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

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

WELLINGTON’S PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

Good generals are very properly averse to putting on paper, even for the benefit of premiers or war ministers, the plan of their next campaign. Points of leakage are so inscrutable, and so hard to detect, that the less that is written the better is it for the projected enterprise. And Wellington was the most reticent of men—even going to the length of hiding from his own responsible subordinates intentions that they much desired to learn, and of giving orders that seemed eccentric while the secret reason for them was kept concealed. He never wrote autobiographical memoirs—the idea was repulsive to him—nor consented to open up (even to William Napier, who much desired it) his full confidence. For the genesis of the plan of the Vittoria Campaign we are compelled to rely mainly on the careful collection of hints from his contemporary dispatches, supplemented by certain rare confidential letters, and some obiter dicta of his later years, which may or may not have been reproduced with perfect accuracy by admirers like Croker or Lord Stanhope.

One thing is clear—he was conscious of the mistakes of 1812, and was not going to see them repeated in 1813. When the Burgos campaign was just over he wrote two short comments[442] on it, for the benefit of persons whom he judged capable of appreciating his difficulties. He owned up to his errors—he acknowledged four. The first was that he had tried to take Burgos by irregular means, without a proper battering train: the second that he had under-estimated the strength of the united French armies of Portugal and the North: the third that he had kept his army in two equal halves over-long—Hill should have been called in from Madrid to join the main body much sooner than he actually was: the fourth and most notable was that he had entrusted a crucial part of his plan of campaign to a Spanish general, over whom he had no formal authority—Ballasteros, who should have advanced from Andalusia to distract and hinder Soult. ‘If the game had been well played it would have answered my purpose. Had I any reason to suppose that it would be well played? Certainly not. I have never yet known the Spaniards do anything, much less do anything well.... But I played a game which might succeed (the only one that could succeed) and pushed it to the last. The parts having failed—as I admit was to be expected—I at least made a handsome retreat to the Agueda, with some labour and inconvenience but without material loss.’

The interest of these confessions is that we find Wellington in his next campaign making a clear effort to avoid precisely these four mistakes. He made elaborate preparations long beforehand for getting up a battering train: he rather over- than under-estimated his adversary’s numbers by way of caution: he never divided his army at all during his great advance of May-June 1813; after the first six days it marched in close parallel columns all in one mass, till Vittoria had been reached: and, last but not least, he entrusted no important part of the scheme to any Spanish general, and indeed used a much smaller proportion of Spanish troops than he need have done, although he had now become Generalissimo of all the allied armies, and could command where he could formerly only give advice.

Immediately after the termination of the Burgos retreat Wellington’s views for the future do not seem to have been very optimistic. He wrote to the Prime Minister that at present he could do nothing against an enemy whose numbers had proved too great for him to contend with[443]. Next spring he hoped to take the field with a larger force than he had ever had before, but unless the Spaniards could display a discipline and efficiency which it seemed impossible to teach them, he saw no prospect of ever obliging the French to quit the Peninsula by force of arms. To Lord Bathurst he wrote in much the same terms—the French, he thought, would canton their army in Old Castile and wait for the arrival of fresh reinforcements from France.

But the whole aspect of affairs was changed when the news of Napoleon’s Russian débâcle came to hand. It soon became clear that so far from any French reinforcements coming to Spain, it would be King Joseph who would be asked to send reinforcements to Germany. Lord Liverpool’s letter, enclosing the 29th Bulletin, reached Wellington at Lisbon on January 18th, and put him in a more cheerful mood. Moreover, he thought that his visit to Cadiz to accept the position of Generalissimo had been a success, and that he would get more help out of the Spaniards now that he had the formal power of issuing orders to their generals, ‘though I am not sanguine enough to hope that we shall derive much advantage from Spanish troops early in the campaign.’ But he intended to start betimes, ‘and at least to put myself in Fortune’s way[444].’ The French would be compelled to stand on the defensive; if they continued to hold the immense line that they were still occupying in January, they must be weak somewhere, and it was impossible that they should be reinforced.

It is on February 10th[445] that we get the first hint that Wellington’s scheme for the campaign of 1813 was going to be a very ambitious one—aiming not at local successes in Castile, or on recovering Madrid, but at driving the French right up to the Pyrenees. On that day he wrote to Lord Bathurst to say that ‘the events of the next campaign may render it necessary for the army to undertake one or more sieges in the North of Spain,’ wherefore he wished certain heavy guns and munitions to be sent by sea to Corunna, to be at his disposal, as soon as might be convenient, and twice the quantity of each to be prepared in England to be shipped when asked for.

