the Secretary of the War Office[271].

This decree reached Wellington on October 2, while he lay at Villatoro, conducting the siege of Burgos. He resolved to take up the long-delayed commission, provided that he should receive the permission of the Prince Regent to do so, and sent, through his brother at Cadiz, a letter of conditional acceptance. His consent to serve was not couched in very enthusiastic terms: being anxious to do all that could be done to support the legitimate quarrel of the Spanish nation with France, he had no objection to taking upon himself the additional labour and responsibility of commanding the Spanish armies. The delay which must be required, for getting leave from the Prince Regent to make a formal acceptance of the offer, seemed to him of secondary importance, because he was already in the habit of communicating his general views on operations to the Spanish generals, and of making suggestions to them, which always received the utmost attention. ‘I am convinced they will continue the same practice, even though I am not invested with the supreme command.’ These phrases look like deliberate sarcasm, considering Wellington’s former relations with Cuesta, Del Parque, Blake, and Mendizabal. But they probably mean no more than that the present commanders of the forces which were actually co-operating with him in 1812, Castaños, Morillo, and Carlos de España, had been loyal and obliging. Finally, ‘he hopes that in the new and prominent situation in which he is to be placed, he will have not only the full support but the confidence of the Spanish Government, Cortes, and nation[272].’

The inner meaning of these somewhat double-edged phrases is explained in a memorandum for Lord Bathurst, the British Secretary of State for War, which was sent home under the same cover as the Cadiz document[273]. It was eminently not a letter to be shown to Spaniards, and contained some of the most bitter expressions concerning them which Wellington ever penned. No use could be got out of their armies, he wrote, unless they were under his control. They had lost nearly all their guns and cavalry, and generally could not act in bodies separate from the Allied Army. Their discipline, equipment, and organization was as bad as ever: yet if put in line with his own troops they might behave quite well. He would prevent by good management repetitions of those terrible disasters to individual armies which had so often happened in past years. But his power over them must be made real, and for that purpose he intended to apply the financial screw. All subsidies advanced by the British Government to Spain must for the future be expended wholly on such Spanish troops as were actually employed in co-operation with the Anglo-Portuguese army, or else those troops would become a fresh burden on the military chest. And in his letter to Cadiz he had been careful to show that he did not intend to allow the Spanish Government to dictate a military policy to him, because they had placed their troops at his disposition.

These letters, sent off from the camp before Burgos on October 5, got to London on October 20, and the Prince Regent’s approbation of Wellington’s acceptance of the offer from the Cortes was granted at once[274]. The dispatch conveying it was delivered at Cadiz on the 17th of November, and on the 20th the Cortes confirmed its former decree, and sent off a formal warrant of appointment to the new generalissimo, which reached him at Freneda on December 4th. The confirmation was not made with such general approval as the original appointment—and for good reason. By this time it had become evident that Wellington was not about to drive the French over the Pyrenees: he had raised the siege of Burgos, and when the Cortes repeated their vote, was known to be in full retreat for Salamanca. Hopes from his success were no longer so high as they had been in September, and a nasty jar had been given to the whole arrangement by the mutinous conduct of Ballasteros, who (as has been shown in an earlier chapter) had issued a manifesto against all submission to foreign generals, and had refused to obey Wellington’s directions at a critical moment. It is true that Ballasteros had been arrested and imprisoned, without any consequent trouble[275]; but it was known that there were other Spanish generals who were not without sympathy with his views.

Having received his formal nomination as generalissimo, Wellington wrote to Carvajal, the Minister of War, on December 4th, one of the most stringent letters that any secretary of state has ever received. It reminds the reader of one of Napoleon’s epistles to Clarke or King Joseph. The Spanish Government, he said, had now a right to expect from him an accurate representation of facts, and he was going to perform this duty. The discipline of the Spanish armies was in the very lowest state; their efficiency was much deteriorated. How could any army be expected to keep order when neither officers nor men had received any pay for months—or even for years? But it was not financial arrears that explained all defects: even in corps—like those of the Galician and Estremaduran armies—which had recently been re-clothed and regularly paid by Wellington’s own exertions, insubordination and indiscipline were rife: they were as little to be depended upon in the field as the rest. The officers, with some few exceptions, were absolutely slack and careless: the desertion from the ranks immense. He had hesitated at accepting the command, when he thought of what he had seen of the Spanish troops of late. But having undertaken it, he would not relinquish the task because it was laborious and of doubtful success. There were four demands which he must make as a preliminary condition: the Government must give him power—

(1) To have under his control all promotions and appointments to command;

(2) To dismiss from the service any officer whom he thought deserving of such punishment;

(3) To apply the whole war-budget to such services as he might choose;

(4) To appoint to his head-quarters a Spanish chief-of-the-staff, to whom all military reports from the whole kingdom should be sent: so that nothing should take place without his knowledge. Through this officer he would correspond with the Regency, and send them regular reports.

He then proceeded to definite demands as to administration. The present state of military organization was absurd, burdensome, and expensive. The realm was overrun with unnecessary army-commanders and captain-generals, with immense and useless staffs. ‘For example, General Castaños is most usefully employed as commander of the 5th Army, whose territory consists of Estremadura and Castile. But there is a captain-general and a large staff in each of these provinces, though the troops in the former are not enough to make a full garrison for Badajoz, or those in the latter to make a full garrison for Ciudad Rodrigo[276].’ The captain-generals and their staffs have nothing to administer, are quite useless, and absorb money which should go to the army. In the same way the 2nd (Valencian) and 3rd (Murcian) Armies, together have a strength equivalent to two divisions, yet have each the full military and civil staff of a complete army[277]. So has the 9th (Cantabrian) Army, which is composed entirely of guerrillero bands. Only the Andalusian and Galician troops are sufficiently numerous to be worth calling armies at all.

The first thing to do is to cut down unnecessary commanders-in-chief and staffs. The Galician, Castilian, and Estremaduran commands should be at once amalgamated, and put under Castaños, with one single staff for all three. Probably the same should be done with the Andalusian, Murcian, and Valencian commands. An immense body of superfluous staff-officers must be sent back to Cadiz at once. As a second step he would have to revise the organization of the country into captain-generalships and intendancies. Captain-generals often hampered army-commanders; intendants must probably be put under military authority. This was no doubt wrong in principle. But the civil intendant was powerless, in a country just liberated from the enemy and full of trouble and disorder. He could not exert authority unless he were lent military assistance: yet he would probably fall out with the military chief, because their ends would be divergent[278]. ‘When the enemy is still in the country that must be done which tends most directly to drive him out—whatever constitutional principles may be violated in the process[279].’

Finally, Wellington resolved that he must come down to Cadiz in person to urge his schemes of reorganization on the Regency and the Cortes—obviously a most invidious task, since no nation likes to have administrative reforms thrust upon it by a foreigner—more especially by a foreigner whose tone is dictatorial and whose phrases seem almost deliberately worded so as to wound national pride.

On December 12th he started out to deal with the Cadiz bureaucrats, planning to cover the whole 300 miles from Freneda in six days. As a matter of fact he took eleven, partly because he was smitten with lumbago, which made riding painful, partly because he was delayed one night in the Pass of Perales, and two at Albuquerque, by floods, which made mountain-streams impassable for many hours. Immediately on reaching the seat of government, where he was received with great state if with little real cordiality, he started on his campaign against the Regency, the Cortes, and the Minister of War. It is much to the credit of the Spaniards that, though many of his demands were unpalatable, the greater part of them were conceded with slight variation of terms. It is curious to note the points on which the Regency proved recalcitrant and started argument. Of the four great preliminary conditions which Wellington exacted, they granted at once that which seemed the most important of all—the creation of a Spanish chief-of-the-staff to be attached to Wellington’s head-quarters, and conceded that all military correspondence should pass through his hands. The person selected was General Wimpffen, a Spanish-Swiss officer, of whom we have had to speak occasionally in dealing with Catalonian affairs—he had been Henry O’Donnell’s adjutant-general in 1810. He was a non-political soldier of good abilities, and Wellington found him laborious and obliging: there seems never to have been any friction between them. Secondly, the Regency granted the great point that the whole British subsidy should be applied to such military expenses as Wellington should designate: and they afterwards went so far as to order that in the recovered provinces nine-tenths of the taxes raised should be devoted to military purposes. But they haggled on the two conditions dealing with military patronage. Instead of giving the generalissimo power to revise all appointments, they proposed that ‘no officer should be promoted to a chief command, or the command of a division, or any extraordinary command, except at the recommendation of the general-in-chief. With regard to other promotions the rules of the Spanish service shall be strictly observed.’ This left all patronage from the rank of brigadier-general downward in the hands of the Minister of War and the Cortes. And whereas Wellington had proposed, as his second condition, that he should have power to cashier any officer whom he considered deserving of such punishment, the Regents offered him only the right of suspending and sending away from the army in the field officers guilty of grave misconduct[280].

It is clear that these variations on the original proposals had two main objects. The Spaniards evidently thought that if Wellington had every officer down to the lowest under his thumb, liable to be cashiered without any appeal, he might use this tremendous power to stock the whole army with men of one political colour, and make it into a machine quite independent of the Government, and capable of being turned against it. And similarly there was a great difference between the right to send an officer away from the front, and the right to drive him out of the army. To be put on half-pay, or on administrative duty in some office at Cadiz, was a much less terrible fate than cashiering.

It must be remembered that many Spaniards thought Wellington capable of aiming at a military dictatorship, to which he might be helped by generals who were considered Anglophils, such as Castaños, his nephew and chief-of-the-staff Giron, or Morillo. And others believed that British policy secretly desired the seizure of Cadiz and Minorca and the reduction of Spain to a Protectorate. Now if there had been any truth in these absurd suspicions, there is no doubt that the powers which Wellington demanded would have given him the chance of carrying out such designs. And there were an infinite number of Spanish officers, from generals like La Peña down to petty governors and members of provincial staffs, who had come into direct contact with Wellington, and knew his unflattering opinion of them. All these men in disgrace, or disgruntled placemen, thought that the new generalissimo would start his career by a general cashiering of those against whom he had an old grudge.

Hence pressure was brought to bear upon the Regents and the Cortes from many and diverse quarters, with the common plea that there must be no British military dictatorship, and that Spanish officers must be protected from possible persecution and oppression. The underlying idea was that if the mass of the middle and lower grades in the army were out of Wellington’s supervision, it did not matter so much who held the post of army-commander or captain-general. For the chiefs, though in influential posts, were few, and would not be able to carry their subordinates with them in any unpopular movement dictated to them by the generalissimo.

After much discussion, and with reluctance[281], Wellington accepted the modifications—thinking that the other things conceded gave him practically all that he needed. He was to find out his error in the year that followed. He had not guarded himself against seeing officers with whom he was satisfied removed from his field-army under the pretence of promotion, or of transference to other duties, or of political offences. He had forgotten to demand that he should have the power of retaining as much as that of dismissing generals. In this way he was deprived of the services of Castaños and afterwards of Giron, both of whom he was anxious to keep. Successors technically unobjectionable, whom he had no wish to ‘blackball,’ were substituted for them, to his deep regret. And another evasion of his intention was that officers whom he had intended to disgrace, and had removed from the front, were given posts elsewhere which could not be called ‘divisional’ or ‘separate’ commands, but were quite desirable; and so while the letter of the bargain was kept, the purpose of inflicting punishment on such people was foiled.

Another long controversy was provoked by Wellington’s proposal that the small armies should be amalgamated, and that unnecessary captain-generals with their staffs should be got rid of. Much but not all of what he asked was conceded. The Murcian and Valencian armies were consolidated, and given the new name of the ‘Second Army’—the Catalan army being still the ‘First Army’. But they were not amalgamated with the Andalusian command (now the ‘Third Army’), as Wellington suggested. And similarly the Estremaduran, Castilian, and Galician armies, with the outlying Cantabrian division, ceased to be the 5th, 6th, and 7th Armies, and took the new name of the Fourth. And a great reduction of staffs and removal of contending military authorities was procured, by nominating Elio, commander of the new 2nd Army, to be Captain-General of Murcia and Valencia, Del Parque of the 3rd Army to be Captain-General of Granada and Jaen, and Castaños to be Captain-General alike of Estremadura, Galicia, and Castile. This was all to the good, but the Cortes refused Wellington’s other proposal, that the civil government in each province should be placed under the control of the army-commanders. Declaring that it was constitutionally impossible to abolish the independence of the civil power, the Cortes yet conceded that the jefe político (or provincial prefect) and the Intendant should obey the Captain-General ‘in all matters relating to the Army[282],’ also that nine-tenths of the revenue in each province should be allocated to the military budget. This would have worked if all parties concerned had been both willing and competent; but it remained a melancholy fact throughout the next campaign that the army-commanders could seldom get either money or food from the civil authorities, and that most essential operations were delayed by the absolute impossibility of moving large bodies of men without adequate magazines or a fair supply of money. The only regular income of the army was that drawn from the British subsidy.

But the worst of Wellington’s troubles were yet some months ahead. The Regency with which he had made his bargain[283] was displaced in March 1813, and succeeded by another. The Cortes was jealous of the Executive, and had determined to make for itself a supreme authority which should have neither brains nor energy. The subject of quarrel chosen was the old Regency’s alleged slackness in carrying out a recent Act which had abolished that moribund abuse the Inquisition[284]. After an all-night sitting and a vote of censure, the Regents were dismissed, and replaced by a group appointed under an absurd principle borrowed from the old régime, which was applied because it suited the desires of the assembly for the moment. It was composed of the three senior members of the Council of State—senility and weakness being desired. These were the Cardinal Bourbon—Archbishop of Toledo—an aged scion of the royal house, and the Councillors Pedro Agar and Gabriel Cisgar, who had been Regents before, but had been got rid of for incompetence. Thus all real power went to the Chamber itself—the Regency having become a negligible quantity. Wellington’s position was decidedly impaired by the change—largely because a new minister-of-war had come into office, General Juan O’Donoju, of whom he had an evil memory as Cuesta’s chief-of-the-staff during the Talavera campaign. This clever, shifty, and contentious Irish-Spanish officer broached the theory that the agreement of December 1812 did not bind the new Regents, because they had never assented to it, and because it was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution that a foreigner should have the power to appoint or dismiss Spanish generals.

When Henry Wellesley at Cadiz, instructed by his brother, turned his heaviest diplomatic batteries[285] upon the Regents, and privately warned the leading members of the Cortes of the awkward results that would follow the repudiation of the agreement, O’Donoju was disavowed but not displaced. He continued to give perpetual trouble through the following summer by his persistent intrigues. Wellington was by no means satisfied with the attempts that were made to propitiate him, by the formal recognition of his status as generalissimo by the new Regents, and the gift of a great estate in Granada, the royal domain of Soto de Roma, which had been usurped by Godoy. He did not want grants but real authority. Of his future troubles we shall have to speak in their proper place.

The most enduring of them was provincial maladministration, which rendered so many of his orders futile. For usually when he directed a division to move, he was informed that it was destitute of both munitions and transport[286]. And changes of organization were often made against his protests—e. g. a new army regulation cut down all regimental formations to a single battalion of very heavy strength (1,200 bayonets). Wellington would have preferred a two-battalion formation, in which the second unit should act as a dépôt and feeder to the first[287]. He complained that if a regiment was badly cut up in action, there would be no machinery for keeping it up to a decent average. The experience of the British army with regard to single-battalion corps had been conclusive against the system for the last five years of Peninsular service. But his protests were vain—internal organization of units did not come within the wording of his powers as generalissimo, and the new organization continued, dozens of second battalions being scrapped.

The net result was that, when Wellington took the field in May 1813, he only had with him two of Castaños’s divisions and three of those of the Army of Galicia—less than 25,000 men. The Andalusian ‘Army of Reserve,’ which had been promised to him, started late for want of organization, moved slowly for want of magazines, and only reached the front when the battle of Vittoria had been won and the French had been expelled from Spain[288]. The Cortes had at least 160,000 men under arms; not a sixth part of them were available during the decisive operations. But of this more in its proper place.

Portugal, as usual, contributed its share to the troubles of the Commander-in-Chief, though they were but trifling compared to the Spanish problems. The Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro was an expensive person, who actually at the worst of the war drew money out of Portugal from the Braganza private domains, though he had all the revenues of Brazil to play with[289]. Moreover, he had a tiresome habit of sending incompetent hangers-on to Europe, with a request that berths might be found for them. But he was not actively noxious—the same could not be said of his wife, the Spanish princess Carlotta, who was still harping on her natural claim to be Regent of Spain on behalf of her imprisoned brother Ferdinand, and still interfered from time to time at Cadiz, by ordering the small knot of deputies who depended on her to attack the existing regency, or to vote in incalculable ways on questions of domestic politics. Fortunately she was so great a clerical and reactionary that the ‘Liberal’ majority in the Cortes had secretly resolved that she should never get into power. When the old regency was evicted in March 1813, it was suspected that the Cardinal Bourbon was put at the head of the succeeding body mainly because the presence of a prince of the blood in the Executive seemed to make it unnecessary to import another member of the royal house. For this small mercy Henry Wellesley wrote a letter of thanksgiving to his brother at the front. It was fortunate that the Prince Regent himself gave no encouragement to his wife’s ambitions, being as indolent as she was active, and very jealous of her secret intrigues with foreigners. At one time during the winter of 1812-13 she showed an intention of departing for Europe, but with the assistance of the British ambassador João succeeded in frustrating her scheme for appearing at Cadiz in person to claim her supposed rights.

Meanwhile the civil government of Portugal continued to be directed by the existing Council of Regency, of whom the majority were honest if not always well-advised. It is true that Wellington’s old enemies[290] the Patriarch of Lisbon and the Principal Sousa still remained members of it: the determination to evict them which he had declared in 1810 was never carried out—the one was so powerful from his position in the Church, the other from the influence of the widespread Sousa family, that in the end he left them undisturbed. They were perhaps less dangerous in the Regency than out of it, with their hysterical appeals to narrow national sentiment, protests against the doings of their colleagues, and perpetual intrigues. A frondeur is partly muzzled when he holds office. And in practical administration they were steadily voted down by the majority of the Regency, consisting of the Marquis of Olhão, the Conde de Redondo[291], Dr. Nogueira, and last but not least the British Minister Sir Charles Stuart, whose presence on the board was perhaps necessary, but certainly very trying to Portuguese amour-propre. The three native regents were genuine patriots, and good friends of the alliance, but a little antiquated in their views as to administration and finance. The Secretary of State, Miguel Forjaz, to whom so many of Wellington’s letters are addressed, was a much more modern personage with a broader intelligence: indeed, Wellington considered him on the whole the most capable statesman in the Peninsula.

There were two standing sources of friction between the British army and the Portuguese Regency—both inevitable, and both tiresome from the point of view of the necessary entente between two allied nations. The more irritating but less important was trouble caused by the daily movement of troops, especially troops in small bodies, or individual officers. A perusal of the records of many scores of courts martial, as well as of the correspondence of Wellington and Beresford, leads to the conclusion that there were grave faults on both sides. Parties of British soldiers on the march, when unaccompanied by an officer, were given to the illegal ‘embargoing’ of carts or mules, to the extortion of food by force or threats, to mishandling of the peasantry when denied what they asked: occasionally they went so far as acts of murder or arson[292]. And it cannot be denied that individual officers of unsatisfactory type were occasionally guilty of gross misconduct—drunken orgies, wanton disregard of legal authority in requisitions, even acts of insult or assault on local magistrates[293]. On the other hand, the provocation was often considerable—there were plenty of cases established of the denial of legal billets, which kept parties waiting in the rain for hours, of wanton incivility, of attempts at extortion in prices, of actual highway robbery[294], and false accusations brought up to cover neglect of duty. One of Wellington’s main complaints was that he had to waste time in investigating imaginary outrages, which, on inquiry, turned out to have been invented to serve as countercharges against accusations of slackness or misfeasance. He was determined that outrages by the army should cease—indeed, he hanged, first and last, some fifty soldiers for plunder accompanied with violence, an offence which he would never pardon. But the Portuguese magistrates were prone to make accusations, and then to protest against having to support them by evidence. By a curious turn of official pride many of them refused to testify before courts martial, or even to send witnesses to appear before such bodies, standing to the theory that it was beneath the dignity of a magistrate to come with evidence before a foreign military tribunal[295]. The result of this was that offenders brought up for trial, and often probably guilty, had to be acquitted for lack of proof. On the other hand, accusations, made and supported, were sometimes found to be entirely groundless—in one supposed murder case, the alleged corpse was discovered in perfect health; in another, a magistrate who accused a British officer of assault was found to have been dining with him and frequenting his quarters, long after the supposed offence[296].

The Portuguese Regency was bound to stand up in defence of its magistrates—Wellington, though always ready to punish proved crimes, was determined not to take accusation as equivalent to conviction, merely because it was preferred by a constituted authority. Hence came perpetual friction and recrimination; that things were no worse was certainly due to the fact that the commander-in-chief’s iron discipline, and rigorous dealing with his own people, could not fail to impress the Portuguese with the fact that he was always trying to be just.

The other and more fundamentally dangerous source of wrangling in Portugal was finance. There could be no disputing the fact that the part of the army which was not directly maintained from the British subsidy was often six months in arrears of pay, and still more often on the edge of starvation. Portuguese paper money, in which many transactions had to take place, and which could be legally used for a certain percentage of all army payments, was not only at a habitual discount of at least 25 percent., but also fluctuating in exchange-value from day to day. Hence came all manner of illicit speculations by merchants, both British and Portuguese, who were always trying to buy Government paper at under its quotation for the day, and to put it off on others at an exaggerated estimate. The same took place with Commissariat Warrants, which unscrupulous brokers bought from the ignorant peasantry for a mere song, after setting rumours about concerning impending bankruptcy of the state, and then cashed at full face-value in Lisbon or London.

The Regency maintained that all the trouble came from the simple fact that the war had placed upon the back of Portugal, a small country, half of whose territory had been wasted by Soult and Masséna in 1809 and 1810, a much greater burden than could be borne. The armed forces alone—some 50,000 regular troops, and often as many militia in the garrisons—were so many hands taken away from agriculture, the only staple industry of the land. Money was going out of the realm year by year to purchase wheat, because the people could not produce enough to maintain their existence. Prices had risen to heights that terrified those who remembered pre-war days: the pay of the army was enormous compared to the rates before 1808, and much of it was going, under Marshal Beresford’s system, to the British officers who were now holding a clear majority of all the senior ranks and commands. All available money went to the army, and the civil administration was starved. The Regency acknowledged the deplorable state of its finances, but could only suggest remedies which had grave inconveniences. Another British loan was asked for; but considering the heavy subsidy that Portugal was receiving already, the British Government gave little encouragement to such an idea[297]. The Portuguese minister in London (the Conde de Funchal, one of the Sousas) suggested a large measure of confiscation of Church and Crown lands—which could then be sold. But this would involve a quarrel with the Church party in Portugal, who had been loyal supporters of the British alliance, and probably with the Prince Regent also, since he was drawing a private income from the Braganza estates. It might also produce a general shock to national credit, for it would deal a blow to the general stability of society, and terrify all landholders. Moreover, it appeared doubtful if purchasers of Church lands would present themselves: and Crown lands were largely uncultivated and worthless tracts in the Alemtejo[298]. The measure was carried out, indeed, many years later, during the civil wars of Miguel and Maria; but then it came as a consequence of a purely domestic struggle, in which the Church party had taken the beaten side. The circumstances of 1813 were entirely different. A third expedient suggested was the establishment of a National Bank, after the model of the Bank of England, which should take over the management of the public debt and currency. But credit and guarantees must be at the back of any such association, and unless the British Government were ready to become the guarantor (which was impossible) it was hard to see what new securities could be found.

Wellington’s panacea for financial distress was not heroic measures but careful and honest administration of details. He held that there was great slackness and partiality in the raising and collection of taxes, and that the amount received could be very largely increased by the abolition of abuses. In a very long memorandum, addressed to the Prince Regent João in April 1813, he launched out into an indictment of the whole financial system of the realm. ‘The great cities and even some of the smaller places of the kingdom have gained by the war: the mercantile class generally has enriched itself by the great disbursements which the army makes in cash: there are individuals in Lisbon and Oporto who have amassed immense sums. The fact is not denied that the “tributes” regularly established at Lisbon and Oporto, and the contribution of ten per cent. on the profits of the mercantile class are not really paid to the state.... I have recommended the adoption of methods by which the taxes might be really and actually collected, and merchants and capitalists really pay the tenth of their annual profits as an extraordinary contribution for the war.... It remains for the Government to explain to your Royal Highness the reasons why it will not put them in practice—or some other expedient which might render the revenue of the state equal to its expenses.’ He then proceeds to urge supervision of a Custom House notorious for letting off powerful importers overlightly, and of the collectors of land-revenue, who were allowed to keep state balances in their hands for months without paying them in to the Treasury[299].

In letters to Charles Stuart[300] as a member of the Regency Wellington let out in much more unguarded terms. The root of corruption was in the mercantile community, who had squared the minor bureaucracy. The army and state would have been ruined long ago, but for his own protests and insistence, by the jobbers of Lisbon, not only Portuguese, Jews, cosmopolitans of all sorts, but ‘sharks calling themselves British merchants.’ The Government is ‘teased into disapprobation of good measures by the merchants, who are interested in their being discontinued. But when it is necessary to carry on an expensive system of war with one-sixth of the money in specie necessary, we must consider questions and adopt measures of this description, and we ought to have the support and confidence of your Government in adopting them.’

Making allowance alike for the difficulties of the Regency, and the irritation of the much-worried general, it seems fair to say that on the one hand Wellington was right in denouncing jobbery and urging administrative reforms, but that on the other hand no such reforms, however sweeping, would have sufficed to make both ends balance in the revenue of the exhausted kingdom of Portugal. The task was too heavy—but the eighteenth-century slackness and corruption, which still survived in too many corners of the bureaucracy, made it even heavier than it need have been. It is probable that Wellington’s palliatives would have failed to make receipts meet expenditure, however hardly the screw might have been turned. But a levy of 10 per cent. on commercial profits does not look very heavy to the taxpayer of 1921!

This is a military not an economic or a financial history; it is unnecessary to go further into Portuguese problems. The main thing to be remembered is that they bulked large in the correspondence of the harassed chief, who sat writing minutes on all topics, civil no less than strategical, in his desolate head-quarters at Freneda.

SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER III

WELLINGTON AND WHITEHALL

The position which Wellington had won himself by five years of successful campaigning in the Peninsula was such as no British commander since Marlborough had enjoyed. His reputation was now European; his views, not merely on the Spanish struggle but on the general politics of the Continent, had to be taken into consideration by the Ministry. He was no longer an officer to whom orders could be sent, to be carried out whether he liked them or not. He had become a political personage, whose views must be ascertained before any wide-reaching decision as to the struggle with Napoleon was taken. In 1813 it is not too much to say that he exercised a determining influence not only on the military policy of Britain, but on the whole course of the Great War: as we shall presently see, the triumph of Vittoria had the most marked and direct effect on the action of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. But even before Vittoria he had asserted his will in many ways—he had stopped some projects and approved others. The factious resignation of his brother Lord Wellesley from the Perceval Cabinet had not impaired his position, nor had the coming into office of Lord Liverpool, when Perceval perished by the bullet of a crazy assassin a month after the fall of Badajoz. Wellington’s correspondence with the War Minister, Lord Bathurst, in 1813, is as confidential and amicable on both sides as had been the case when the domineering Wellesley had been in power: with the new Prime Minister, Liverpool, there is no trace of any friction whatever—rather every sign of reciprocal respect.

But the position which Wellington had achieved had its drawbacks as well as its advantages. Since it had become habitual for the Cabinet to ask his opinion on high military matters not connected with the Peninsula, an endless vista of troubles was opened up before him, for (as always happens in times of exceptional crisis) the Ministry at home was being plagued with all manner of solicitations from every quarter of Europe, to which answers were required.

While Wellington had been trailing back reluctantly from Burgos to Ciudad Rodrigo, Napoleon had been conducting a retreat of a very different kind from Moscow to the Berezina, a retreat whose character and consequences were not known in London or in Spain for some weeks later. He had left Moscow on October 19th, had dictated the famous 29th Bulletin, acknowledging the wreck of his project and the ruin of his army, at Molodetchno on December 3rd, and had started on his headlong flight to Paris on December 5th, leaving the small remnant of his host to perish in the snow. He reached the Tuileries on the night of December 18th, on the heels of the disastrous bulletin, which his ministers had only received thirty-six hours before, on the preceding day[301]. In London the fact that the Russian expedition had failed was well known by the end of November, but the extent of the failure was only realized when the 29th Bulletin got to Lord Liverpool’s hands, by the usual smugglers’ route, on December 21st, rather less than five days after its arrival in Paris[302].

The Prime Minister sat down next morning to communicate the fact to Wellington, and to consult him upon the logical consequences. ‘There has been,’ he wrote, ‘no example within the last twenty years, among all the extraordinary events of the French Revolution, of such a change of fortune as Bonaparte has experienced during the last five months. The most formidable army ever collected by Bonaparte has been substantially destroyed. It only remains to be ascertained whether he will succeed in escaping himself—and with what remnant of an army.... Under these circumstances the question naturally occurs whether he will leave the French army in Spain? We have a report that he has already ordered 40,000 men from that country to rejoin him—but it is only a report. I am inclined, however, to be of opinion that he will withdraw the greater part of his forces from Spain. The only efficient French Army at the present moment in existence is that under Soult: and whatever it may cost Bonaparte to abandon Spain, I think he will prefer that alternative to the loss of Germany. I may be wrong in this speculation, but give you my reasons, and I am particularly desirous of calling your attention to this view of the subject, in order that you may take the necessary means for obtaining early information of the movements of any French divisions toward the frontier, and that you may consider what measures may be proper to be adopted if my conjecture should be realized[303].’

Thus on the first day after the arrival of the epoch-making bulletin, and before it was known that Napoleon himself had reached Paris, the great strategical question of the winter of 1812-13 was formulated, and put before Wellington. Will the French evacuate Spain? and, if so, what should be done with the British Army in the Peninsula? There were three possible contingencies—(1) the Emperor might abandon Spain altogether, in order to have the nucleus of an army ready for the campaign of 1813 in Germany, or (2) he might not evacuate Spain altogether, but might cut down his forces there, and order them to stand on the defensive only, or (3) he might value his prestige so highly that he would take little or nothing in the way of troops from the Peninsula, and endeavour to make head against the Russians with whatever remnant of an army might be left him in the North, with the conscripts of 1813, and the levies of the German States—if the latter should remain obedient to him[304].

At first it seemed as if the third and least likely of these three hypotheses was the correct one. For strange as it might appear, considering what had happened in Russia, Wellington could detect no signs of any great body of French troops being moved towards the Pyrenees. So far was this from being the case, that the cantonments adopted by the enemy in December were so widely spread to the South, that the only possible deduction that could be made was that the whole of the armies of 1812 were being kept in Spain. We now know that the reason for this was that the communications between Madrid and Paris were so bad, that Napoleon’s orders to his brother to draw in towards the North, and send large drafts and detachments to France, only reached their destination in February. For many weeks Wellington could report no such movements as Lord Liverpool had expected.

It was not till March 10th that the much-desired news began to come to hand[305], time having elapsed sufficient to allow of King Joseph beginning to carry out the Emperor’s orders. On that day Wellington was able to send Lord Bathurst intelligence which seemed to prove that the second hypothesis, not the third, was going to prove the correct one: i. e. there was about to be a certain deduction from the French armies in Spain, which would make it unlikely that they would take the offensive, but nevertheless the main body of them was still to be left in the Peninsula. Though the enemy had made no move of importance, it was certain that Soult and Caffarelli had been recalled to France—the latter taking with him the troops of the Imperial Guard, which had hitherto formed part of the Army of the North. To replace the latter Palombini’s division had been moved from near Madrid to Biscay. A large draft of artillery had been sent back to France, and twelve (it was really twenty-five) picked men for the Imperial Guard from each battalion of the Army of Spain. On the other hand, a body of 4,000 men—probably convalescents or conscripts—had come down from Bayonne to Burgos[306]. Seven days later a more important general move could be detected: not only had Soult gone towards France with a heavy column of drafts, but the French had evacuated La Mancha, the troops formerly there having retired north to the province of Avila[307]. Again, a week later, on March 24th, it became known[308] that the Army of the Centre had moved up towards the Douro, and that King Joseph and his Court were about to quit Madrid. A little later this move was found to have taken place: the enemy had evacuated a broad stretch of territory, and ‘concentrated very much toward the Douro[309].’ On the same day an intercepted letter, from General Lucotte at Paris to King Joseph, let Wellington into the main secrets of the enemy: the General reported to his master that the Emperor’s affairs were in a bad way, that there would be no men and very little money for Spain, and that he must make the best of what resources he had. His Imperial Majesty was in a captious and petulant mood, blaming everything done by everybody beyond the Pyrenees, but more especially his brother’s neglect to keep open the communication with France and to hunt down the northern insurgents[310].

This useful glimpse into the mentality of the enemy made it abundantly clear that Lord Liverpool’s original theory, that Napoleon would withdraw his whole army from Spain in order to hold down Germany, was perfectly erroneous. At the same time, Lucotte’s report coincided with all the other indications, in showing that the enemy had been perceptibly weakened, could count on no further reinforcements, and must stand on the defensive during the campaign that was to come.

But while it was still thought in Whitehall that the Emperor might evacuate Spain altogether, various projects for turning the Russian débâcle to account began to be laid before Wellington. The first was a scheme for fostering a possible insurrection in Holland, where grave discontent was said to be brewing. Would it be wise for the Prince of Orange, now serving as an aide-de-camp on the head-quarters staff, to be sent home, so that he might put himself at the head of a rising? Wellington replied that he no more believed in an immediate insurrection in Holland than in one in France. ‘Unless I should hear of an insurrection in France or in Holland, or should receive an order to send him, I shall say nothing on the subject to the Prince[311].’ He was undoubtedly right in his decision: the Dutch required the news of Leipzig, still nine months ahead, to make them stir: an expedition to Holland in the early spring would have been hopelessly premature.

A little later came a much more plausible proposition, which met with an equally strong negative from Wellington. The ever-loyal Electorate of Hanover was prepared to rise: to start the movement it would be only necessary to land a nucleus of British-German troops somewhere on the Frisian coast. Could Wellington spare the three cavalry regiments, five infantry battalions, and one battery of the King’s German Legion which were serving with him? After Tettenborn’s March raid to Hamburg the insurrection actually broke out, and Bathurst suggested[312] that the time had come to throw a considerable force ashore in the electorate. He asked whether the Hanoverian officers in Spain were beginning to chafe at being kept so far from their homes at the critical moment. Again Wellington put in a strong negative. He had been to consult General Charles Alten, ‘by far the best of the Hanoverian officers,’ as to the expedience of sending the Legion to Germany. Alten held that ‘the best thing for England, for Germany, and the world, is to make the greatest possible effort here:’ the services of a few thousand veteran troops would be important in the narrower field in Spain—they would be lost in the multitudes assembling on the Elbe. If a large body of loyal levies were collected in Hanover it might ultimately be well to send a part of the Legion thither: but not at present[313]. This was the policy which the Ministry followed: in the spring they dispatched to North Germany only cadres from the dépôts of the Legion at Bexhill—500 men in all, including some experienced cavalry and artillery officers. In July the 3rd Hussars went across to Stralsund, in August two batteries of Horse Artillery, all from England[314]. But no deduction of units was made from Wellington’s Spanish army—only a few officers were permitted to sail, at their own request. The senior of them, General Bock of the Heavy Dragoons, unfortunately perished by shipwreck with his three aides-de-camp off the coast of Brittany in the winter that followed Vittoria.

Bathurst was so far right that many of the Hanoverian officers regretted their stay in the Peninsula: on the other hand, Wellington was not merely trying to keep his own army strong, when he refused to listen to the suggestions made him. It was perfectly true that 4,000 good soldiers were an appreciable unit in a Spanish battle—while they would be ‘entirely thrown away,’ as he put it, in Germany. The margin of strength was so narrow in the Peninsular Army that it was not safe to decrease it.

The same question that arose about the King’s German Legion also came up during the spring of 1813 with regard to the Brunswickers. Many officers of the Brunswick-Oels battalion in the 7th Division were fired with the idea of liberating Germany—they wrote to their duke, then in England, begging him to have the battalion ordered home. He replied that he had tried to get the War Office to let him go to the Elbe, even with a small cadre, a few hundred men, but had been refused[315]. It is much more surprising that this corps was not spared from the Peninsula: Wellington had a bad mark against it, for its terrible propensity to desertion, and a worse for the behaviour of one of its companies at Tordesillas in the recent campaign. Probably he thought that, if he surrendered the Brunswickers, he would have to give up the German Legion also.

It is odd to find that among Wellington’s troubles were not only the proposed subtraction of troops whom he did not want to lose, but the proposed addition of troops whom he was not at all anxious to see in the Peninsula. The story is one which illustrates the casual methods of Russian officers. In February there came to Freneda a well-known British secret agent, Mackenzie, the man who had organized the successful evasion of La Romana’s Spaniards from Denmark in 1808[316]. He brought letters from Admiral Greig, commanding the Russian Black Sea fleet, to the effect that there was a surplus of troops from Tchitchagoff’s Army of the Danube, which could not be utilized in Germany for want of transport and supplies. There were 15,000 men who could be collected at Odessa and shipped to Spain, to be placed in the Allied Army, if Wellington would accept them. The memory of Russian co-operation in Holland in 1799 was not a very happy one: but it seemed unwise to offend the Tsar, on whose goodwill the future of Europe now depended. Wherefore the answer given was that they might come if the British Cabinet approved, and if the Spanish and Portuguese governments saw no objection. ‘One would think that the Emperor had demands enough for his men,’ wrote Wellington to Charles Stuart, ‘but Mackenzie says that they have more men than they can support in the field, which is not improbable. The admission of Russians into the Peninsula, however, is quite a new feature of the war: and it is absolutely necessary that the allied Governments should consent to the measure[317].’ The correspondence with Cadiz and London ended in the most tiresome and ridiculous fashion—the Spanish Regency was at the moment in a state of diplomatic tension with Russia, on some questions of precedence and courtesy. It answered in the most downright fashion that the presence of Russian troops in Spain would be neither helpful nor welcome. The British ambassador at Cadiz was shocked at the language used, which would be most offensive to the Tsar[318]. But the whole project suddenly collapsed on news received from London. Count Lieven, the Russian representative at the Court of St. James’s, declared that he had never heard of the offer, that he was sure that no such scheme would be approved by the Tsar, and that there was certainly no Russian corps now available for service in the Mediterranean. Admiral Greig had once communicated to him a scheme for a Russian auxiliary force to be used in Italy—but this was a plan completely out of date, when the whole Russian army was wanted for Germany[319]. Wellington had therefore to explain to the Spanish and Portuguese Governments that his proposals to them had been made under a complete misapprehension: his amour-propre was naturally hurt—Greig and Mackenzie had put him in an absurd position.

Prince Lieven’s mention of Italy takes us to another of Wellington’s worries. It has been mentioned in the preceding volume that Lord William Bentinck, commanding the British Army in Sicily, had already in 1812 been planning descents on Italy, where he rightly thought the French military strength was low, after the departure of the whole of the Viceroy’s contingent for the Russian War, and of many of Murat’s Neapolitans also. So set had he been on expeditions to Calabria or Tuscany, that he had made great difficulties when ordered to send out the Alicante expedition to favour Wellington’s Salamanca campaign[320]. The news of the Russian disaster had filled Bentinck’s mind with new Italian schemes—the conditions were even more favourable than in 1812. He was now dreaming of invading Italy with all the men he could muster, and proposed on February 24th to the British War Minister that he should be allowed to withdraw all or some of the Anglo-Sicilian troops from Alicante. He had also seen Admiral Greig, and put in a claim for the hypothetical 15,000 Russians who had caused Wellington so much trouble. Knowing how much importance the latter attached to the Alicante Army, as the real nucleus of resistance to Suchet in Eastern Spain, he had the grace to send copies of his February dispatch to Freneda.

This was a most irritating interruption to Wellington’s arrangements for the next campaign: the Alicante force was a valuable piece in the great game which he was working out. To see it taken off the board would disarrange all his plan. Accordingly he made the strongest protest to Lord Bathurst against the Italian expedition being permitted. To make any head in Italy, he said, at least 30,000 or 40,000 men would be needed. No doubt many Italians were discontented with the Napoleonic régime, but they would not commit themselves to rebellion unless a very large force came to their help. If only a small army were landed, they would show passive or even active loyalty to their existing government. They might prefer a British to a French or an Austrian domination in their peninsula, because it would be more liberal and less extortionate. But they would want everything found for them—arms, equipment, a subsidy. Unless the Government were prepared to start a new war on a very large scale, to raise, clothe, and equip a great mass of Italian troops, and to persevere to the last in a venture as big as that in Spain, the plan would fail, and any landing force would be compelled to re-embark with loss and disgrace[321].

On the whole Wellington’s protest proved successful: Lord William was forced to leave a large body of his Anglo-Sicilians in Spain, though he withdrew 2,000 men from Alicante early in April, when it was most needful that the Allied force on the East Coast should be strong. The remainder, despite (as we shall see) of very bad handling by Sir John Murray, proved sufficient to keep Suchet employed. No Italian expedition was permitted during the campaigning season of 1813, though Lord William sent out a small foreign expeditionary force for a raid on Tuscany, which much terrified the Grand Duchess Eliza[322]. Next year only, when the whole Napoleonic system was crumbling, did he collect a heterogeneous army of doubtful value, invade Liguria, and capture Genoa from a skeleton enemy. But by that time the French were out of Spain, and Wellington’s plans could not be ruined by the distraction of troops on such an escapade. In May 1813 the Italian expedition, if permitted, might have wrecked the whole campaign of Vittoria, by leaving Suchet free to join the main French army. How it would have fared may be judged from the fact that the Viceroy Eugène made head all through the autumn against 80,000 men of the Austrian Army of Italy.