The mention of ‘one or more sieges in the North of Spain’ for which guns had better be sent by sea to Corunna, can only mean that Wellington was thinking of Burgos and St. Sebastian—perhaps also of Santoña and Pampeluna. There were no other fortresses needing the attention of a heavy battering train in that direction. It is clear that, even in February, Wellington’s mind was travelling far afield; and on June 26th, Vittoria having been now won, he wrote to remind Lord Bathurst of his demand, and to point out that his forecast had come true[446].

In March, as was shown in an earlier chapter, Wellington began to get the news which proved that the French were making large drafts from Spain for the new Army of Germany, and that Soult, Caffarelli, and other generals were summoned to Paris. He knew, a few days later, that the enemy was evacuating La Mancha, and that the King was moving his head-quarters from Madrid to Valladolid. Everything indicated conscious weakness on the part of the enemy—it would be well to take instant advantage of it: Wellington wrote to his brother on March 28 that he hoped to start out in force on May 1st[447]—giving no hint where that force would be employed. At the same time he expressed his doubt as to whether any of the Spanish corps which were to join him could be ready by that date. But he was depending so much on the sole exertions of the Anglo-Portuguese army, that the tardiness of the Spaniards would not put a complete stop to his projected operations. Two other practical hindrances were a late spring, which made green forage for the horses harder to procure than it normally was in April, and accidents from bad roads and bad weather to his pontoon train, which he was secretly bringing up from the Tagus to the Douro, as it was to play a most essential part in the commencement of the campaign[448]. These mishaps appear mere matters of detail, but (as we shall see) there were immense consequences depending upon them—the presence of a large pontoon train on the Esla and the Douro, when its normal habitat was on the lower Tagus, was one of the first surprises in the wonderful campaign of May-June 1813. Starting from Abrantes in the end of April, it did not reach Miranda de Douro till the 20th of May[449].

The first definite revelation as to what Wellington’s plan was to be, is contained in a letter to Beresford of April 24th. ‘I propose to put the troops in motion in the first days of May: my intention is to make them cross the Douro, in general within the Portuguese frontier, covering the movement of the left by that of the right of the Army toward the Tormes, which right shall then cross the Douro, over the pontoons, in such situation as may be convenient. I then propose to seize Zamora and Toro, which will make all future operations easy to us[450].’

Here the first half of the great movement is accurately set forth, just as it was executed, though owing to the delays spoken of above, the general orders for the marching out of all the allied divisions were issued on May 13th instead of on May 1st-2nd. But in all other respects we have the exact analysis of the scheme: the ‘Left’—Graham with the equivalent of six divisions—crossed the Douro far inside Portugal at various points, and was in and about Braganza and Miranda by May 21st-24th: meanwhile the ‘Right’—Hill with three divisions—moved forward from the Agueda to the Tormes, attracting the main attention of the French between the 20th and the 26th, till it reached Salamanca, from whence it swerved off to the left, and joined Graham’s wing by the bridge of Toro, thus establishing the whole army in one mass north of the Douro, and completely turning the western flank of the entire French front of defence. On May 12 only, three weeks after he had communicated the secret to Beresford, did Wellington divulge it to the Ministers at home: evidently he dreaded leakage somewhere in London, such as he had discovered in the preceding autumn[451]. For Lord Bathurst’s benefit he descends a little more into detail:

‘I propose to commence our operations by turning the enemy’s position on the Douro, by passing the left of our army over that river within the Portuguese frontier. I should cross the Right in the same manner, only that I have been obliged to throw the Right very forward during the winter, in order to cover and connect our cantonments, and I could not well draw them back without exposing a good deal of country, and risking a counter-movement on the part of the enemy. I therefore propose to strengthen the Right, and move with it myself across the Tormes, and to establish a bridge on the Douro below Zamora. The two wings of the army will thus be connected, and the enemy’s position on the Douro will be turned. The Spanish Army of Galicia will be on the Esla, to the left of our army, at the same time that our army reaches that river.

‘Having turned the enemy’s position on the Douro, and established our communications across it, our next operation will depend on circumstances. I do not know whether I am now stronger than the enemy, even including the Army of Galicia. But of this I am very certain, that I shall never be stronger throughout the campaign, or more efficient, than I am now: and the enemy will never be weaker. I cannot have a better opportunity for trying the fate of a battle, which if the enemy should be unsuccessful, must oblige him to withdraw entirely. We have been sadly delayed by the pontoon bridge, without which it is obvious we can do nothing[452].’