So much may suffice to explain Wellington’s dealings during the winter and spring of 1813 with the British Cabinet. His advice, as we have seen, was always asked, and generally settled the problem in the way that he desired. So much cannot be said for his dealings with the Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards: the Duke of York seems to have been the last person in Whitehall to recognize the commanding intellect of the great general. Though he always wrote with perfect courtesy, he evidently considered that his own views on the organization, personnel, and management of the British Army were far more important than those of the victor of Salamanca. The correspondence of Wellington with the Duke and his Military Secretary, Colonel Henry Torrens, occupies an enormous number of pages in the volumes of Dispatches and Supplementary Dispatches. Torrens, an obliging man, seems to have tried to make himself a buffer between the two contending wills, and Wellington was conscious of the fact that he was no enemy. The subjects of contention were many.

One of the most important was patronage. Now that he had reached the fifth year of his command in the Peninsula, Wellington considered that he had won the right to choose his own chief subordinates. But still he could not get officers of tried incapacity removed from the front, nor prevent others, against whom he had a bad mark, from being sent out to him. When he asked for removals, he was told of ‘the difficulty of setting aside general officers who have creditably risen to high rank’ on the mere ground that they have been proved incapable, and unfit for their situations. But it was far worse that when he had requested that certain generals should not be sent out, they came to him nevertheless, despite of his definite protest; and then, when he requested that they might be removed, he was told that he would incur odium and responsibility for their removal. ‘What a situation then is mine! It is impossible to prevent incapable men from being sent to the army; and then when I complain that they have been sent, I am to be responsible! Surely the “odium” ought not to attach to the person who officially represents that they are not capable of filling their situations’—but (the aposiopesis may be filled up) to the Horse Guards for sending them out. Yet Wellington’s pen did not add the words which are necessary to complete the sense.

The most tiresome case in 1812-13 was that of Colonel James Willoughby Gordon, who had come out as Quartermaster-General in 1812, when Wellington’s first and most trusted quarter-master, George Murray, was removed (quite without his desire) to a post in Ireland. Gordon was sent by the Duke of York’s personal choice[323], without any previous consultation with the Commander-in-Chief in Spain as to whether he would be acceptable. The atrocity of this appointment was not only that Gordon was incapable, but that he was a political intriguer, who was in close touch with the Whig Opposition at home, and before he went out had promised to send confidential letters on the campaign to Lord Grey. This he actually did: the malicious Creevey had a privileged peep at them, and found that ‘his accounts are of the most desponding cast. He considers our ultimate discomfiture as a question purely of time, and that it may happen any day, however early: and that our pecuniary resources are utterly exhausted. The skill of the French in recovering from their difficulties is inexhaustible: Lord W. himself owns that the resurrection of Marmont’s broken troops after Salamanca was an absolute miracle of war. In short, Gordon considers that Lord W. is in very considerable danger[324].’ The writer was holding the most important post on Wellington’s staff, and using the information that he obtained for the benefit of the Parliamentary Opposition; he should have been court-martialled for the abuse of his position for personal ends. Wellington at last detected his mischief-making, by the appearance in the Whig papers of definite facts that could only have been known to three people—Wellington himself, his secretary Fitzroy Somerset, and the Quartermaster-General. ‘I showed him,’ writes Wellington to Bathurst, ‘my dispatch to your Lordship of August 3, as the shortest way of making him acquainted with the state of affairs.... The topics of this dispatch find their way into the Morning Chronicle, distorted into arguments against the Government. I am quite certain that the arguments in the Morning Chronicle are drawn from a perusal of my dispatches, and that no one saw them here excepting the Quartermaster-General and Lord Fitzroy. Even your Lordship had not yet received this dispatch, when the topics it contained were used against the Government in the newspapers.... For the future he shall not see what I write—it would be no great loss to the Army if he were recalled to England. I cypher part of this letter in the cypher you sent me to be used for General Maitland[325].’

It was four months before this traitor was got rid of, though Lord Bathurst had been shocked by the news, and corroborated it by his own observation: he had seen mischievous letters from Gordon to the Horse Guards, and if he wrote such stuff to the Duke it was easy to guess what he might write to Lord Grey or Whitbread. Certain of the newspaper paragraphs must have come ‘from some intelligent person with you[326].’ The strange way in which the removal was accomplished was not by a demand for his degradation for misuse of his office[327], but by a formal report to the Horse Guards that ‘Colonel Gordon does not turn his mind to the duties to be performed by the Quartermaster-General of an Army such as this, actively employed in the field: notwithstanding his zeal and acknowledged talent, he has never performed them, and I do not believe he ever will or can perform them. I give this opinion with regret, and I hope His Royal Highness will believe that I have not formed it hastily of an officer respecting whose talents I, equally with His Royal Highness, had entertained a favourable opinion[328].’ Three weeks later the Military Secretary at the Horse Guards writes that Wellington shall have back his old Quartermaster-General George Murray—and Gordon is recalled[329]. But why had Gordon ever been sent? The Duke of York alone could say. The impression which he had left as a soldier upon men at the front, who knew nothing of his political intrigues, was exceedingly poor[330].

This was the worst trick which was played on Wellington from the Horse Guards. Another was the refusal to relieve him of the gallant but muddle-headed and disobedient William Stewart, who despite of his awful error at Albuera was allowed to come out to the Peninsula again in 1812, and committed other terrible blunders: it was he who got the three divisions into a marshy deadlock on the retreat from Salamanca, by deliberate and wilful neglect of directions[331]. ‘With the utmost zeal and good intentions he cannot obey an order,’ wrote Wellington on December 6, 1812—yet Stewart was still commanding the Second Division in 1814[332]. In letters sent to the Horse Guards in December 1812 the Commander-in-Chief in Spain petitioned for the departure of five out of his seven cavalry generals—which seems a large clearance—and of ten infantry divisional and brigade commanders. About half of them were ultimately brought home, but several were left with him for another campaign. He had also asked that he might have no more generals who were new to the Peninsula inflicted upon him, because their arrival blocked promotion for deserving colonels, to whom he was anxious to give brigades. ‘I hope I shall have no more new Generals: they really do but little good, and they take the places of officers who would be of real use. And then they are all desirous of returning to England[333].’ The appeal was in vain—several raw major-generals were sent out for the spring campaign of 1813, and we have letters of Wellington making apologies to Peninsula veterans, to whom he had promised promotion, for the fact that the commands which he had been intending for them had been filled up against his wishes by the nominees of the Horse Guards. Things went a little better after Vittoria, when several undesired officers went home, and several deferred promotions took place—the news of that victory had had its effect even in Whitehall.

It is more difficult to sympathize with Wellington’s judgement—though not with his grievance—in another matter of high debate during this winter. Like most men he disliked talking about his own coffin, i. e. making elaborate arrangements for what was to happen in the event of his becoming a casualty, like Sir John Moore. He loathed the idea of ‘seconds in command’, arguing that they were either useless or tiresome. He did not want an officer at his elbow who would have a sort of right to be consulted, as in the bad old days of ‘councils of war’; nor did he wish to have to find a separate command for such a person to keep him employed[334]. It was true that he often trusted Hill with an independent corps in Estremadura; but frequently he called in Hill’s column and it became part of the main army—as on the Caya in 1811, in the Salamanca retreat in 1812, and at Vittoria in 1813. In the winter of 1812-13 a point which might have been of high importance was raised: who would be his successor in case of a regrettable accident? Wellington decided that Beresford was the proper choice—despite of Albuera. ‘All that I can tell you is that the ablest man I have yet seen with the army, and the one having the largest views, is Beresford. They tell me that, when I am not present, he wants decision: and he certainly embarrassed me a little with his doubts when he commanded in Estremadura: but I am quite certain that he is the only person capable of conducting a large concern[335].’ He also held that Beresford’s position as a marshal in the Portuguese Army gave him a seniority in the Allied Army over British lieutenant-generals.

This judgement of Wellington’s is surprising: Beresford was courageous, a good organizer, a terror to shirkers and jobbers, and accustomed to command. Yet one would have thought that his record of 1811, when he displayed almost every possible fault alike of strategy and of morale in Estremadura, would have ruled him out. Wellington thought, as it would appear, that he had a better conception of the war as a whole—‘the large concern’—than any of the other generals in the Peninsula, and had every opportunity of knowing. On this most critical point Wellington and the Duke of York fell out at once: it was not that the Duke wanted to rule out Beresford because he was undecided in the field, unpopular with his colleagues, self-assertive or arrogant. He had a simple Horse Guards rule which in his view excluded Beresford from consideration at once. ‘According to the general received opinion of the Service no officer in the British Army above the rank of lieutenant-colonel is ever expected to serve under an officer junior to himself, even though he may possess a superior local commission.’ He then proceeded to recall the fact that in 1794, when Lord Moira came to Flanders with the local rank of general, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and a number of other general officers with commissions of senior date, refused to serve under him: in consequence of which Lord Moira had to resign and to return to England. There were many similar examples in the past. The right of officers to refuse to serve under a junior being established, it could not be argued that higher rank acquired by that junior in a foreign service had any weight. Beresford might be a Portuguese field-marshal, but from the British point of view he was junior to Sir Thomas Graham, Sir Stapleton Cotton, and Sir Rowland Hill. If by some deplorable accident Lord Wellington were incapacitated from command at the present moment, Sir Thomas Graham, if with the Army, would succeed. If Sir Thomas were on sick leave, Sir Stapleton Cotton would be the senior officer in the Peninsula, and the command of the Army would automatically devolve on him: if Sir Stapleton were also on leave, it would go to General Hill.

‘It appears impossible to expect that British generals senior to Marshal Beresford will submit to serve under him. It appears to the Commander-in-Chief, therefore, that there remains but one of two alternatives—the one to recall Marshal Beresford from the Peninsula in case he should persist in his claim; the other, in case Lord Wellington still prefers that officer as his second in command, to recall all the British lieutenant-generals senior to him in our own Army[336].’

This was a maddening reply, for though Wellington liked Stapleton Cotton he had no delusions about his intellectual capacity. The best he could say about him during the controversy was that ‘he commands our cavalry very well; I am certain much better than many who might be sent out to us, and who might be supposed much cleverer than he is.’ As a matter of fact, Graham was on sick leave, with an affliction of eyesight, which was supposed to be likely to result in permanent incapacity. Cotton was also on short leave to England on ‘urgent personal affairs[337],’ but expected back shortly. Therefore the Duke’s letter was a proposal to consign the fate of the British Army in the Peninsula to a gallant officer with the mental capacity of a cavalry brigadier, who had never commanded a force of all arms, and who was the cause of much quiet amusement to his comrades, from his ostentatious dress and unconcealed admiration for his own perfections.

Lord Bathurst tried to smooth matters, by asking Graham whether he felt inclined to surrender any claim to take over the Peninsular Army on account of his bad health. Sir Thomas replied that he should decline the responsibility for that reason: that he hoped to cause no difficulties, but that he could not agree that Beresford had any claim, ‘his obligation to the service bound him not to sacrifice the rights of British officers from a purely personal spirit of accommodation.’ To which Bathurst replied that if he waived his rights as a consequence of his ill health, while making no concession on grounds of principle, perhaps Hill and Cotton might do the same. To this the victor of Barrosa answered that he might consent, on the distinct understanding that no precedent was created, and that the arrangement was temporary[338].

His compliance proved useful: Stapleton Cotton arrived in London shortly after and ‘expressed himself decidedly against Sir William Beresford’s claims, and with some warmth.’ Lord Bathurst explained to him that Graham’s consent to the ‘temporary arrangement’ must govern his own, and tried to put him off the idea that he himself would undoubtedly become Wellington’s destined successor, if Graham refused the post, by hinting that after all Graham might recover his eyesight, and be able to take over the command. After showing much soreness, Cotton reluctantly acquiesced. The War Minister, writing an account of the interview to Wellington, ends with ‘I think it necessary to have this explained beforehand, that you might not have any doubt whether you were, after what has passed, to consider Sir Thomas Graham or Sir Stapleton Cotton as the person who was to exercise the command in case of your personal indisposition[339].’ So Beresford’s nomination was passed, as Wellington desired, and contrary to the Duke of York’s views as to the inevitable power of old precedent. But it was only passed by the consent of the other parties concerned, however reluctantly given. Fortunately Wellington preserved his usual splendid health, and the experiment of trusting the whole Allied Army in the Peninsula to the victor of Albuera was never made.

On another great controversy which (since Wellington never went off duty for a day) was of more practical importance than that of the right of succession, the Duke of York was partly successful in discomfiting the Commander-in-Chief in Spain. This was a question on which there had been much argument at the end of each Peninsular campaign, but never so much as in 1812-13. The exceptionally heavy casualty lists of the storming of Badajoz, the battle of Salamanca, and the retreat from Burgos had brought a great number of units, both cavalry and infantry, to very low figures. There were (as has been mentioned in a previous chapter) twelve battalions which had at the end of the retreat less than 300 bayonets effective, thirteen which had more sick than men present with the colours. For some of these the difficulty was only a momentary one—there was a large draft on the way to reinforce the unit, or at least a good number of trained recruits in Great Britain ready to be sent out. But this was not the case with all of them: the reason of this was to be sought in the organization of the Army in 1812: the majority of infantry regiments had two battalions; if the second unit was on home service, it regularly found drafts for the one at the front. But if the regiment was a single-battalion corps (and there were seven such with Wellington[340]), or if it chanced to have both units abroad and none at home (as was the case with fifteen other corps[341]), there was only a dépôt in Great Britain, and this had to feed two battalions both on active service overseas, and often could not discharge the double task effectively. There were of course regiments so popular, or recruited with such zeal and efficiency, that they succeeded in keeping two units abroad with adequate numbers: but this was exceptional.

What was to be done if a Peninsular battalion had got very low in numbers, had no sister-unit at home to feed it, and had few or no recruits at its British dépôt ready to be sent out? This was the case in December 1812 with twelve good old battalions of the Peninsular Army[342]. The Duke of York maintained that since they all showed under 350 effectives present (one was as low as 149 rank and file), and since there was no immediate prospect of working them up to even a low battalion strength of 450 or 500 men, they must come home at once, and take a long turn of British service, in which they could be brought up gradually to their proper establishment. He had carried out this plan in earlier years with some very fine but wasted battalions, such as the 29th and 97th. To replace the depleted veteran corps, there should come out new battalions from home, recently brought up to full strength. The same ought to be done with four or five cavalry regiments, which could show only about 250 horses effective.

But Wellington had other views, and had begun to carry them out on his own responsibility. He held that a well-tried battalion acclimatized to Peninsular service was such a precious thing, and a raw battalion such a comparatively worthless one, that it would be best to combine the wasted units in pairs as ‘Provisional Battalions’ of 600 or 700 bayonets, each sending home the cadres of four or five companies to its dépôt, and keeping six or five at the front. The returning cadres would work up to full strength by degrees, and could then come out again to join the service companies. On December 6th, 1812, he issued orders to constitute three Provisional Battalions[343]: he intended to carry out the same system for several more pairs of battalions[344], and it was put into practice for the 2/31st and 2/66th as from December 20. So with the cavalry, he intended to reduce four regiments to a two-squadron establishment, sending home the cadres of their other squadrons to be filled up at leisure.

On January 13th the Duke of York sent out a memorandum entirely disapproving of the system. He regretted to differ in principle from the Commander-in-Chief in Spain, but could not possibly concur in the arrangement. All depleted battalions for which no drafts could be found must come home at once. ‘Experience has shown that a skeleton battalion composed of officers, non-commissioned officers, and a certain foundation of old and experienced soldiers can be re-formed for any service in a short time: but if a corps reduced in numbers be broken up by the division of its establishment, such an interruption is occasioned in its interior economy and esprit de corps, that its speedy recompletion and reorganization for foreign service is effectually prevented. The experiment now suggested has once been tried, and has resulted in a degree of irregularity, contention, and indiscipline in the regiment concerned, which had made necessary the strongest measures.’ (Many court martials, and the removal of the whole of the officers into other battalions.) It was justly urged that seasoned men are more valuable than men fresh from England, but for the sake of a present and comparatively trifling advantage the general efficiency of the whole British Army must not be impaired. All the depleted battalions should be sent home at once[345].

Wellington was deeply vexed at this decision. He replied that orders, if definitely given, would of course be obeyed; but if left to act on his own responsibility, he could only say that the service in America or Sicily or at home was not his concern, and that he was bound to state what was best for the Peninsular Army. One old soldier who has served two years in Spain was more effective than two, or even three, who had not. Raw battalions fill the hospitals, straggle, maraud, and starve. He never would part with the Provisional Battalions as long as it was left to his discretion: and the same with cavalry. He had four depleted cavalry regiments much under-horsed: he would like to have the horses of the four hussar regiments which were being sent to him from England to give to his old Peninsula troopers, rather than the regiments themselves. But orders are orders and must be obeyed[346].

The Duke replied that for his part he had to take into consideration not only the Peninsula but the British service all over the world. Drafting of one corps into another was hurtful to the service and depressed the spirits of corps: it was even deemed illegal. Though the last person in the world to wish to diminish the Army in Spain or cripple its general’s exertions, he was compelled to persevere in his direction from necessity[347].

On March 13th Wellington reluctantly carried out the orders from the Horse Guards as regards his depleted cavalry regiments: the 4th Dragoon Guards, 9th and 11th Light Dragoons, and 2nd Hussars of the German Legion were ordered to make over their effective horses to other regiments, and to prepare to embark at Lisbon. A paragraph in the General Orders expressed Wellington’s regret at losing any of his brave old troops, and his hope that he might yet see them again at the front[348].

As to the infantry, the Duke repeating his general precept that depleted battalions must come home, but not giving definite orders for them by name and number, a curious compromise took place. Wellington sent back to England the two weakest units, which were still in April well under 300 bayonets apiece[349]: he had already drafted a third into the senior battalion of its own regiment, which was also in the Peninsula. Four more of the war-worn battalions had been worked up to about 400 of all ranks, by the return of convalescents and the arrival of small drafts—Wellington ventured to keep them, and to report them as efficient battalions, if small ones[350]. The challenge to Home authority lay with the remaining six[351]: though five of them were well under 400 strong he nevertheless stuck to his original plan and formed three provisional battalions out of them. If the Duke of York wanted them, he must ask for them by name: he did not, and they kept the field till the end of the war, and were repeatedly mentioned by Wellington as among the most efficient units that he owned. Presumably Vittoria put his arrangements beyond criticism—at any rate, the controversy was dropped at the Duke’s end. The net result was that Wellington lost three depleted infantry units and four depleted cavalry units of the old stock—about 2,000 veteran sabres and bayonets. In return he received before or during the campaign of 1813 four new cavalry regiments—all hussars[352]—and six new infantry battalions[353] all much stronger than the units they replaced, and making up about 1,600 sabres and 3,000 bayonets. He would probably have said that his real strength was not appreciably changed by getting 4,500 new hands instead of 2,000 old ones. Certainly, considering the effort that was required from the Peninsula Army in 1813, it is sufficiently surprising that its strength was, on balance, only four infantry units to the good—the cavalry regiments remaining the same in number as in 1812.

There were plenty of small administrative problems to be settled during the winter-rest of 1812-13, which worried Wellington but need not worry the modern student of history, being in themselves trivial. It is well, however, to note that in the spring of 1813 his old complaint about the impossibility of extracting hard cash from the Government, instead of the bank-notes and bills which the Spanish and Portuguese peasantry refused to regard as real money, came practically to an end. By heroic exertions the Chancellor of the Exchequer was scraping together gold enough to send £100,000 a month to Lisbon. A large sum in pagodas had been brought all the way from Madras, and the Mint was busy all the year in melting them down and recoining them as guineas. It was the first time since the ‘Suspension of Cash Payments Act’ of 1797 that any gold of this size had been struck and issued. As the whole output went straight to the Peninsula for the Army, the new coin was generally known as the ‘military guinea.’ Considering that gold was so much sought for in England at the time that a guinea could command 27s. in paper, it was no small feat to procure the Indian gold, and to see that the much wanted commodity went abroad without diminution. Wellington could have done with much more gold—six times as much he once observed—but at least he was no longer in the state of absolute bankruptcy in which he had opened the campaign of the preceding year—nor obliged to depend for a few thousand dollars on profits to be made on Egyptian corn which he sold in Lisbon, or impositions of doubtful legality made upon speculators in Commissariat Bonds. The Portuguese troops had their pay still in arrears—but that was not Wellington’s responsibility. The muleteers of the transport train were suffering from being paid in vales, which they sold to Lisbon sharks, rather than in the cruzados novos or Pillar Dollars which they craved, and sometimes deserted in not unnatural disgust. But, at the worst, it could not be denied that finance looked a good deal more promising than it had in 1812[354].

There had been much reorganization since the end of the Burgos retreat. In uniforms especially the change was greater than in any other year of the war: this was the first campaign in which the British heavy cavalry showed the new brass helmet, discarding the antiquated cocked hat—the light dragoons had gone into shakos, relinquishing the black japanned leather helmet with bearskin crest. Infantry officers for the first time appeared in shakos resembling those of the rank and file—the unwise custom by which they had up till now worn cocked hats, which made them easy marks for the enemy’s snipers, being at last officially condemned. Another much needed improvement was the substitution of small tin camp kettles, to be carried by the men, for the large iron Flanders cooking-pots, four to each company and carried on mules, which had hitherto been employed. They had always been a nuisance; partly because the mules could never be relied upon to keep up with the unit, partly because their capacity was so large that it took much firewood and a long space of time to cook their contents. Nothing is more common in personal diaries of 1808-12 than complaints about rations that had to be eaten half-cooked, or were not eaten at all, because the order to move on arrived before the cauldrons had even begun to get warm.

A more doubtful expedient was that of putting the great-coats of the whole of the infantry into store before the march began. Wellington opined that the weight of coat and blanket combined was more than the soldier could be expected to carry. One or other must be abandoned, and after much consideration it was concluded that the blanket was more essential. ‘Soldiers while in exercise during the day seldom wear their great-coats, which are worn by them only at night, together with the blanket: but as the Commander of the forces has now caused the army to be provided with tents, the necessity for the great-coat for night use is superseded[355].’ And tents, as a matter of fact, were provided for the first time during this campaign. The expedient worked well enough during the summer and autumn, when the weather was usually fine, in spite of some spells of rainy weather in June. But in the Pyrenees, from October onward, the tents proved inadequate protection both from sudden hurricanes and from continuous snowfall. And bad though the plight of men huddled in tents frozen stiff by the north wind might be, it was nothing to that of the sentry on some mountain defile, trying to keep a blanket round his shoulders in December blizzards. Yet the tents, with all their defects, were a decided boon—it would have been impossible indeed to hold the Pyrenean passes at all, if some shelter had not been provided for the battalions of the front line. Villages available for billeting were few and always in the hollows to the rear, not on the crests where the line of defence lay. It would seem that the experiment of dispensing with the great-coats was dropped, and that they were brought round by sea to Pasages or St. Sebastian, for personal diaries mention them as in use again, in at least some regiments, by December. Oddly enough, there appears to be no official record of the revocation of the order given in May.

Another innovation of the period was the introduction of a new unit into the British Army—called (after the idiotic system of nomenclature used at the Horse Guards) the ‘Staff Corps Cavalry.’ They were really military mounted police, picked from the best and steadiest men in the cavalry regiments, and placed under the command of Major Scovell, the cypher-secretary on Wellington’s head-quarters staff, of whose activities much has been said in the last volume. There were two troops of them, soon raised to four, with a total strength of about 300 of all ranks[356]. The object of the creation of the corps was to make more effectual the restraint on marauding, and other crimes with which the Provost-Marshal and his assistants were too few to deal. Wellington had railed with almost exaggerated emphasis on the straggling, disorder, and looting which had distinguished the Burgos retreat, and the Duke of York had licensed the formation of this police-cavalry as the best remedy for the disease. They had plenty to do after Vittoria, when the British Army had the greatest orgy of plunder that ever fell to its lot during the war. Wellington’s own view was that the slackness of discipline in certain regiments, rather than privations or casual opportunity, was the main source of all evil. But he welcomed any machinery that would deal with the symptoms of indiscipline, even if it did not strike at the roots of the disease. Over-leniency by courts martial was another cause of misconduct according to his theory—with this he strove to cope by getting from home a civilian Judge-Advocate-General, whose task was to revise the proceedings of such bodies, and disallow illegal proceedings and decisions. The first and only holder of this office, Francis Larpent, has left an interesting and not always discreet account of his busy life at Head-Quarters, which included a strange episode of captivity in the French lines on the Bidassoa[357].

SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER IV

THE PERPLEXITIES OF KING JOSEPH.
FEBRUARY-MARCH 1813

We have seen, when dealing with the last month of 1812 and the distribution of the French army into winter quarters, that all the arrangements made by King Joseph, Jourdan, and Soult were settled before any knowledge of the meaning of the Moscow Retreat had come to hand. The famous ‘29th Bulletin’ did not reach Madrid till January 6th, 1813; this was a long delay: but the Emperor’s return to Paris on December 16th, though he arrived at the Tuileries only thirty-six hours after the Bulletin had come to hand, was not known to Joseph or Jourdan till February 14th—which was a vastly longer delay. The road had been blocked between Vittoria and Burgos for over five weeks—and couriers and dispatches were accumulating at both these places—one set unable to get south, the other to get north. The Minister of War at Paris received Joseph’s dispatches of the 9th, 20th, and 24th of December all in one delivery on January 29th[358]. The King, still more unlucky, got the Paris dispatches of all the dates between December 18th and January 4th on February 14th to 16th by several couriers who came through almost simultaneously[359]. It was not till Palombini’s Italian division—in a series of fights lasting from January 25 to February 13—had cleared away Longa and Mendizabal from the high-road between Burgos and Vittoria, that quicker communication between those cities became possible.

Long as it had taken in 1812 to get a letter from Paris to Madrid, there had never been such a monstrous gap in correspondence as that which took place in January 1813. Hence came the strange fact that when Napoleon had returned to France, and started on his old system of giving strategical orders for the Army of Spain once more, these orders[360]—one on top of another—accumulated at Vittoria, and came in one overwhelming mass, to upset all the plans which Joseph and Jourdan had been carrying out since the New Year.

The King had received the 29th Bulletin on January 6th: he had gathered from it that matters were going badly with the army in Russia, but had no conception of the absolute ruin that had befallen his brother’s host. Hence he had kept his troops spread in the wide cantonments taken in December, and had sent Daricau’s to the province of Cuenca, to reopen the way to Suchet at Valencia. The great convoy of Spanish and French administrators, courtiers, and refugees, which had been left in Suchet’s care, retraced its way to Madrid under escort of some of Daricau’s troops in the last days of January. Meanwhile Pierre Soult’s cavalry continued to sweep La Mancha, imposing contributions and shooting guerrilleros, and the Army of the Centre cleared the greater part of the country east and north of Madrid of strong parties of the Medico’s and the Empecinado’s men. Caffarelli, as Jourdan complained, ought to have been making more head in the North—but his dispatches were so infrequent that his position could not be fully judged—it was only certain that he could not keep the Burgos-Bayonne road open for couriers.

There was only one touch during the winter with Wellington’s army, whose cantonments, save those of the Light Division, were far back, behind the ‘no man’s land’ which encircled the French armies. This single contact was due to an adventurous reconnaissance by Foy, who at his head-quarters at Avila had conceived a project for surprising Hill’s most outlying detachment, the 50th regiment, which was billeted at Bejar, in the passes in front of Coria. On false news that no good look-out was being kept around Bejar, he started on the 19th February from Piedrahita with a column of three very weak infantry battalions and 80 horse—about 1,500 men in all, and marching day and night fell upon the cantonments of the 50th at dawn on the morning of the 20th. The surprise did not come off. Colonel Harrison of the 50th was a cautious officer, who had barricaded the ruined gates of the town, and patched its crumbling walls—He had picquets far out, and was accustomed to keep several companies under arms from 2 o’clock till daylight every night. Moreover Hill, thinking the position exposed, had lately reinforced him with the 6th Caçadores, from Ashworth’s brigade. Foy, charging in on the town in the dusk, dislodged the outlying picquets after a sharp skirmish; but his advanced guard of 300 voltigeurs met such a storm of fire from the gate and walls, which were fully manned, that it swerved off when 30 yards from the entrance. Foy ordered a general retreat, since he saw the enemy ready for him, and marched off as quickly as he had come, pursued for some distance by the Caçadores[361]. He says in his dispatch to Reille that he only lost two men killed and five wounded, that he could have carried the town had he pleased, and that he only retired because he was warned that the 71st and 92nd, the other regiments of Cadogan’s brigade, were marching up from Baños, seven miles away[362]. This those may believe who please: it is certain that he made off the moment that he saw that his surprise had failed, and that he was committed to an attack on a barricaded town. Hill expected more raids of this sort, but the attempt was never repeated.

It was on the 14th of February, five days before Foy’s adventure, that King Joseph received his first Paris mail. Its portentous and appalling contents were far worse than anything that he had expected. The most illuminating item was a letter from Colonel Desprez, his aide-de-camp, who had made the Moscow retreat, and was able to give him the whole truth concerning Russia. ‘We lost prisoners by the tens of thousands—but, however many the prisoners, the dead are many more. Every nightly bivouac left hundreds of frozen corpses behind. The situation may be summed up by saying that the army is dead. The Young Guard, to which I was attached, quitted Moscow 8,000 strong; there were 400 left at Wilna. All the other corps have suffered on the same scale; I am convinced that not 20,000 men recrossed the Vistula. If your Majesty asks me where the retreat will stop, I can only reply that the Russians will settle that point. I cannot think that the Prussians will resist: the King and his ministers are favourably disposed—not so the people—riots are breaking out in Berlin: crossing Prussia I had evidence that we can hardly count on these allies. And it seems that in the Austrian army the officers are making public demonstrations against continuing the war. This is a sad picture—but I think there is no exaggeration in it. On returning to Paris and thinking all over in cold blood, my judgement on the situation is as gloomy as it was at the theatre of war[363].’

Napoleon had spent several days at the Tuileries, busy with grandiose schemes for the organization of a new Grande Armée, to replace that which he had sacrificed in Russia, and with financial and diplomatic problems of absorbing interest, before he found a moment in which to dictate to Clarke his orders for the King of Spain. The note was very short and full of reticences[364]: it left much unsaid that had to be supplied by the recipient’s intelligence. ‘The King must have received by now the 29th Bulletin, which would show him the state of affairs in the North; they were absorbing the Emperor’s care and attention. Things being as they were, he ought to move his head-quarters to Valladolid, holding Madrid only as the extreme point of occupation of his southern wing. He should turn his attention to the pacification of Biscay and Navarre while the English were inactive. Soult had been sent orders to come back to France—as the King had repeatedly requested; his Army of the South might be given over to Marshal Jourdan or to Gazan.’ If Joseph had owned no independent sources of information such a statement would have left him much in the dark, both as to the actual state of the Emperor’s resources, and as to his intentions with regard to Spain. The Emperor did not say that he had lost his army and must create another, nor did he intimate how far he intended to give up his Spanish venture. But the order to draw back to Valladolid and hold Madrid lightly, could only be interpreted as a warning that there would be no more reinforcements available for Spain, so that the area of occupation would have to be contracted.

The recall of Soult was what Joseph had eagerly petitioned for in 1812, when he had come upon the curious letter in which the Marshal accused him before the Emperor of treason to the French cause[365]. But the Marshal was not brought home in disgrace; rather he was sent for in the hour of danger, as one who could be useful to the new Grande Armée. It must have been irritating to the King to know, from a passage in the already-cited letter of Colonel Desprez, that Napoleon had called the Duke of Dalmatia ‘the only military brain in the Peninsula’, that he stigmatized the King’s denunciations of him as des pauvretés to which he attached no importance, and that he had added that half the generals in Spain had shared Soult’s suspicions. The Marshal left, in triumph rather than in disgrace, with a large staff and escort, and a long train of fourgons carrying his Andalusian plunder, more especially his splendid gallery of Murillos robbed from Seville churches[366].

Dated one day later than the Emperor’s first rough notes, we find the formal dispatch from the war-minister Clarke, which made things a little clearer. Setting forth his master’s ideas in a more verbose style, Clarke explained that the affairs of Spain must be subordinated to those of the North. The move to Valladolid would make communication with Paris shorter and safer, and provide a larger force to hold down Northern Spain. Caffarelli was not strong enough both to hunt down the guerrilleros and at the same time to provide garrisons on the great roads and the coast. The King would have to lend him a hand in the task.

There were other dispatches for Joseph and Jourdan dated on the 4th of January, but only one more of importance: this was an order for wholesale drafts to be made from the Army of Spain, for the benefit of the new Army of Germany. But large as they were, the limited scale of them showed that the Emperor had not the least intention of surrendering his hold on the Peninsula, or of drawing back to the line of the Ebro or the Pyrenees, as Lord Liverpool had expected[367]. All the six Armies of Spain—those of the North, Portugal, the Centre, the South, Aragon, and Catalonia—were to continue in existence, and the total number of men to be drawn from any one of them did not amount to a fourth of its numbers. There were still to be 200,000 men left in the Peninsula.

The first demand was for twenty-five picked men from each battalion of infantry or regiment of cavalry, and ten from each battery of artillery, to reconstitute the Imperial Guard, reduced practically to nothing in Russia. Putting aside foreign regiments (Italian, Neapolitan, German, Swiss) there were some 220 French battalions in Spain in January 1813, and some 35 regiments of cavalry. The call was therefore for 5,500 bayonets and 875 sabres—no great amount from an army which had 260,000 men on its rolls, and 212,000 actually under the colours.

But this was only a commencement. It was more important that the Armies of the South and Catalonia were to contribute a large number of cadres to the new Grande Armée. Those of Portugal, Aragon, the Centre, and the North were at first less in question, because their regiments were, on the average, not so strong as those of the other two. The Army of the South was specially affected, because its units were (and always had been) very large regiments. In 1812 Soult’s infantry corps nearly all had three battalions—a few four. Similarly with the cavalry, many regiments had four squadrons, none less than three. The edict of January 4th ordered that each infantry regiment should send back to France the full cadre of officers and non-commissioned officers for one battalion, with a skeleton cadre of men, cutting down the number of battalions present with the eagle by one, and drafting the surplus rank and file of the subtracted battalion into those remaining in Spain. The cadre was roughly calculated out to 120 of all ranks. When, therefore, the system was applied to the Army of the South, it was cut down from 57 battalions to 36 in its 19 regiments[368]. The 21 cadres took off to France 2,500 officers and men. Similarly 15 cavalry regiments, in 50 squadrons, were to send 12 squadron-cadres to France, some 600 sabres.

The small Army of Catalonia was to contribute a battalion-cadre from each of those of its regiments which had three or more battalions—which would give six more cadres for Germany.

The Armies of Portugal, Aragon, and the Centre were mainly composed of regiments having only two battalions—they were therefore for the present left comparatively untouched. The first named was only ordered to give up one battalion-cadre, the second two, the third three (all from Palombini’s Italian division). Of cavalry the Army of Portugal only gave up one squadron-cadre, the Army of the Centre three.

In addition, the small number of foreign auxiliary troops still left in Spain were ordered back to France, save the remnant of Palombini’s and Severoli’s Italians and the Rheinbund units[369] in the Army of the Centre, viz. the 7th Polish Lancers (the last regiment of troops of this nationality left south of the Pyrenees), the Westphalian horse in the Army of the Centre, and the Berg and Westphalian infantry in Catalonia. Moreover, the brigade of the Young Guard in the Army of the North (that of Dumoustier) and the three naval battalions from Cadiz, which had served so long in the Army of the South, were to come home, also four batteries of French horse-artillery and two of Westphalian field artillery. Lastly, cadres being as necessary for the military train as for any other branch of the service, all the armies were to send home every dismounted man of this corps. The same rule was applied to the Équipages militaires and the Artillery Park. This whole deduction from the Army of Spain under these heads came to nearly 12,000 soldiers of all arms, over and above these cadres.

There was an elaborate clause as to reorganizing the Army of the North: in return for giving up four provisional regiments of drafts to the Armies of Portugal and the South, it was to get three regiments made over to it from the former, and one from the latter. Napoleon calculated that it would lose nothing in numbers from the exchange, but as a matter of fact it did. The drafts to be returned to their proper corps ran to over 8,000 men. But General Reille, being told to contribute three regiments to the Army of the North, selected the three depleted units which had composed Thomières’ unlucky division at the battle of Salamanca (the 1st, 62nd, and 101st), which together did not make up 3,000 bayonets[370], though Gazan chose to make over the 64th, a three-battalion regiment with 1,600 men. The Army of the North, therefore, lost nearly 3,000 men on the balance of the exchange, though the Emperor was aware that it was already too weak for the task set it. But he probably considered that Palombini’s Italians, detached (as we have already seen[371]) from the Army of the Centre, would make up the difference.

In addition to the squadron-cadres which he requisitioned on January 4th, the Emperor had a further intention of bringing back to Central Europe some complete units of heavy cavalry, to furnish the host now collecting in Germany with the horsemen in which it was so notoriously deficient. The whole of the dragoon-division of Boyer in the Army of Portugal is marked in the March returns with ordre de rentrer en France; so are several dragoon regiments in the Army of the South. But as a matter of fact hardly one of them had started for the Pyrenees by May[372], so that both in the Army of Portugal and the Army of the South the cavalry total was only a few hundreds smaller at the time of the opening of the campaign of Vittoria than it had been at the New Year—the shrinkage amounting to no more than the squadron-cadres and the few men for the Imperial Guard.

The Emperor’s intentions, therefore, as they became known to King Joseph and Jourdan on February 16th, left the three armies opposed to Wellington some 15,000 men smaller than they had been at the time of the Burgos retreat; but this was a very modest deduction considering their size, and still kept nearly 100,000 men in Castile and Leon, over and above the Army of the North, which might be considered as tied down to its own duty of suppressing the rising in Biscay and Navarre, and incapable of sparing any help to its neighbours. When we reflect on the scale of the Russian disaster, the demand made upon the Army of Spain seems very moderate. But there were two ominous doubts. Would the Emperor be content with his original requisitions in men and horses from the armies of Spain? And what exactly did he mean by the phrase that the King would have to lend appui et secours to the Army of the North, for the destruction of the rebels beyond the Ebro? If this signified the distraction of any large body of men from the forces left opposed to Wellington, the situation would be uncomfortable. Both these doubts soon developed into sinister certainties.

On receiving the Emperor’s original orders King Joseph hastened to obey, though the removal of his court from Madrid to Valladolid looked to him like the abandonment of his pose as King of Spain. He ordered Soult’s successor, Gazan, to evacuate La Mancha, and to draw back to the neighbourhood of Madrid, leaving a small detachment of light troops about Toledo. The Army of the South also took over the province of Avila from the Army of Portugal, and it was intended that it should soon relieve the Army of the Centre in the province of Segovia. For Joseph had made up his mind that any help which he must give against the northern rebels should be furnished by D’Erlon’s little army, which he would stretch out from Segovia towards Burgos and the Ebro[373], and so take Mina and the insurgents of Navarre in the rear. Early in March all these movements were in progress, and (as we have seen in the last chapter) were beginning to be reported to Wellington, who made many deductions from them. Joseph himself transferred his head-quarters to Valladolid on March 23rd, by which time the greater part of the other changes had been carried out. The Emperor afterwards criticized his brother’s delay of a whole month between the receipt of his orders to decamp and his actual arrival at Valladolid. To this Jourdan made the reply that it was useless to move the head-quarters till the drawing in of the Army of the South had been completed, and that the bringing in of such outlying units as Daricau’s division from the province of Cuenca, and the transference of the Army of the Centre northward, took much time[374]. Evacuations cannot be carried out at a day’s notice, when they involve the moving of magazines and the calling in of a civil administration.

On March 12th, while all the movements were in progress, another batch of orders from Paris came to hand. They contained details which upset the arrangements which the King was carrying out, for the Emperor decided that the succour which was to be given to the Army of the North was to be drawn from Reille’s Army, and not from D’Erlon’s, so that a new series of counter-marches would have to be carried out. And—what was more ominous for the future—Napoleon had dropped once more into his old habit of sending orders directly to subordinate generals, without passing them through the head-quarters of the Army of Spain. For Clarke, in his dispatch of February 3rd, informed the King that the Emperor had sent Reille directions to detach a division to Navarre at once, ‘a disposition which cannot conflict with any orders which your Majesty may give to the Army of Portugal, for the common end of reducing to submission the provinces of the North[375].’ Unfortunately this was precisely what such an order did accomplish, for Joseph had sent D’Erlon in the direction to which he now found that Reille had simultaneously detached Barbot’s division of the Army of Portugal, without any knowledge that D’Erlon had already been detailed for the job.

The Emperor was falling back into the practice by which he had in the preceding year ruined Marmont—the issuing of detailed orders for the movement of troops, based on information a month old, it being certain that the execution of these orders would take place an additional three weeks after they had been formulated. As we shall presently see, the initial successes of Wellington in his Vittoria campaign were entirely due to the position in which the Army of Portugal had placed itself, in obedience to Napoleon’s direct instructions.

Meanwhile Clarke’s dispatch of February 2nd, conveying these orders, arrived at the same moment as two others dated ten days later[376], which were most unpleasant reading. The first contained an absolutely insulting message to the King from his brother: ‘his Imperial Majesty bids me say,’ wrote Clarke, ‘with regard to the money for which you have asked in several recent letters, that all funds necessary for the armies of Spain could have been got out of the rich and fertile provinces which are being devastated by the insurgent bands. By employing the activity and vigour needed to establish order and tranquillity, the resources which they still possess can be utilized. This is an additional motive for inducing your Majesty to put an end to this war in the interior, which troubles peaceful inhabitants, ruins the countryside, exhausts your armies, and deprives them of the resources which they could enjoy if these fine regions were in a peaceful state. Aragon and Navarre are to-day under Mina’s law, and maintain this disastrous struggle with their food and money. It is time to put an end to this state of affairs.’

Written apparently a few hours later than the dispatch quoted above came another[377], setting forth the policy which was to be the ruin of the French cause in Spain three months later. It is composed of a series of wild miscalculations. When the head-quarters of the Army of Spain should have been moved to Valladolid, it would be possible to send the whole Army of Portugal to help the Army of the North beyond the Ebro. ‘The Armies of the Centre and South, occupying Salamanca and Valladolid, have sufficient strength to keep the English in check, while waiting on events. Madrid and even Valencia are of secondary importance. Valladolid and Salamanca have become the essential points, between which there should be distributed forces ready to take the offensive against the English, and to wreck their plans. The Emperor is informed that they have been reinforced in Portugal, and that they seem to have two alternative schemes—either to make a push into Spain, or to send out from the port of Lisbon an expedition of 25,000 men, partly English, partly Spanish, which is to land somewhere on the French coast, when the campaign shall have begun in Germany. To prevent them engaging in this expedition, you must always be in a position to march forward and to threaten to overrun Portugal and take Lisbon. At the same time you must make the communications with France safe and easy, by using the time of the English inactivity to subdue Biscay and Navarre.... If the French armies in Spain remain idle, and permit the English to send expeditions against our coast, the tranquillity of France will be compromised, and the ruin of our cause in Spain will infallibly follow.’

A supplementary letter to Jourdan of the same day recapitulates all the above points, adding that the Army of Portugal must send to Clausel, now Caffarelli’s successor in the North, as many troops as are needed there, but that the King at the same time must menace Portugal, so that Wellington shall not be able to detach men from his Peninsular Army.

The fundamental error in all this is that, underrating Wellington’s strength, Napoleon judged that the Armies of the South and Centre could keep him in check. They were at this moment under 60,000 of all arms: if the Army of Portugal were out of the way, they were absolutely insufficient for the task set them. As to their menacing Lisbon, Wellington would have liked nothing better than an advance by them into Portugal, where he would have outnumbered them hopelessly. The hypothesis that Wellington was about to send 25,000 men by sea for a landing inside the French Empire, on which Napoleon lays so much stress, seems to have been formed on erroneous information from French spies in London, who had heard the rumour that a raid on Holland or Hanover was likely, or perhaps even one aimed at La Vendée. For the royalist émigrés in England had certainly been talking of such a plan, and pressing it upon Lord Liverpool, as the dispatches of the latter to Wellington show[378]. The Emperor did not know that all such schemes would be scouted by the British Commander in Spain, and that he now possessed influence enough with the Cabinet to stop them.

It would appear that the Emperor’s intelligence from England misled him in other ways: he was duly informed of the departure from Lisbon of the depleted cavalry and infantry units, about which Wellington disputed so much with the Duke of York, and the deduction drawn was that the Peninsular Army was being decreased. The exaggerated impression of the losses in the Burgos retreat, which could be gathered from the Whig newspapers, led to an underrating of the strength that the British Army would have in the spring. Traitors from Cadiz wrote to Madrid that the friction between the Regency and Wellington was so great, that it was doubtful whether the new Generalissimo would have any real control over the Spanish armies. And the sickness in both the British and the Portuguese armies—bad as it was—was exaggerated by spies, so wildly that the Emperor was under the delusion that Wellington could not count on more than 30,000 British or 20,000 Portuguese troops in the coming campaign. It may be worth while to quote at this point the official view at Paris of the British army in Portugal, though the words were written some time later, and only just before the news of Wellington’s sudden advance on the Douro had come to hand:

‘In the position in which the enemy found himself there was no reason to fear that he would take the offensive: his remoteness, his lack of transport, his constant and timid caution in all operations out of the ordinary line, all announced that we had complete liberty to act as suited us best, without worry or inconvenience. I may add that the ill feeling between English and Spaniards, the voyage of Lord Wellington to Cadiz, the changes in his army, of which many regiments have been sent back to England, were all favourable circumstances allowing us to carry out fearlessly every movement that the Emperor’s orders might dictate[379].’

It is only necessary to observe that Wellington was not more remote from the French than they were from him: that he had excellent transport—far better than his enemies ever enjoyed: that timid caution was hardly the policy which stormed Badajoz or won Salamanca: that his rapid and triumphant offensive was just starting when the Minister of War wrote the egregious paragraph which we have just cited. Persistent undervaluing of the resources and energy of Wellington by Head-quarters at Paris—i.e. by the Emperor when present, by the Minister of War in his absence—was at the roots of the impending disaster.

Leaving the King newly established at Valladolid, the Army of the South redistributing itself between Madrid and the Douro, the Army of the Centre turning back from its projected march to Burgos in order to reoccupy the province of Segovia, and the Army of Portugal beginning to draw off from in front of Wellington troops to be sent to the North, we must turn for a moment to explain the crisis in Navarre and Biscay which was engrossing so much of Napoleon’s attention.

SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER V

THE NORTHERN INSURRECTION.
FEBRUARY-MAY 1813

It has been explained in an earlier chapter that ever since General Caffarelli concentrated all the available troops of the Army of the North, in order to join Souham in driving away Wellington from the siege of Burgos, the three Basque provinces, Navarre, and the coast-land of Santander had been out of hand[380]. The outward and visible sign of that fact was the intermittent stoppage of communication between Bayonne and Madrid, which had so much irritated Napoleon on his return from Russia. It was undoubtedly a just cause of anger that important dispatches should be hung up at Tolosa, or Vittoria, or Burgos, because the bands of Mina or Mendizabal or Longa were holding the defile of Salinas—the grave of so many convoy-escorts—or the pass of Pancorbo. It had been calculated in 1811 that it might often require a small column of 250 men to bring an imperial courier safely through either of those perilous narrows. But in the winter of 1812-13 things had grown far worse. ‘The insurgents of Guipuzcoa, Navarre, and Aragon,’ as Clarke wrote to Jourdan with perfect truth[381], ‘have had six months to organize and train themselves: their progress has been prodigious: they have formed many formidable corps, which no longer fear to face our troops when numbers are equal. They have called in the English, and receive every day arms, munitions, and even cannon on the coast. They have actually begun to conduct regular sieges.’ Yet it was three months and more since the King had sent back Caffarelli and the field-force of the Army of the North from Valladolid, to restore order in the regions which had slipped out of hand during the great concentration of the French armies in November.

If it be asked why the North had become so far more unquiet than it had been in previous years, the answer must be that the cause was moral and not material. It was not merely that many small places had been evacuated for a time by the French during the Burgos campaign, nor that the British fleet was throwing in arms and supplies at Castro-Urdiales or Santander. The important thing was that for the first time since 1808 the whole people had got a glimpse of hope: the French had been driven out of Madrid; they had evacuated Biscay; Old Castile and Leon had been in the power of Wellington for several months. It was true that Madrid had been recovered, that Wellington had been forced to retreat. But it was well known that the general result of the campaign of 1812 had been to free all Southern Spain, and that the French had been on the verge of ruin in the early autumn. The prestige of the Imperial armies had received at Salamanca a blow from which it never recovered. Wherefore the insurgents of the North put forth during the winter of 1812-13 an energy such as they had never before displayed, and the French generals gradually discovered that they had no longer to do with mere guerrillero bands, half-armed, half-fed wanderers in the hills, recruited only from the desperate and the reckless, but with a whole people in arms. When Caffarelli returned from Burgos, he found that the Spanish authorities had re-established themselves in every town which had been left ungarrisoned, that taxes and requisitions were being levied in a regular fashion, and that new regiments were being formed and trained in Biscay and Guipuzcoa. The nominal Spanish commander in this region was Mendizabal, theoretically Chief of the ‘Seventh Army’—but he was an officer of little resource and no authority. The real fighting man was Longa, originally a guerrillero chief, but now gazetted a colonel in the regular army. He was a gunsmith from the Rioja, a very resolute and persistent man, who had taken to the hills early, and had outlived most of his rivals and colleagues—a clear instance of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ His useful co-operation with Sir Home Popham in the last autumn has been mentioned above: his band, now reorganized as four infantry battalions, was raised from the mountaineers of the province of Santander and the region of the upper Ebro. His usual beat lay between the sea and Burgos, and he was as frequently to be found on the Cantabrian coast as at the defile of Pancorbo, where the great Bayonne chaussée crosses from the watershed of the Ebro to that of the Douro. His force never much exceeded 3,000 men, but they were tough material—great marchers and (as they proved when serving under Wellington) very staunch fighters on their own ground. West of Longa’s hunting grounds were those of Porlier, in the Eastern Asturias: the star of the ‘Marquesito,’ as he was called, had paled somewhat of late, as the reputation of Longa had increased. He had never had again such a stroke of luck as his celebrated surprise of Santander in 1811[382], and the long French occupation of the Asturias in the days of Bonnet had worn down his band to little over 2,000 men. At this moment he was mainly engaged, under the nominal command of Mendizabal, in keeping Santoña blockaded. To besiege it in form he had neither enough men nor a battering train: but if driven away once and again by Caffarelli, he never allowed himself to be caught, and was back again to stop the roads, the moment that the relieving column had marched off. In Biscay the leading spirit was Jauregui (El Pastor), another old ally of Sir Home Popham, but in addition to his band there was now on foot a new organization of a more regular sort, three Biscayan and three Guipuzcoan battalions, who had received arms from the English cruisers. They held all the interior of the country, had fortified the old citadel of Castro-Urdiales on the coast, with guns lent them from the fleet, and co-operated with Mendizabal and Longa whenever occasion offered. They had held Bilbao for a time in the autumn, but were chased out of it when Caffarelli returned from Burgos. In January they made another attempt upon it, but were repulsed by General Rouget, in command of the garrison.

Between the fields of operation of the Biscayans and Longa and that of the Navarrese insurgents, there was the line of the great Bayonne chaussée, held by a series of French garrisons at Tolosa, Bergara, Mondragon, Vittoria, Miranda del Ebro, and the castle of Pancorbo. This line of fortified places was a sore hindrance to the Spaniards, but on many occasions they crossed it. Mina’s raiding battalions from Navarre were frequently seen in the Basque provinces. And they had made communication between one garrison and another so dangerous that the post-commanders often refused to risk men on escorts between one place and the next, and had long ceased to attempt requisitions on the countryside. They were fed by convoys pushed up the high road, with heavy forces to guard them, at infrequent intervals. In Navarre, as has been already explained, Mina held the whole countryside, and had set up an orderly form of government. He had at the most 8,000 or 9,000 men, but they spread everywhere, sometimes operating in one column, sometimes in many, seldom to be caught when sought after, and capable of turning on any rash pursuing force and overwhelming it, if its strength was seen to be over-small. Mina’s sphere of action extended far into Aragon, as far as Huesca, so that he was as much a plague to Paris, the Governor of Saragossa, as to Thouvenot, Governor of Vittoria, or Abbé, Governor of Pampeluna. His strategical purpose, if we may ascribe such a thing to one who was, after all, but a guerrillero of special talent and energy, was to break the line of communication down the Ebro from Miranda to Saragossa, the route by which the King and the Army of the North kept up their touch with Suchet’s troops in Aragon. It was a tempting objective, since all down the river there were French garrisons at short distances in Haro, Logroño, Viana, Calahorra, Milagro, Tudela, and other places, none of them very large, and each capable of being isolated, and attacked for some days, before the Governor of Navarre could come to its aid with a strong relieving column. And there were other garrisons, such as those at Tafalla and Huesca, covering outlying road-centres, which were far from succour and liable to surprise-attacks at any moment.

Nor was Mina destitute of the power to call in help for one of his greater raids—he sometimes shifted towards the coast, and got in touch with the Guipuzcoans and Biscayans, while he had also communication with Duran, south of the Ebro. This officer who was theoretically a division-commander in the Valencian Army, was really the leader of a band of four or five thousand irregulars, who hung about the mountains of Soria, and kept the roads from Madrid to Saragossa and the Ebro blocked. And Duran was again in touch with the Empecinado, whose beat lay on the east side of New Castile, and whose main object was to molest the French garrisons of Guadalajara, Segovia, and Alcalá. Temporary combinations of formidable strength could be made, when several of these irregular forces joined for a common raid: but the chiefs generally worked apart, each disliking to move very far from his own district, where he was acquainted with the roads and the inhabitants. For in a country of chaotic sierras, like Northern Spain, local knowledge was all-important: to be aware of exactly what paths and passes were practicable in January snow, or what torrents were fordable in March rain, was the advantage which the guerrillero had over his enemy. It is probable that in March or April 1813 the total force of all the insurgent bands was no greater than that of the French garrisons and movable columns with which they had to contend. But the Army of the North was forced to tie down the larger half of its strength to holding strategical points and long lines of communication, while the guerrilleros could evacuate one whole region for weeks at a time, in order to mass in another. They could be unexpectedly strong in one district, yet lose nothing by temporary abandonment of another. They were admirably served for intelligence, since the whole population was by goodwill or by fear at their service: the French could only depend on afrancesados for information, and these were timid and few; they grew fewer as Mina gradually discovered and hanged traitors. When the French columns had gone by, it was easily to be guessed who had guided them or given them news—and such people perished, or had to migrate to the nearest garrison. But local knowledge was the real strength of the guerrilleros: a French column-commander, guiding his steps from the abominable maps of Lopez—the atlas which was universally used for want of a better—was always finding his enemy escape by a path unindicated on the map, or appear in his rear over some unknown cross-road, which could not have been suspected to exist. Hence the local Spanish traitor was absolutely necessary as a guide, and often he could not be found—treachery having been discovered to be a path that led inevitably to the gallows. The Army of the North had acquired, from old and painful experience of counter-marches, some general knowledge of the cross-roads between the Ebro and the Pyrenees. But when troops from a distance—sections of the Bayonne Reserve, or reinforcements from the Army of Portugal—were turned on to the game of guerrillero-hunting, they found themselves very helpless. As a rule, the most promising march ended in finding the lair still warm, but the quarry invisible.

Napoleon and his mouthpiece, the War Minister Clarke, refused to the end, as Marshal Marmont remarked[383], to see that the War of Spain was unlike any other war that the French armies had waged since 1792. The nearest parallels to it were the fighting in Switzerland in 1798 and against Hofer’s Tyrolese in 1809. But both of these earlier insurrectionary wars had been fought on a very limited area, against an enemy of no great numerical strength, practically unhelped from without. In Spain the distances were very great, the mountains—if less high than the Alps—were almost as tiresome, for in the Alps there were vast tracts completely inaccessible to both sides, but the Sierras, if rugged, are less lofty and better furnished with goat-tracks and smugglers’ by-ways, where the heavily laden infantryman cannot follow the evasive mountaineer. Moreover, the English cruisers continued to drop in the arms and munitions without which the insurgents could not have kept the field.

There can be no doubt that Napoleon undervalued the power of the Spanish guerrilleros, just as he undervalued the resources and the enterprise of Wellington. From the first moment of his return from Russia he had continued to impress on Joseph and Jourdan the necessity for pacifying the North, before the season for regular campaigning should have arrived, and Wellington should have taken the field. But his theory that the winter was the best time for dealing with the bands was rather specious than correct. For although the short days, the snow in the passes, and the swollen torrents were, no doubt, great hindrances to that freedom of movement which was the main strength of the guerrilleros, they were even greater hindrances to combined operations by bodies of regular troops. Rapid marches are impossible off the high roads in Northern Spain, during the midwinter months; and it was only by combined operations and the use of large forces that the insurgents could be dealt with. Indeed, the country roads were practically impassable for any regular troops in many regions. What officer would risk detachments in upland valleys that might be found to be blocked with snow, or cut off from their usual communication by furious streams that had overflowed the roads and made fords impracticable? Winter marches in unexplored hills are the most deadly expedients: all the weakly soldiers fall by the way—had not Drouet lost 150 men in passing the Guadarrama during the early days of December—and the Guadarrama was crossed by one of the few great royal roads of Spain? What would be the losses of columns sent out on cross-roads and caught in blizzards, or in those weeks of continuous rain which are not uncommon in the sub-Pyrenean region?

The Emperor’s view was that Caffarelli had failed in his task from want of resourcefulness. He was always trying to parry blows rather than to strike himself: he allowed the insurgents to take the initiative, and when they had executed some tiresome raid would set out in a pursuit which was seldom useful, since they naturally outran him[384]. He was always marching to deliver or revictual some threatened garrison, anywhere between Santoña and Pampeluna, instead of setting himself to destroy the main agglomeration of hostile forces. Now Caffarelli, it is true, was no great general, and may have been on occasion wanting in vigour. But the best reply to the criticism of him sent from Paris is to observe that his successor, Clausel, universally acknowledged to be the most active officer in Spain, failed in exactly the same way as his predecessor, even when he had been lent 20,000 veteran troops to aid him in his task.

Napoleon wanted a great general movement pour balayer tout le Nord. He granted that Caffarelli had not enough troops both to furnish garrisons for every important point, and to hunt down the guerrilleros with a large field-force. Therefore he ordered Reille to furnish Caffarelli’s successor with every man that he asked for. If necessary, the whole Army of Portugal might be requisitioned, since those of the South and Centre would be enough to keep Wellington in check. The letter of instructions which Clarke was directed to give to Clausel, when the latter took up his appointment, explains the Emperor’s views. ‘By a continual taking of the offensive it ought to be possible to reach a prompt and happy result. The moment that the reinforcements to be furnished by General Reille arrive (and possibly they have already put themselves at your disposition) in Navarre and Biscay, I am convinced that your usual activity will change the face of affairs. Rapid pursuits, well directed, and above all properly adapted to the topographical configuration of the district; raids made without warning on the insurgents’ dépôts of provisions, their hospitals, their stores of arms, and in general on all their magazines, will infallibly carry confusion into their operations. After you have had some successful engagements with them, it will only require politic measures to complete their disorganization. When you have scattered their juntas, all the young men they have enrolled by compulsion will melt home. If you leave them no rest, and surprise them in their remotest places of refuge, the matter should end by their going wholly to pieces.... As to the keeping open your communication with France, one particular device, to whose utility all the generals who have served in that region bear witness, is to establish at regular distances and in well chosen positions, especially where roads meet, small palisaded forts, or blockhouses, which will form a chain of posts and support each other. Owing to the wooded nature of the country they will not cost much to build—the estimate for such a system of blockhouses has been calculated to me at no more than 300,000 francs.

‘Santoña and Pampeluna must be held—the latter because its capture is Mina’s main ambition, the former because it is a terror to the English, who recently tried to have it besieged: General Caffarelli had to lead an expedition to relieve it. Pampeluna is the more important for the moment: when a division of the Army of Portugal reaches Navarre you ought to be able to make Mina change his tone. Santoña can wait—it may be reprovisioned by sea from the small ports of Biscay. As General Caffarelli has inconsiderately evacuated most of them, you should reoccupy them all, especially Bermeo and Castro-Urdiales. The latter is said to have been fortified with the help of the English. For the sake of the safety of Santoña all these places must be retaken at once: from the mouth of the Bidassoa to Santander every maritime position should be in French hands. Santander especially is, by the Emperor’s express orders, to be permanently occupied by an adequate garrison.

‘It is necessary that all these operations should be carried out simultaneously. The pursuit of Mina in Navarre should synchronize with the operations in Biscay. The insurgents should be hunted in the inland, at the same time that they are attacked on the coast. This is the only way to disorganize them, to make them weak and divided at all points.... It seems preferable to use every available man for a general simultaneous attack, than to undertake each necessary operation in succession, with a smaller force and more leisure—all the more so because the reinforcements, which are to co-operate in your scheme, may be called elsewhere by some unforeseen development of affairs[385].’

Clausel, in obedience to his instructions, tried to carry out the whole of this scheme, and had small luck therewith. He built the chain of blockhouses from Irun to Burgos, thereby tying up many battalions to sedentary duty. He hunted Mina right and left, drove the insurrectionary Junta of Biscay from its abode, occupied all the little ports from Santander to San Sebastian, stormed the well-fortified Castro-Urdiales, revictualled Pampeluna and Santoña, and at the end of three months had to report that his task was unfinished, that the insurrection was still unsubdued, and that although he had borrowed 20,000 infantry from the Army of Portugal, he must ask for another 20,000 men [where were they to be got?] in order to finish the campaign. And by this time—the end of May—Wellington was loose, and the King was falling back on the Ebro, vainly calling for the five divisions that his brother had made over to the Army of the North. But we must resume the chronicle of the Northern campaign, before commenting on its inadequate and unhappy conclusion.

The operations may be said to have begun in January, when Palombini’s Italian division marched from Old Castile to join the Army of the North, in order to replace Dumoustier’s brigade of the Young Guard, which was being recalled to France. After crossing the Guadarrama Pass in a blizzard, which cost some lives, they got to Burgos on the 28th, driving away the Cura Merino and his band, who had been blocking the road from Valladolid. From Burgos Palombini marched to Vittoria, escorting a convoy of drafts returning to France, couriers, officials, and convalescents. There he heard that Longa and Mendizabal had cut in behind him, and had again stopped communications. Wherefore he turned back, and swept the Bureba, where they were reported to be. Not finding them, he marched as far as Poza de la Sal, not far from Briviesca, but some leagues off the great chaussée. In this town his head-quarters were fixed, while the bulk of his division was sent out in flying columns to collect food. He had only 500 men with him, when on the night of February 10-11 he found himself surrounded by three Spanish columns, which had slipped through the intervals of the outlying Italian regiments, and ran in on the town from different quarters. The surprise, contrived by Longa, was complete; but Palombini, collecting his men in a clump, held out till daylight, when his battalions came flocking in to the sound of the musketry and relieved him. The Spaniards disappeared, taking with them some baggage and prisoners captured in the first rush, and were soon lost to sight in the mountains.

The Italians, lucky to have escaped so cheaply, marched back to the Ebro by way of Domingo Calzada, where there was a French garrison in imminent danger of starvation, as it had long been blockaded by local bands[386]. Palombini took it on with him, and blew up the castle, as the place was inconveniently remote from any other French post. He then returned to Vittoria by way of Haro (February 18) and next pushed on to Bilbao, where he relieved Dumoustier’s brigade of the Imperial Guard, which was at last able to obey the Emperor’s order to return to France (February 21). Caffarelli used this force as his escort back to Bayonne, and returned in some disgrace to Paris. Clausel assumed command in his stead on the next day.

Pampeluna had been declared by the new commander’s letter of instructions to be the place of which he should be most careful. But seeing no chance of visiting and relieving it till his reinforcements from the Army of Portugal should have come up, Clausel, while waiting for their arrival, came to Bilbao, where he began to make preparations for the siege of Castro-Urdiales, by far the most important, for the moment, of the ports along the coast which the Emperor had commended to him for destruction.

Meanwhile the Biscayan insurgents collected opposite Bilbao, on the Eastern side, and Mendizabal brought up Longa’s troops and some of the smaller bands to threaten it from the West. The idea was to give Clausel so much trouble about his head-quarters that he would be unable to march away against Castro. The days slipped by, and farther East Mina was more active than ever in Navarre. He had at last become the happy possessor of two siege guns, landed at Deba on the Biscay coast, and dragged by incredible exertions across mountain paths to the farthest inland. When they came to hand he set to work to beleaguer the French garrison of Tafalla, an outlying place, but less than thirty miles from Pampeluna. This was a challenge to General Abbé, the Governor of Navarre: a force which has dug trenches and brought up heavy guns is obviously asking for a fight, and not intending to abscond. Abbé marched with 3,000 infantry and 150 chasseurs to raise the siege, and found Mina with four of his battalions and his regiment of cavalry drawn up across the high road, in a mountain position at Tiebas, ten miles north of Tafalla. After a hard day’s fighting, Abbé failed to break through, and had to fall back on Pampeluna[387] (February 9). The news of his repulse disheartened the garrison, whose walls were crumbling under the fire of Mina’s heavy guns, and they surrendered on February 11th to the number of 11 officers and 317 men—the post-commander and many others had been killed during the siege.

This success of Mina’s meant nothing less than that the whole open country of Navarre was at his mercy, since Abbé had been beaten in the field; wherefore Clausel hastened to dispatch the first reinforcements from the Army of Portugal which reached him—Barbot’s division—to this quarter. But the affair created less excitement than an exploit of reckless courage carried out by one of Mina’s detachments in the following month. The old castle of Fuenterrabia commands the passage of the Bidassoa, and looks across its estuary into France: on March 11 it was surprised by escalade by a handful of guerrilleros, the garrison taken prisoner, the guns thrown into the water, and the whole building destroyed by fire. The flames were visible far into France—troops hurried up from Irun and Hendaye, but of course found the guerrilleros gone[388].

This exploit was rather spectacular than harmful to the French—quite otherwise was the last event of the month of March. Barbot’s division, on entering Navarre, was directed to help Abbé to clear the country between Pampeluna and the Ebro. Having reached Lodosa on March 30, Barbot sent out two battalions to raise requisitions in the neighbouring town of Lerin. The place was being sacked, when the scattered French were suddenly attacked by two of Mina’s battalions, while two more and 200 Navarrese lancers cut in between the enemy and Lodosa. The French, thoroughly surprised, lost heavily in the first shock, but rallied and started to cut their way back to their division, only eight miles away. In a running fight they were much mauled, and finally had to form square to receive the cavalry. In this inconvenient formation they were forced to a long musketry fight with the Navarrese, which so shook the square that it finally broke when Mina’s lancers charged. The two battalions were annihilated, 28 officers and 635 men taken prisoners—the rest cut down. Gaudin, the colonel commanding the detachment, escaped with a few mounted officers[389]. The extraordinary part of the affair was that its last crisis took place at only two miles from Lodosa, where Barbot was lying with his remaining six battalions. The French general never stirred, but only put himself in a posture of defence, thereby provoking Mina’s surprise[390], for he could have saved the column by going out to its help. After the disaster he retired to Pampeluna, with a division reduced to little over 3,000 men. But not long after Taupin’s division of the Army of Portugal also entered Navarre, and joined Abbé. This gave the latter a very heavy force—at least 13,000 men, and when Clausel had finished his own operations in the direction of Bilbao, and marched from Biscay to encircle Mina on one side, while Abbé was to hold him on the other, the great guerrillero was in grave danger. But this was only in late April and May, and before the chronicle of these weeks is reached we have to turn back westward for a space.

Napoleon’s orders had told Clausel to attack at all points at once, and to lose no time in setting to work. But it was quite clear that no general synchronized move could be made, until the divisions borrowed from Reille had all arrived. What active operations meant, before the reinforcements had come up, had been sufficiently proved by Abbé’s defeat at Tiebas: and Clausel’s own doings in March were equally discouraging, if not so disastrous. He had resolved to carry out one of the Emperor’s urgent orders by capturing Castro-Urdiales, the touching-place of British cruisers and the one fortified port which the Allies possessed on the Biscay coast. Undervaluing its strength, he marched out on March 21 with the bulk of Palombini’s Italian division and a single French battalion, intending to take it by escalade. For he had been told that its ancient walls had been indifferently repaired, and were almost without guns. When, however, he had reached the neighbourhood of Castro on the 22nd, he had to own on inspection that the enterprise would be hopeless—his commanding engineer, the historian Vacani[391]—maintained that it would take 6,000 men and a siege train of at least six heavy guns to deal with the place. And, as subsequent events showed, this was quite true. Castro is built on a rocky spit projecting into the sea, with a stout wall 20 feet high drawn across the isthmus which joins the headland to the coast. The narrow front of this wall, from water to water, had been well repaired; there were some 20 guns mounted, and an old castle on the extreme sea-ward point of the spit served as a citadel or inner fortification. Mendizabal and his lieutenant, Campillo, had come down from the interior with three or four thousand men, and were visible on the flank, ready to fall upon the Italian column if it should approach the town, through the labyrinth of vineyards and stone fences which covered its outskirts.

Clausel, always venturesome, was inclined at first to go on with his enterprise, when news reached him that Bilbao, which he had left rather weakly garrisoned, was threatened by the guerrillero Jauregui, and the battalions of the volunteers of Biscay and Guipuzcoa. He returned hastily to his head-quarters with his French battalion, but found that the danger had been exaggerated for the moment, so sent out General Rouget with two battalions to join Palombini, who had meanwhile on the 24th fought a severe action with Mendizabal. The Spaniard had tried to surround him in his camp at San Pelayo, with several outflanking columns—the Italian sallied out and drove him off with loss—but suffered himself no less[392]. Clausel, on reaching the front, came to the conclusion that Castro must not be attacked without heavy guns and a larger field-force. He directed Palombini to burn the ladders, fascines, &c., prepared for the assault, and to go off instead to raise the blockade of Santoña, while he himself returned to Bilbao. The Italian division therefore marched westward on Colindres, on the other side of the bay on which Santoña stands, thrusting aside the Spanish blockading forces, and communicated with the governor, General Lameth. A supply of small arms and ammunition, money, and food was thrown into the place. On the other hand, Lameth was ordered to get six heavy guns on shipboard, and to be prepared to run them down the coast, when next a French force should appear in front of Castro-Urdiales, along with a provision of round shot, shells, and entrenching tools. Lameth got the siege material ready, but was not asked for it till another full month had gone by, for Clausel had other business pressed upon him.

Palombini thereupon turned back, and regained Bilbao in three forced marches, unmolested by the Spaniards, for they had gone off in the direction of Balmaseda, not expecting him to return so quickly. He had only been in Bilbao for two days when Clausel sent him out again, eastward this time and not westward, with two of his regiments, for a surprise attack on Guernica, the head-quarters of the Biscayan insurgents and the seat of their Junta. A French column of two battalions of the 40th Line from Durango was to co-operate and to assail the enemy in the rear. This expedition was quite in consonance with Napoleon’s orders to strike at the enemy’s central dépôts in front and rear by unexpected raids. But it also showed the difficulty of carrying out such plans. Palombini reached Guernica, driving before him bands which gave way, but were always growing stronger: behind Guernica they made a stand—the French flanking column failed to appear—having found troubles of its own—and Palombini was repulsed and forced to cut his way back out of the hills. He reported his loss as only 80 men—but it was probably somewhat more[393] (April 2). Having picked up the stray French column, and replenished his ammunition from Bilbao, Palombini, with a laudable perseverance, attacked the Guernica position again on April 5, and this time forced it. Thence pushing east, he tried to drive the enemy before him along the coast road, on which, in the neighbourhood of St. Sebastian, a brigade from the Bayonne reserve had been set to block their flight. But the Biscayans and El Pastor evaded him and slipped south into the hills: the Guipuzcoan battalions, instinctively falling back on their own province, were in more danger. But warned in time that the coast road was stopped, some of them took refuge in the boats of English warships at Lequeytio and Motrico, and were shipped off to Castro-Urdiales in safety, while others simply dispersed. No prisoners were taken, but Palombini captured the petty magazines of the Guipuzcoans at Aspeytia and Azcoytia, and thinking that the insurrection was scotched returned to the Bayonne chaussée at Bergara (April 9).

So far was this from ending the campaign, that while Palombini was devastating Guipuzcoa, the Biscayans and El Pastor had concerted a new attack on Bilbao with Longa and Mendizabal, who had been left with no containing force in front of them when the enemy had retired from before Castro-Urdiales.

Clausel had gone off from Bilbao on March 30, with a large escort, to join at Vittoria the newly arrived divisions of the Army of Portugal, those of Taupin and Foy, and was set on organizing a new attack on Mina. In the absence of both the Commander-in-Chief and of Palombini, Bilbao was very weakly garrisoned—not more than 2,000 men were left to General Rouget to defend a rather extensive system of outworks. On April 10th the Spaniards attacked him on both sides of the Nervion river, and would probably have broken into Bilbao but for the incapacity of Mendizabal, whose main body did not come up in time to assist the attack of the Biscayans on the other bank of the river. Rouget was still holding out when Palombini came to his rescue from Bergara via Durango, in two forced marches. The Spaniards thereupon dispersed, after their usual fashion, Mendizabal disappearing to the east, the Biscayans falling back on their old head-quarters at Guernica. Palombini was strong at the moment, having been joined by the brigade from Bayonne, under General Aussenac, which had been blocking the coast road. He therefore tried to surround the Biscayans with converging columns—but when he thought that he had cut them off from the inland, and was about to drive them into the water, the bulk of them were picked up at Bermeo by English cruisers, and landed farther down the coast. Only some baggage and a store of munitions fell into the pursuer’s hands (April 14).

On this, Palombini, ‘convinced,’ says his admiring chronicler Vacani, ‘of the uselessness of trying to envelop or destroy local bands among mountains which they knew too well, when he could only dispose of columns of a few battalions for the pursuit,’ resolved to halt at Bilbao, and prepare for the siege of Castro. He put the brigade from Bayonne in charge of the high road to San Sebastian, and waited for the arrival of Foy from Vittoria. For he had been informed that this general, with his division of the Army of Portugal, was to be detailed to help him in the subjection of Biscay. Meanwhile April was half over, the insurgents had been often hunted but never caught, and Wellington might be expected to be on the move any morning: it was strange that he had not been heard of already.

Leaving Biscay to Palombini and Foy, Clausel had collected at Vittoria one of his own divisions, hitherto scattered in small detachments, but relieved by the reinforcements sent him from the Army of Portugal. For beside the four divisions lent for active service, he had taken over the whole Province of Burgos, to which Reille had sent the division of Lamartinière. With his own newly-collected division, under Vandermaesen, and Taupin’s of the Army of Portugal, Clausel set out for Navarre on April 11th, to combine his operations with those of Abbé and to hunt down Mina. As he had already sent forward to the Governor of Navarre the division of Barbot, there was now a field-force of 20,000 men available for the chase, without taking into consideration the troops tied down in garrisons. This was more than double the strength that Mina could command, and the next month was one of severe trial for the great guerrillero.

Clausel’s first idea was to catch Mina by a sweeping movement of all his four divisions, which he collected at Puente la Reyna in the valley of the Arga (April 24). Mina answered this move by dispersion, and his battalions escaped through intervals in the cordon with no great loss, and cut up more than once small detachments of their pursuers. Clausel perceiving that this system was useless, then tried another, one of those recommended by the Emperor in his letter of instruction of March 9, viz. a resolute stroke at the enemy’s magazines and dépôts. Mina kept his hospitals, some rough munition factories which he had set up, and his store of provisions, in the remote Pyrenean valley of Roncal, where Navarre and Aragon meet: it was most inaccessible and far from any high road. Nevertheless Clausel marched upon it with the divisions of Abbé, Vandermaesen, and Barbot, leaving Taupin alone at Estella to contain Western Navarre. He calculated that Mina would be forced to concentrate and fight, in order to save his stores and arsenal, and that so he might be destroyed. He was partly correct in his hypothesis—but only partly. Mina left four of his battalions in Western Navarre, in the valleys of the Amescoas, to worry Taupin, and hurried with the remaining five to cover the Roncal. There was heavy fighting in the passes leading to it on May 12 and 13, which ended in the Navarrese being beaten and dispersed with the loss of a thousand men. Clausel captured and destroyed the factories and magazines, and made prisoners of the sick in the hospitals, whom he treated with unexpected humanity. Some of the broken battalions fled south by Sanguesa into lower Navarre, others eastward into Aragon. Among these last was Mina himself with a small party of cavalry—he tried to fetch a compass round the pursuing French and to return to his own country, but he was twice headed off, and finally forced to fly far into Eastern Aragon, as far as Barbastro. This region was practically open to him for flight, for the French garrison of Saragossa was too weak to cover the whole country, or to stop possible bolt-holes. Mina was therefore able to rally part of his men there, and called in the help of scattered partidas. Clausel swept all North-Western Aragon with his three divisions, making arrests and destroying villages which had harboured the insurgents. But he did not wish to pursue Mina to the borders of Catalonia, where he would have been quite out of his own beat, and inconveniently remote from Pampeluna and Vittoria.

But meanwhile the division which he had left under Taupin in Navarre was having much trouble with Mina’s four battalions in the Amescoas, and parties drifting back from the rout in the Roncal vexed the northern bank of the Ebro, while Longa and Mendizabal, abandoning their old positions in front of Bilbao, had descended on to the Bayonne chaussée, and executed many raids upon it, from the pass of Salinas above Vittoria as far as the Ebro (April 25-May 10). The communications between Bayonne and Burgos were once more cut, and the situation grew so bad that Lamartinière’s division of the Army of Portugal had to be moved eastward, to clear the road from Burgos to Miranda, Sarrut’s to do the same between Miranda and Bilbao, while Maucune detached a brigade to relieve Lamartinière at Burgos. Of the whole Army of Portugal there was left on May 20th only one single infantry brigade at Palencia which was still at Reille’s disposition. Five and a half divisions had been lent to Clausel, and were dispersed in the north. And Wellington was now just about to move! The worst thing of all for the French cause was that the communications of the North were as bad in May as they had been in January: after Clausel had taken off the main field-army to the Roncal, and had led it from thence far into Aragon, the roads behind him were absolutely useless. Only on the line Bayonne-Vittoria, where the new blockhouses were beginning to arise, was any regular passing to and fro possible. Clausel himself was absolutely lost to sight, so far as King Joseph was concerned—it took a fortnight or twenty days to get a dispatch through to him.

Meanwhile, before turning to the great campaign of Wellington on the Douro, it is necessary to dispose of the chronicle of affairs in Biscay. Foy and his division, as we have seen, had marched from Vittoria to Bilbao and reached the latter place on April 21st[394]. On the way they had nearly caught Mendizabal at Orduña, where he chanced to be present with a guard of only 200 men; but, warned just in time, he had the luck to escape, and went back to pick up his subordinates Longa and Campillo nearer the coast.

Soon after Foy’s arrival at Bilbao he was joined by Sarrut’s division of the Army of Portugal, which had followed him from Vittoria. He had therefore, counting Palombini’s Italians, the brigade of Aussenac, and the regular garrison of Bilbao, at least 16,000 men—ample for the task that Clausel had commended to him, the capture of Castro-Urdiales, with its patched-up mediaeval wall. The only thing presenting any difficulty was getting a siege train to this remote headland: Lameth, the Governor of Santoña, as it will be remembered, had been ordered to provide one, and there were four heavy guns in Bilbao:—the roads on both sides, however, were impracticable, and the artillery had to come by water, running the chance of falling in with British cruisers.

On April 25th Foy marched out of Bilbao with his own, Sarrut’s, and Palombini’s divisions, more than 11,000 men,[395] leaving Aussenac on the Deba, to guard the road from San Sebastian, and Rouget in garrison as usual. On the same evening he reached the environs of Castro, and left Palombini there to shut in the place, while he went on himself to look for Mendizabal, who was known to be watching affairs from the hills, and to be blocking the road to Santoña, as he had so often done before. Foy then moved on to Cerdigo where he established his head-quarters for the siege, on a strong position between the sea and the river Agaera. Mendizabal was reputed to be holding the line of the Ason, ten miles farther on, but in weak force: he had only the partidas of Campillo and Herrero with him, Longa being absent in the direction of Vittoria. On the 29th Foy drove off these bands at Ampuero, and communicated with Santoña, into which he introduced a drove of 500 oxen and other victuals. The governor Lameth was ordered to ship the siege train that he had collected to Islares, under the camp at Cerdigo, on the first day when he should find the bay clear—for three English sloops, the Lyra, Royalist, and Sparrow, under Captain Bloye, were lying off Castro and watching the coast. Foy then established Sarrut’s division to cover the siege at Trucios, and sent two Italian battalions to Portugalete to guard the road to Bilbao, keeping his own division and the three other Italian battalions for the actual trench work. The heavy guns were the difficulty—those expected from Bilbao were stopped at the mouth of the Nervion by the English squadron, which was watching for them—but in the absence of the sloops on this quest, the governor of Santoña succeeded in running his convoy across the bay on May 4th. The guns from Bilbao were afterwards brought up by land, with much toil.

Foy then commenced three batteries on the high slopes which dominate the town: two were completed on the 6th, despite much long-distance fire from the British ships, and from a heavy gun which Captain Bloye had mounted on the rocky islet of Santa Anna outside the harbour. On the 7th fire was begun from two batteries against the mediaeval curtain wall, but was ineffective—one battery was silenced by the British. On the 10th, however, the third battery—much closer in—was ready, and opened with devastating results on the 11th, two hours’ fire making a breach 30 feet wide and destroying a large convent behind it.

The Governor, Pedro Alvarez, one of Longa’s colonels, had a garrison of no more than 1,000 men—all like himself from Longa’s regiments of Iberia; he made a resolute defence, kept up a continuous counter-fire, and prepared to hold the breach. But it was obvious that the old wall was no protection from modern artillery, and that Foy could blow down as much of it as he pleased at leisure. On the afternoon of the 11th part of the civil population went on board the British ships: the governor made preparations for holding the castle, on the seaside of the town projecting into the water, as a last stronghold: but it was only protected by the steepness of the rock on which it stood—its walls were ruined and worthless. Late in the day the British took off the heavy gun which they had placed on the islet—it could not have been removed after the town had fallen, and the fall was clearly inevitable.

Foy, seeing the curtain-wall continuing to crumble, and a 60-foot breach established, resolved to storm that night, and sent in at 7.20 three columns composed of eight French and eight Italian flank companies for the assault—the former to the breach, the latter to try to escalade a low angle near the Bilbao gate. Both attacks succeeded, despite a heavy but ill-aimed fire from the defenders, and the Spaniards were driven through the town and into the castle, where they maintained themselves. Alvarez had made preparations for evacuation—while two companies held the steep steps which were the only way up to the castle, the rest of the garrison embarked at its back on the boats of the British squadron. Some were killed in the water by the French fire, some drowned, but the large majority got off. By three in the morning there were only 100 men left in the castle: Alvarez had detailed them to throw the guns into the sea, and to fire the magazines, both of which duties they accomplished, before the early dawn. When, by means of ladders, the French made their way into an embrasure of the defences, some of this desperate band were killed. But it is surprising to hear that most of them got away by boat from the small jetty at the back of the castle. They probably owed their escape to the fact that the stormers had spent the night in riotous atrocities vying with those of Badajoz on a small scale. Instead of finishing off their job by taking the castle, they had spent the night in rape and plunder in the town[396].

The Spaniards declared that the total loss of their garrison was only 100 men, and the statement is borne out by the dispatch of Captain Bloye of the Lyra. Foy wrote to Clausel that the whole business had only cost him fifty men. The two statements seem equally improbable, for the siege had lasted for six days of open trenches, and both sides had fought with great resolution[397].

But the really important thing to note about this little affair is that it absorbed three French divisions for sixteen days in the most critical month of 1813. Eleven thousand men were tied down in a remote corner of Biscay, before a patched-up mediaeval wall, while Longa was running riot in Alava and breaking the line of communication with France—and (what is more important) while Wellington’s columns were silently gliding into place for the great stroke on the Douro. Colonel Alvarez could boast that his thousand men had served a very useful and honourable end during the great campaign. He and they were landed by Captain Bloye at Bermeo, and went off over the hills to join Longa: the majority of them must have been present at the battle of Vittoria, some six weeks after their escape by sea.

Having discharged the first duty set him by Clausel, Foy left the Italians at Castro, to guard the coast and keep up communications with Santoña. He sent Sarrut southward to hunt for Longa, by way of Orduña; but the Spaniard crossed the Ebro and moved into the province of Burgos, evading pursuit. Then, finding that Lamartinière’s division was guarding the great road in this direction, he turned off north-westward, and escaped by Espinosa to the mountains of Santander. Sarrut, having lost him, turned back to Biscay.

Meanwhile Foy himself, after retiring to Bilbao to give a few days of rest to his division, started out again on May 27th for a circular tour in Biscay. His object was to destroy the three Biscayan volunteer battalions which had given his predecessor so much trouble. Two he dispersed, but could not destroy, and they ultimately got together again in somewhat diminished numbers. The third was more unlucky: caught between three converging columns near Lequeytio, it was driven against the seashore and nearly annihilated—360 men were taken, 200 killed, only two companies got off into the hills (May 30th). But to achieve this result Foy had collected three brigades—5,000 men—who would have been better employed that day on the Esla, for Wellington was crossing that river at the moment—and where were the infantry of the Army of Portugal, who should have stood in his way?

So while the British Army was streaming by tens of thousands into the undefended plains of Leon, Foy and Sarrut were guerrillero-hunting in Biscay, and Taupin and Barbot had just failed in the great chase after Mina in Aragon and Navarre. Such were the results of the Emperor’s orders for the pacification of the North.

SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER VI

AN EPISODE ON THE EAST COAST.
CASTALLA, APRIL 1813

During the winter months, from November to February, affairs had been quiet on the Mediterranean side of the Peninsula. The transient sojourn of the Armies of Soult and King Joseph in the kingdom of Valencia, which had so much troubled the mind of General Maitland, had lasted no more than a few weeks. After they had marched off to retake Madrid, no traces remained of them, in the end of October, save the mass of sick, convalescents, and Spanish refugees which they had left behind—guests most undesired—in charge of Suchet. There was no longer any fear of a siege of Alicante, or of the expulsion of the Anglo-Sicilian expeditionary corps from Spain.

When the shadow of this fear had passed, the Allied forces resumed something like their old position. The Anglo-Sicilians had passed under many commanders since the autumn: Maitland had resigned owing to ill-health before October 1st: he was succeeded for six weeks by John Mackenzie, the senior Major-General at Alicante, who was superseded about November 20th by William Clinton (brother of Henry Clinton of the 6th Division). But Clinton was only in charge of the expeditionary force for twelve days, being out-ranked by James Campbell, Adjutant-General of the Army of Sicily, who turned up with a large body of reinforcements on December 2nd. Campbell, however, only bore rule at Alicante for a period of three months, giving place to Sir John Murray on February 25th. It was therefore on the last-named officer that the stress of co-operating with Wellington in the campaign of 1813 was to fall. The unlucky man was quite unequal to the position, being singularly infirm of purpose and liable to lose his head at critical moments, as he had shown at Oporto on May 12th, 1809[398]. It is surprising that Wellington, knowing his record, should have acquiesced in the appointment—perhaps he thought that here at least was a general who would take no risks, and have no dangerous inspirations of initiative.

The strength of the Alicante army had risen by January 1813 to something like 14,000 men, but it remained (as it had been from the first) a most heterogeneous force, consisting in the early spring of 1813 of six British[399], three German[400], and two foreign battalions belonging to the regular forces of the Crown[401], with four Italian units[402] of various sorts. The cavalry consisted of one British and one Sicilian regiment and an odd squadron of ‘Foreign Hussars.’ The artillery was partly British, partly Sicilian, and partly Portuguese. In addition to these troops the commander at Alicante had complete control over General Whittingham’s ‘Majorcan division,’ a Spanish corps which had been reorganized in the Balearic Islands by that officer, and which had been clothed, armed, and paid from the British subsidy. It consisted of six infantry battalions and two weak cavalry regiments, and was in the spring about 4,500 strong. They were rightly esteemed the best Spanish troops on the Eastern front, and justified their reputation in the subsequent campaign. There was a second Spanish division in the neighbourhood, that of General Roche, which, like Whittingham’s, had been taken on to the British subsidy, and re-clothed and re-armed. But this unit was not reckoned part of the Alicante force, but belonged theoretically to Elio’s Murcian army, in which it was numbered as the 4th Division. It counted only five battalions and was at this time not more than 3,500 strong. But though it was registered as part of the Army of Murcia, it often acted with Murray’s Anglo-Sicilian troops, being cantoned alongside of them in the Alicante region. When Wellington became Generalissimo of the Spanish armies, he not infrequently gave orders to Roche to join Murray rather than Elio—apparently conceiving that the fact that the division lived on the British subsidy had placed it on a somewhat different footing from the rest of the Murcians.

If we count Whittingham and Roche as attached to the Expeditionary Army at Alicante, the strength of that heterogeneous host would have been rather over 21,000 men—a total perceptibly greater than Suchet’s field-force encamped over against it on the Xucar. And in addition there lay close behind, within the borders of the kingdom of Murcia, Elio and his ‘Second Army,’ which, even after deducting Roche’s division, was a considerable accumulation of troops. But the Murcian army’s record was more unhappy than that of any other Spanish unit, and it had been dashed to pieces once more in the preceding July, at the discreditable battle of Castalla. Though it nominally counted 30,000 men in its six divisions, only three of them were available[403], for two were really no more than the old guerrillero bands of the Empecinado and Duran, who hung about in Southern Aragon, and shifted for themselves. They were both remote and disorganized. Since Roche’s division was also often out of Elio’s control, he really had no more than 13,000 infantry and 2,000 horse in hand.

There were facing Suchet, of allied troops of one sort and another, some 35,000 men, a fact which the Marshal never ceased to utilize in his correspondence with Madrid, when he wished to excuse himself from lending aid to his neighbours. But the Murcian army had still not recovered from the demoralization caused by the battle of Castalla, and the Alicante army was suffering from two evils which reduced its value as a campaigning force to a very low level. The first was a terrible deficiency of transport. When Lord William Bentinck sent out the first expeditionary force from Sicily, he intended it to equip itself with mules, horses, and carts in Spain. But in the summer of 1812 the Kingdom of Murcia was the only unoccupied region on the east side of the Peninsula, and all its not too copious resources were wanted for its own army. Successive captains-general refused, not unnaturally, to help Maitland or Murray in the task of collecting sumpter-beasts, and suggested that they ought to draw both animals and food from Sicily. Food was indeed procured from thence, and even from Algeria and the Levant, so that the army did not starve. But there was insufficient means to move that food from the water’s edge. A certain number of mules were collected by paying very heavy hire—not at all to the gratification of the Spanish authorities, who wanted them for their own use. But they were so few that the Army could make no long general marches, and could count on little more than what the men carried in their haversacks. The best that could be done was to move it forward from the immediate neighbourhood of Alicante, so that it could live upon the resources of the inland, where there were many fertile and well-peopled valleys. The main object, indeed, of James Campbell’s forward move was to get food for Whittingham’s and Roche’s divisions, which were (though paid by the British subsidy) dependent for their rations on the Spanish Government, and seldom received them. Local food for these troops had to be sought, as the only possible means of keeping them alive. In February the line of occupation reached as far as Biar, Castalla, and Xixona, all held by Whittingham’s division, while Roche and the Anglo-Sicilians were mostly in second line, at Elda, Monforte, and Alicante. But the problem of making the Anglo-Sicilian army a mobile force was not much further advanced in March 1813 than it had been in October 1812.

The second weak point of the Alicante army was the extremely doubtful quality of some of its foreign elements. It is true that the German Legion battalions were as steady as those of the same corps in Wellington’s own army. But all the others were crammed with deserters from the enemy’s ranks, or prisoners of war who had enlisted in order to escape the miseries of the prison-camp or the hulks. The ‘Calabrese Free Corps’ was a trifle better than the rest, being mostly composed of genuine exiles. But the only difference between the recent recruits of Dillon’s cosmopolitan regiment in the British service and of the ‘Italian Levy’ and ‘Estero regiment’ was that the former corps contained more French and Swiss deserters, and the latter pair more Italians. All had the usual sprinkling of Poles, Dutch, Croats, and other miscellaneous adventurers. A lurid light was thrown upon their possibilities on February 11th, when 86 men of the 2nd Italian Levy deserted to the French lines, bringing over their officer as a prisoner. It was discovered that the rest of the battalion were in a plot to betray Xixona to Suchet, and with it one of Whittingham’s Spanish regiments, which was encamped beside them. There was just time to march in the 1 /27th and a second Spanish battalion, who surrounded and disarmed the Italians, before a French column appeared at dawn. It directed itself to the quarters from which the traitors had just been drawn off, was surprised to be received with a heavy fire, and rapidly withdrew [404]. Such an incident was certainly not calculated to inspire a timid general, like Sir John Murray, with any great craving for a bold offensive.

On the other hand, Murray had a formidable force on paper, and when Suchet reflected that there lay close behind him, first Elio’s army in Murcia—at least 13,000 men without counting the Empecinado’s and Duran’s bands—and farther back Del Parque’s Andalusian ‘3rd Army,’ which had also some 13,000 effectives, he could not but see that 50,000 men might march against his comparatively weak force in Valencia at any moment. His strength on the Xucar was very modest—not much over 15,000 bayonets and sabres: for though he had 60,000 men of all arms effective, and 75,000 on his rolls, including sick and detached, yet such a force was not enough to control the whole of the ancient lands of the Aragonese crown—Aragon Proper, Catalonia, and Valencia. He was in possession of all of them save the Catalan inland, where the ‘First Army’ still maintained itself, the extreme southern region of the Valencian kingdom round Alicante, and the mountains between Aragon and Castile, which were the hunting ground of the guerrilleros of Duran and the Empecinado. The garrison was small for such a widespread occupation, and the only thing that made the Marshal’s position tolerable was the fact that (unlike Catalonia) Aragon and Valencia had shown themselves very ‘quiet’ regions. Suchet’s rule had been severe, but at least orderly; there had been little of the casual plunder and requisitioning which made French rule detested under other commanders. The coast-plain of Valencia and the broad stretch of the Ebro valley in Central Aragon were districts less suitable for the operations of guerrilleros than almost any other part of Spain. On the Valencian frontier there was only one active partida, that of the ‘Fraile’ (Agostin Nebot), whose welcome gift of 60 captured French transport mules to the Alicante army is acknowledged in one of Wellington’s dispatches. It is true that the sub-Pyrenean parts of Aragon were exposed to Mina’s raids, and that the solid block of sierras round Molina and Albaracin was always the refuge of Duran and Villacampa, but these were not essential regions for the maintenance of the hold on the Mediterranean coast. With the exception of these tracts the land was fairly quiet: there was a general submission to the French yoke, and an appreciable proportion of afrancesados. The blow inflicted on public opinion by the fall of Valencia in January 1812 was still a recent thing. Wellington’s army had been heard of, but never seen; and the operations of the Alicante expeditionary force had hitherto served to depress rather than to encourage insurrection. Hence it was possible that 35,000 men could hold the broad lands that lay between Tudela and Saragossa and Lerida on the North, and Denia and Xativa on the South—though Decaen’s 28,000 had a much more precarious grip on Catalonia. But the occupation was a tour de force after all, and was liable to be upset at any moment by an active and capable enemy. Fortunately for Suchet his opponent on the East Coast during the spring of 1813 was neither active nor capable.

As long as King Joseph kept his head-quarters at Madrid and occupied the province of La Mancha, extending his line eastward to San Clemente, he had been in touch with Suchet’s front, and communications were open. Indeed Daricau’s division marched to the borders of Valencia in the end of January, and took over from the Marshal the large body of Spanish refugees and convalescents of the Army of the South, who had been under his charge since October. But the whole situation was changed when the orders of the Emperor compelled Joseph to draw back his head-quarters to Valladolid, and to hold Toledo as his extreme post towards the South. When this change was made, the touch between Valencia and Madrid was lost—the Spanish cavalry of the Army of Andalusia advanced across the Sierra Morena into La Mancha: Villacampa’s division descended from the hills to occupy the more level parts of the province of Cuenca. For the future the King and Suchet could only keep touch with each other by the circuitous route through Saragossa. The situation of the French Army of Valencia was rendered far more isolated and dangerous—it was in a very advanced position, with no communication whatever with any friendly force save through Aragon. And its inland flank was exposed to all manner of possible molestation—if Villacampa, Duran, and the Empecinado had represented a serious fighting force, capable of regular action in the field, Suchet would have been bound to retire at once to the line of the Ebro, on pain of finding himself surrounded and cut off. But these irregular ‘divisions’ of the Army of Murcia were, as a matter of fact, good for raids and the cutting of communications, but useless for battle. They were local in their operations, seldom combined, and only obeyed their nominal commander, Elio, when it pleased them. It was very hard for any one of them to move far from its accustomed ‘beat,’ because they had no magazines, and lived each on their own region.

Suchet accordingly resolved to try the hazardous experiment of preserving his old positions, even when communication with Madrid had been cut off. He left on his inland flank only a flying brigade or two, and the normal garrisons of the small fortified towns of upper Aragon, and kept his main striking force still concentrated on the line of the Xucar, in order to cover the plain of Valencia from the one serious enemy, the Alicante army. The available troops consisted of the three small infantry divisions of Habert, Harispe, and Musnier (this last temporarily under Robert), and the cavalry division of Boussard, the whole amounting to about 12,500 foot and 1,500 horse, or a gross total of all arms of some 15,000 men. They were disposed so as to cover the front of 50 miles from Moxente, at the foot of the Murcian mountains, to the mouth of the Xucar, and were not scattered in small parties, but concentrated in four groups which could easily unite. The right wing was covered by an entrenched camp at Moxente, the centre by another at San Felipe de Xativa. Denia on the sea-coast was held as a cover to the left wing. Cavalry was out in front, and in a rather exposed position a brigade of Habert’s division held Alcoy, a considerable town in a fertile upland valley, whose resources Suchet was anxious to retain as long as possible.

Soon after he had taken over command at Alicante on February 25th, Murray obtained accurate local information as to the exact distribution and numbers of the French, and noting the very exposed position of the brigade at Alcoy, made an attempt to cut it off by the concentric advance of four columns. The scheme failed, partly because of the late arrival of the right-hand column (a brigade of Whittingham’s division), partly because Murray, having got engaged with the French in front, refused to support his advanced troops until the flanking detachments should appear, and so allowed the enemy to slip away (March 6th)[405]. He then halted, though his movement must obviously have roused Suchet’s attention, and rendered a counter-attack possible. But after a week, finding the enemy still passive, he sent forward Whittingham to drive the French outposts from Consentaina, and the pass of Albeyda, in the mountain range which separates the valley of Alcoy from the lowland. This was to ask for trouble, and should only have been done if Murray was proposing to challenge Suchet to a decisive general action: Whittingham indeed thought that this was the object of his commanding officer[406]. At the same time two British battalions under General Donkin made a demonstration against the French right, ten miles farther east, in the direction of Onteniente. Habert, whose whole division was holding the line of hills, gave way after a sharp skirmish, and allowed Whittingham to seize the pass of Albeyda (March 15th). Every one supposed that the Alicante army was now about to attack the French main position between Moxente and Xativa.

But Murray’s plan was different: having, as he supposed, attracted Suchet’s full notice, by his forward movement, he was proposing to send out an expedition by sea, to make a dash at the town of Valencia, which (as he calculated) must be under-garrisoned when heavy fighting was expected on the Xucar. He told off for the purpose Roche’s Spanish division, strengthened by the British provisional battalion of grenadier companies and a regiment borrowed from Elio. The orders were to land on the beach south of the city, make a dash for it, and if that failed to seize Cullera at the mouth of the Xucar, or Denia, farther down the coast. The project looked hazardous, for to throw 5,000 men ashore in the enemy’s country, far from their own main body, was to risk their being cut up, or forced to a re-embarkation on a bare beach, which could not fail to be costly. Unless Murray at the same moment attacked Suchet, so that he should not be able to send a man to the rear towards Valencia, the force embarked was altogether too small. Murray’s calculation was that the Marshal would make a heavy detachment, and that he would then attack the line of the Xucar himself. With this object he invited Elio to co-operate, by turning the French right on the inland on the side of Almanza. The Spanish General, though he had been quarrelling with Murray of late, was now in an obliging frame of mind[407] and so far consented that he brought up one infantry division to Yecla, a place which would make a good starting-point for a flank march round the extreme right of Suchet’s positions.

Meanwhile, for ten days after the combat of Albeyda nothing happened on the main front. Whittingham was still left in an advanced position north of Alcoy, while the rest of the Alicante army was concentrated at Castalla fifteen miles farther back. The marvel is that Suchet did not make a pounce upon the isolated Spanish division pushed up so close to his front. He had not yet taken the measure of his opponent, whose failing (as the whole campaign shows) was to start schemes, and then to abandon them from irresolution, at the critical moment when a decisive move became necessary.

Meanwhile, on March 26th Roche’s division and the attached British battalion were actually embarking at Alicante, for the dash at Valencia, when Murray received a dispatch from Lord William Bentinck at Palermo, informing him that a political crisis had broken out in Sicily, that civil strife there had become probable, and that he was therefore compelled to order the immediate recall of two regiments of trustworthy troops from Spain. The fact was that the new Sicilian constitution, proclaimed as the solution of all discontent in the island in 1812, had failed to achieve its purpose. The old King Ferdinand had carried out a sort of mild coup d’état, and proclaimed his own restoration to absolute power (March 13th, 1813): the Neapolitan troops who formed the majority of the armed force in the island had accepted the position. The Sicilian constitutional party seemed helpless, and the attitude of the local battalions under their control was doubtful. Nothing could save the situation but a display of overpowering force. Wherefore Bentinck directed Murray to send back to Palermo, without delay, the 6th Line battalion K.G.L. and the battalion of grenadier companies belonging to British regiments still quartered in Sicily. This was not a very large order, so far as mere numbers went—the force requisitioned being under 2,000 bayonets. But the prospect of the outbreak of civil war in Sicily scared Murray—if the strife once began, would not more of his best troops be requisitioned, and the Alicante force be reduced to a residuum of disloyal foreign levies? Moreover, one of the units requisitioned by name was the battalion of grenadiers just about to sail for Valencia. Perhaps not without secret satisfaction, for he hated making decisions of any sort, Murray declared that Bentinck’s orders rendered the naval expedition impossible, and countermanded it. He sent off, on the transports ready in harbour, the grenadier battalion ordered to Sicily, and returned the Spanish contingent to its old cantonments[408]. The K.G.L. battalion was just embarking when news arrived (April 1st) that the Sicilian crisis was now over, wherefore Murray retained it for a few more day[409].

For the counter-revolution at Palermo had only lasted for four days! Finding Lord William Bentinck firm, and prepared to use force, King Ferdinand withdrew his proclamation, and resigned the administration into the hands of his eldest son, the Prince Royal. The Queen, whose strong will had set the whole affair on foot, promised to return to her native Austria, and actually sailed for the Levant, to the intense satisfaction of every one save the knot of intriguers in her Court. The scare was soon over—its only result was the abandonment of the raid on Valencia. Murray had now received orders from Wellington to await the arrival of a detailed scheme for the way in which his army was to be employed. Pending the receipt of these[410] directions he lapsed into absolute torpidity—the only record of his doings in the last days of March and early April being that he set the troops concentrated at Castalla to entrenching the hillsides around that formidable position—a clear sign that he had no further intention of taking the offensive on his own account.

Suchet had been much puzzled by the advance of his enemy to Alcoy and Albeyda, followed by subsequent inactivity for a whole month. When he found that even the movement of Elio’s troops to Yecla did not foreshadow a general assault upon his lines, he concluded that there must be some unexplained reason for the quiescence of the Allies, and that the opportunity was a good one for a bold blow, while they remained inexplicably waiting in a disjointed and unconcentrated line opposite his positions. The obvious and easy thing would have been to fall upon Whittingham at Alcoy, but probably for that very reason the Marshal tried another scheme. He secretly passed all his available troops to Fuente la Higuera, on his extreme right flank, leaving only a trifling screen in front of Murray’s army, and on April 10th marched in two columns against the allied left. One consisting of six battalions of Harispe’s division and two cavalry regiments aimed at the isolated Murcian division at Yecla, the other and larger column four battalions of Habert’s division, and seven of Musnier’s (under Robert during the absence of its proper chief), with his cuirassier regiment, marched by Caudete on Villena, to cut in between the Spaniards and Murray, and intercept any aid which the latter might send from Castalla towards the Spaniards.

The blow was unexpected and delivered with great vigour: Harispe surprised General Mijares’ Murcians at Yecla at dawn; they were hopelessly outnumbered, only four battalions being present-the fifth unit of the division was at Villena. And there was but a single squadron with them, Elio’s cavalry being in its cantonments thirty miles away in the Albacete-Chinchilla country. Mijares, on finding himself assailed by superior numbers, tried to march off towards Jumilla and the mountains. Harispe pursued, and seeing the Spaniards likely to get away, for the retreat was rapid and in good order, flung his hussars and dragoons at them. The Spaniards turned up on to a hillside, and tried a running fight. The two leading battalions of the column made good their escape—the two rear battalions were cut off: they formed square, beat back two charges with resolution, but were broken by the third, and absolutely exterminated: 400 were cut down, about 1,000 captured. Of these two unlucky regiments, 1st of Burgos and Cadiz, hardly a man got away—the other two, Jaen and Cuenca, took little harm[411]. The French lost only 18 killed and 61 wounded, mostly in the two cavalry regiments, for Harispe’s infantry were but slightly engaged.

Ill news flies quickly—the fighting had been in the early dawn, by noon mounted fugitives had brought the tidings to Villena, fifteen miles away. Here there chanced to be present both Elio and Sir John Murray, who had ridden over to consult with his colleague on a rumour that Suchet was concentrating at Fuente la Higuera. He had brought with him the ‘light brigade,’ under Colonel Adam, which he had recently organized[412], and 400 horse[413]. The Generals soon learned that beside the force which had cut up Mijares, there was a larger column marching on their own position. They were in no condition to offer battle, Elio having with him only a single battalion, Murray about 2,500 men of all arms. They agreed that they must quit Villena and concentrate their troops for a defensive action. Elio sent orders to his cavalry to come in from the North and join the wrecks of Mijares’ division, and for the reserves which he had got in the neighbourhood of Murcia to march up to the front[414]. But it would obviously take some days to collect these scattered items. Meanwhile he threw the single battalion that he had with him (Velez Malaga) into the castle of Villena, which had been patched up and put into a state of defence, promising that it should be relieved when his army was concentrated.

Murray, on the other hand, retired towards his main body at Castalla, but ordered Adam’s ‘light brigade’ to defend the pass of Biar for as long as prudence permitted, so as to allow the rest of the army to get into position. Whittingham was directed to fall back from Alcoy, Roche to come up from the rear, and by the next evening the whole Alicante army would be concentrated, in a position which had been partly entrenched during the last three weeks, and was very strong even without fortification. Murray refused (very wisely) to send back Adam to pick up the Spanish battalion left in Villena, which Elio (seized with doubts when it was too late) now wished to withdraw.

Suchet reached Villena on the evening of the 11th, and got in touch with the cavalry screen covering Adam’s retreat. Finding the castle held, he started to bombard it with his field artillery, and on the morning of the 12th blew in its gates and offered to storm. He sent in a parlementaire to summon the garrison, and to his surprise it capitulated without firing a shot—a mutiny having broken out among the men[415], who considered that they had been deserted by their General. Suchet now intended to fall on Murray at Castalla, reckoning that Elio’s concentration had been prevented by the blows at Yecla and Villena, and that he would have the Alicante army alone to deal with. He ordered the troops that were with him to drive in without delay Adam’s light brigade, which his cavalry had discovered holding the village of Biar and the pass above it. His other column, that of Harispe, was not far off, being on the march from Yecla. Finding that it was gone, Mijares cautiously reoccupied that place with his two surviving battalions.

The combat of Biar, which filled the midday hours of April 12th, was one of the most creditable rearguard actions fought during the whole Peninsular War. Colonel Adam had only one British and two Italian battalions, with two German Legion rifle companies, four mountain guns, and one squadron of the ‘Foreign Hussars’—about 2,200 men in all. He had prepared a series of positions on which he intended to fall back in succession, as each was forced. At the commencement of the action he occupied Biar village with the Calabrese Free Corps, flanked by the light companies of the 2/27th and 3rd K.G.L. The rest of the brigade was above, on the hills flanking the pass, with the guns on the high road. The leading French battalion assaulted the barricaded village, and was repulsed with heavy loss. Then, as was expected, the enemy turned Biar on both flanks: its garrison retired unharmed, but the turning columns came under the accurate fire of the troops on the slopes above, and the attack was again checked. Suchet, angered at the waste of time, then threw in no less than nine battalions[416] intending to sweep away all opposition, and turning Adam’s left flank with swarms of voltigeurs. The Light Brigade had, of course, to retire; but Adam conducted his retreat with great deliberation and in perfect order, fending off the turning attack with his German and British light companies, and making the column on the high road pay very dearly for each furlong gained. His four mountain guns, on the crest of the pass, were worked with good effect to the last moment—two which had each lost a wheel were abandoned on the ground. When the crest had been passed, Suchet sent a squadron of cuirassiers to charge down the road on the retreating infantry. Foreseeing this, when the cavalry had been noted on the ascent, Adam had hidden three companies of the 2/27th in rocks where the road made a sharp angle: the cuirassiers, as they trotted past, received a flank volley at ten paces distance, which knocked over many, and sent the rest reeling back in disorder on to their own infantry. After this the pursuit slackened; ‘the enemy seemed glad to be rid of us,’ and after five hours’ fighting the Light Brigade marched back in perfect order to the position beside Castalla which had been assigned to it[417]. Its final retirement was covered by three battalions which Murray had sent out to meet it, at the exit from the pass[418].

So ended a very pretty fight. Whittingham, who had witnessed the later phases of it from the hill on the left of Castalla, describes it as ‘a beautiful field-day, by alternate battalions: the volleys were admirable, and the successive passage of several ravines conducted with perfect order and steadiness. From the heights occupied by my troops it was one of the most delightful panoramas that I ever beheld.’ The allied loss was about 300[419], including Colonel Adam wounded in the arm, yet not so much hurt but that he kept the command and gave directions to the end. On the ground evacuated 41 ‘missing’ and two disabled mountain guns were left in the enemy’s hands. The French must have suffered much the same casualties—Suchet gives no estimate, but Martinien’s invaluable lists show two officers killed and twelve wounded, which at the usual rate between officers and men implies about 300 rank and file hit.

On emerging from the pass of Biar in the late afternoon Suchet could see Murray’s army occupying a long front of high ground as far as the town of Castalla, but could descry neither its encampment, behind the heights, nor the end of its right wing, which was thrown back and hidden by the high conical hill on which the castle and church of Castalla stand. Seeing the enemy ready, and apparently resolved to fight, the Marshal put off serious operations to the next day. He had to wait for Harispe’s column, which was still coming up many miles in his rear.

Murray had long surveyed his ground, and had (as we have seen) thrown up barricades and entrenchments on the hill of Castalla and the ground immediately to its right and left. He had very nearly every available man of his army in hand, only a minimum garrison having been left in Alicante[420]. The total cannot have been less than 18,000 men; he had divided his own troops into the Light Brigade of Adam, and the two divisions of Mackenzie and Clinton. The first named had three and a quarter battalions—not quite 2,000 men after its losses at Biar on the previous afternoon[421]. Mackenzie seems to have had one British, two German Legion, and two Sicilian battalions[422]: Clinton three British, one composite Foreign, and one Italian battalion[423]. Whittingham had six Spanish battalions with him[424]—Roche only five[425]. The cavalry consisted of three squadrons of the 20th Light Dragoons, two of Sicilian cavalry, one of ‘Foreign Hussars,’ and about 400 of Whittingham’s Spanish horse[426], under 1,000 sabres in all. There were two British, two Portuguese, and a Sicilian battery on the ground.

The sierra on the left, known as the heights of Guerra, was held by Whittingham’s Spaniards for a mile, next them came Adam’s brigade, above a jutting spur which projects from the sierra towards the plain, then Mackenzie’s division, which extended as far as the hill on which the castle of Castalla stands: this was occupied by the 1/58th of Clinton’s division, and two batteries had been thrown up on the slope. With this hill the sierra ends suddenly; but a depression and stream running southward furnished a good protection for Murray’s right, which was held by the rest of Clinton’s division. The stream had been dammed up, and formed a broad morass covering a considerable portion of the front. Behind it Clinton’s troops were deployed, with three of Roche’s battalions as a reserve in their rear: two batteries were placed on commanding knolls in this part of the line, which was so far thrown back en potence that it was almost at right angles to the front occupied by Mackenzie, Adam, and Whittingham. The Spanish and Sicilian cavalry was thrown out as a screen in front of Castalla, with two of Roche’s battalions in support. The 20th Light Dragoons were in reserve behind the town. The east end of the sierra, near Castalla, was covered by vineyards in step-cultivation, each enclosure a few feet higher than the next below it. Farther west there was only rough hillside, below Whittingham’s front. The whole position was excellent—yet Murray is said by his Quartermaster-General, Donkin, to have felt so uncomfortable that he thrice contemplated issuing orders for a retreat, though he could see the whole French army, and judge that its strength was much less than his own[427]. But he distrusted both himself and many battalions of his miscellaneous army.

Suchet, contrary to his wont, was slow to act. It is said that he disliked the look of the position, and doubted the wisdom of attacking, but was over-persuaded by some of his generals, who urged that the enemy was a mixed multitude, and that the Spaniards and Sicilians would never stand against a resolute attack. It was not till noon that the French army moved—the first manœuvre was that the whole of the cavalry rode out eastward, took position opposite the angle en potence of Murray’s position, and sent exploring parties towards Clinton’s front. Evidently the report was that it was inaccessible. While this was happening the infantry deployed, and Habert’s and Robert’s division advanced and occupied a low ridge, called the Cerro del Doncel, in the plain facing Murray’s left and left-centre. Harispe’s division, minus a detachment left behind the pass of Biar to watch for any possible appearance of Elio’s troops on the road from Sax, formed in reserve. The whole of Suchet’s infantry was only 18 battalions, individually weaker than Murray’s 24; he was outnumbered in guns also—24 to 30 apparently—but his 1,250 cavalry were superior in numbers and quality to Murray’s. He had certainly not more than 13,000 men on the ground to the Allies’ 18,000.

His game was to leave Clinton’s division and Castalla alone, watched only by his cavalry; to contain Mackenzie by demonstrations, which were not to be pushed home; but to strike heavily with Robert’s division at the Spaniards on the left. If he could break down Whittingham’s defence, and drive him off the sierra, he would attack the allied centre from flank and front alike—but meanwhile it was not to be pressed. When, therefore, Habert faced Mackenzie nothing serious happened, the French sent out swarms of tirailleurs, brought up eight guns and shelled the position with grape. Mackenzie’s light companies and guns replied, ‘but there was nothing more than a skirmish: the columns shifted their ground indeed more than once, but they did not deploy, and their officers took good care not to bring them under the fire of our line[428].’

On the left, however, there was hard fighting. Suchet first sent out five light companies to endeavour to turn the extreme western end of Whittingham’s line, and, when they were far up the slope, delivered a frontal attack on the heights of Guerra with six battalions of Robert’s division: the 3rd Léger and 114th and 121st Line[429]: of these the left-hand battalions (belonging to the 121st) came up the projecting spur mentioned above, and faced the 2/27th on the left of Adam’s brigade. The other four were opposed to the Spaniards.

Whittingham was caught in a rather dangerous position, for a little while before the attack developed, he had received an order from head-quarters bidding him execute against Robert’s division precisely the same manœuvre that Suchet was trying against himself, viz. to send troops to outflank the extreme French right. He was told by the bearer of the orders, a Sicilian colonel, that this was preliminary to a general attack downhill upon the French line, which Murray was intending to carry out. The Spanish division was to turn its flank, while Adam and Mackenzie went straight at its front. There is some mystery here—Murray afterwards denied to Whittingham that he had given any such order[430], and Donkin, his Chief of the Staff, maintained that his general was thinking of a retreat all that morning rather than of an attack. Yet Colonel Catanelli was a respectable officer, who was thanked in dispatches both by Murray and Whittingham for his services! Three hypotheses suggest themselves: (1) that Murray at one moment meditated an attack, because he saw Suchet holding back, and then (with his usual infirmity of purpose) dropped the idea, and denied having made any such plan to Whittingham, whose position had been gravely imperilled by its execution. This is quite in accordance with his mentality, and he often tampered with the truth—as we shall see when telling the tale of Tarragona. (2) That Donkin and the head-quarters staff, enraged with Murray’s timidity, were resolved to commit him to a fight, and gave unauthorized orders which must bring it on. (3) That Catanelli, from lack of a good command of English, misunderstood the General’s language, and gave complete misdirections to Whittingham. I must confess that I incline to the first solution[431].

Whatever the source of these orders may have been, Whittingham began to carry them out, though they seemed to him very ill-advised. But noting that if he completely evacuated the heights of Guerra there would be a broad gap in the allied line, he left his picquets in position and two battalions on the crest of the hill[432], with another in support behind[433], while with the remaining three[434] he moved off to the left. The march was executed, out of sight of the enemy, by a mountain path which ran along the rear of the heights.

Whittingham had been moving for some half an hour, and slowly, for the path was steep and narrow, when the sound of musketry on the other side of the crest reached his ears, and soon after a message that the enemy was attacking the whole of the front of his old position. On its left the voltigeur companies had got very near the top of the hill—farther east the assault was only developing. It was lucky that the marching column had not gone far—Whittingham was able to send his hindmost battalion straight up the hill against the voltigeurs, to strengthen his flank—with the other two he counter-marched to the rear of the heights of Guerra, and fed the fighting line which he had left there, as each point needed succour.

The contest all along the heights was protracted and fierce. At several points the French reached the crest, but were never able to maintain themselves there, as Whittingham had always a reserve of a few companies ready for a counter-stroke. The troops of the Army of Aragon had never before met with such opposition from Spaniards, and for a long time refused to own themselves beaten. There was still one regiment of Robert’s division in reserve[435], but evidently Suchet shrank from committing the last fraction of his right wing to the attack, which was obviously not making any decisive headway.

Meanwhile the easternmost column of the French advance suffered a complete defeat: this body, composed of two battalions of the 121st regiment, had mounted the heights, not at their steepest, but at the point where a long projecting spur falls down from them into the plain. But even so there was a sudden rise in the last stage of the ascent, before the crest was reached. On coming to it the French colonel (Millet by name) began to deploy his leading companies, which found themselves opposite the 2/27th, on the left of Adam’s brigade. This manœuvre had always failed when tried against British infantry—notably at Albuera, for deployment at close quarters under the deadly fire of a British line was impracticable, and always led to confusion. There was a pause[436], many casualties, and much wavering; then, seeing the enemy stationary and discouraged, Colonel Reeves flung his battalion at them in a downhill bayonet charge—like Craufurd at Bussaco. The effect was instantaneous and conclusive—the French column broke and raced headlong down the slopes, arriving in the valley as a disorganized mob. It had lost 19 officers and probably 350 men in five minutes.

Either in consequence of this rout, or by mere chance at the same moment[437], the columns which had been assailing Whittingham so long and ineffectively, also recoiled in disorder before a charge of the last four companies of the Spanish reserve. The whole of the French right wing had suffered complete and disastrous defeat. The left division, Habert’s, was still intact and had never committed itself to any serious approach to Mackenzie’s front. But six of the eighteen French battalions in the field were in absolute rout at half-past four o’clock, and Suchet’s right wing was completely exposed—his cavalry were two miles away to the left, and out of reach for the moment. All eye-witnesses agree that if Murray had ordered an immediate general advance of the line from Castalla westward, the Marshal would have been lost, and cut off from his sole line of retreat on the pass of Biar. Murray, however, refused to move till he had brought up his unengaged right wing to act as a reserve, and only when they had filed up through the streets of Castalla, gave the order for the whole army to descend from the heights and push forward.

It was far too late: Suchet had retreated from the Cerro del Doncel the moment that he saw his attack repulsed, Habert’s division and the guns covering Robert’s routed wing. The cavalry came galloping back from the east, and long before Murray was deployed, Suchet took up a new and narrow front covering the entry of the pass of Biar. The only touch with his retreating force was kept by Mackenzie, who (contrary to Murray’s intention) pushed forward with four of his battalions in front of the main body, and got engaged with Suchet’s rearguard. He might probably have beaten it in upon the disordered troops behind, if he had not received stringent orders to draw back and fall in to the general front of advance. By the time that the whole allied army was deployed, the French, save a long line of guns across the mouth of the pass, with infantry on the slopes on each side, had got off. Thereupon, after making a feeble demonstration with some light companies against the enemy’s left flank, Murray halted for the night. The enemy used the hours of darkness to make a forced march for Fuente la Higuera, and were invisible next day.

Suchet declared that he had lost no more than 800 men in the three combats of Yecla, Biar, and Castalla, an incredible statement, as the French casualty rolls show 65 officers killed and wounded on the 11th-12th-13th of April; and such a loss implies 1,300 rank and file hit—possibly more, certainly not many less. It is certain that his 800 casualties will not suffice even for Castalla alone, where with 47 officers hors de combat he must have lost more probably 950 than 800 men. But the 14 officer-casualties at Biar imply another 280 at the least, and we know from his own narrative that he lost 4 officers and 80 men in destroying Mijares’ unfortunate battalions at Yecla[438].

Murray, writing a most magniloquent and insincere dispatch for Wellington’s eye, declared that Suchet had lost 2,500 or even 3,000 men, and that he had buried 800 French corpses. But Murray had apparently been taking lessons in the school of Soult and Masséna, those great manipulators of casualty lists! His dispatch was so absurd that Wellington refused to be impressed, and sent on the document to Lord Bathurst with the most formal request that the attention of the Prince Regent should be drawn to the conduct of the General and his troops, but no word of praise of his own[439]. The allied loss, indeed, was so moderate that Murray’s 2,500 French casualties appeared incredible to every one. After we have deducted the heavy losses to Adam’s brigade at Biar on the preceding day, we find that Whittingham’s Spaniards had 233 casualties, Mackenzie’s division 47, Clinton’s about 20, Adam’s brigade perhaps 70, the cavalry and artillery 10 altogether—the total making some 400 in all[440].

Having discovered that the Alicante army was formidable, if its general was not, Suchet was in some fear that he might find himself pursued and attacked, for the enemy seemed to be concentrating against him. Murray advanced once more to Alcoy, Elio brought up his reserve division and his cavalry to join the wrecks of Mijares’ column, and extended himself on Murray’s left. Villacampa, called down from the hills, appeared on the Upper Guadalaviar on the side of Requeña. But all this meant nothing—Murray was well satisfied to have won a success capable of being well ‘written up’ at Castalla, and covered his want of initiative by complaining that he was short of transport, and weakened in numbers—for after the battle he had sent off the 6th K.G.L. to Sicily, in belated obedience to Bentinck’s old orders. He asked Wellington for more men and more guns, and was given both, for he was told that he might draw the 2/67th from the garrison of Cartagena[441], and was sent a field battery from Portugal. But his true purpose was now to wait for the arrival of the promised ‘plan of campaign’ from Freneda, and thereby to shirk all personal responsibility. Anything was better than to risk a check—or a reprimand from the caustic pen of the Commander-in-Chief.

Suchet, then, drew down Pannetier’s brigade from Aragon to strengthen his position on the Xucar, and waited, not altogether confidently, for the next move on the part of the enemy. But for a month no such move came. He had time to recover his equanimity, and to write dispatches to Paris which described his late campaign as a successful attempt to check the enemy’s initiative, which had brought him 2,000 Spanish prisoners at Yecla and Villena, and two British guns at the pass of Biar. Castalla was represented as a partial attack by light troops, which had been discontinued when the enemy’s full strength had been discovered, and the losses there were unscrupulously minimized. And, above all, good cause had been shown that the Army of Aragon and Valencia could not spare one man to help King Joseph in the North.

But the ‘plan of campaign’ was on its way, and we shall see how, even in Murray’s incompetent hands, it gave the Marshal Duke of Albufera full employment for May and June.