Neither in the letter to Beresford nor in that to Bathurst does Wellington make a forecast beyond the first stage of his advance—obviously it would be impossible to do so till it was seen how the French would act. If they should be tempted to fight—say in front of Valladolid—when their flank was turned, in order to keep their hold on Castile, Wellington would welcome the decisive engagement. But of course they might refuse to fight, as indeed did they. They retired on Burgos, as we shall see, without taking any risks.

But that Wellington already foresaw the possibility of a victorious march to the Pyrenees is, I think, proved not only by his letter of February 10th concerning the siege of fortresses in Northern Spain, quoted above, but by similar hints on May 6 concerning the absolute necessity for naval co-operation in the North. He asks Lord Bathurst to insist on the presence of a squadron under an admiral in the Bay of Biscay, and for careful supervision of the whole coast from Bayonne to Corunna, which must absolutely stop French enterprise at sea, and ‘simplify arrangements for convoy and naval operations in concert with the army during the ensuing campaign[453].’ Taking this in conjunction with the letter of February 10, it seems certain that Wellington was thinking of stores to be landed at Santander, and a battering train to destroy San Sebastian—which was to look forward some way! There was, however, a secondary reason for requiring more naval supervision in the Bay of Biscay: American privateers had been putting in an appearance in these waters, and had captured several small transports.

A plan of campaign that contemplated the driving back of the French to the Pyrenees must, of course, embrace a good deal more than the mere reorganization of the Anglo-Portuguese army for a great push north of the Douro. There were many minor factors to be taken into consideration and utilized. First and foremost came the question as to how far the position of Generalissimo of the Spanish Armies could be turned to account. After his experiences in 1812 Wellington was determined to entrust to his Allies no crucial part of the operations, whose failure could wreck the whole scheme. With his own striking-force he intended to take only one Spanish army, that which was under the sole Spanish general whom he could trust for willing co-operation, even though he knew him to be no great military genius. Castaños had, by his influence at Cadiz, been nominated as Captain-General alike in Galicia, Castile, and Estremadura, and all the troops in those provinces now formed part of the new ‘4th Army.’ They included Morillo’s division, now cantoned about Caçeres, Carlos de España’s in the mountains between Ciudad Rodrigo and the pass of Perales, the lancers of Julian Sanchez—now counted a brigade of regular cavalry and not a partida—on the front between the Agueda and the Douro, and the two Galician divisions of Losada and Barcena, with their weak attendant cavalry brigade: to bring this up to strength two extra regiments[454] had filed up the Portuguese frontier during the winter from Estremadura. All these were in touch with the Anglo-Portuguese army, and were intended to move with it. They made up 18,000 foot and 3,000 horse. In addition there were many other troops theoretically belonging to the 4th Army, but at present cut off from it by the intervening zone of French occupation—viz. Porlier’s division in the Eastern Asturias, and Mendizabal’s irregular forces in Biscay and Cantabria—the troops of Longa and the Biscayan volunteers with other smaller bands. These scattered units, which could only come under Wellington’s real control when he should have beaten the French back to the Ebro, might make up 10,000 or 12,000 men. But they could not be counted upon for the first month of the campaign.

In addition, Castaños had a number of immovable troops—the garrisons of Rodrigo and Badajoz, a dépôt of unhorsed cavalry in Estremadura, and a sedentary unit called the ‘Army of Reserve of Galicia,’ consisting of all the most depleted corps of the old Galician army: its six battalions only made up 2,000 men, and it stopped at Vigo or Corunna all through the year 1813. Two other Galician battalions[455] had been sent round by sea during the winter, to join the much-tried Army of Catalonia. This small transference of troops had reached the knowledge of the French in an exaggerated shape, and caused much speculation at Madrid.

Beside the 21,000 men of the 4th Army, who marched in the Anglo-Portuguese line under Castaños’s nephew General Giron[456], there was only one other Spanish force which Wellington intended to employ in his own operations. This was the so-called ‘Army of Reserve of Andalusia,’ which had to come up all the way from Seville, and was far too late to join in the campaign of Vittoria: it did not get to the front till July: even later than the Generalissimo expected. The origin of this corps was that, when Soult evacuated Andalusia in September 1812, the best-equipped of the Cadiz garrison troops joined the field-army of Ballasteros, and advanced with him to Granada. This body was in April 1813 known as the ‘Third Army’ and was now commanded by the Duque del Parque, the successor of the cashiered Ballasteros. But the remainder of the Cadiz garrison, which had not gone to the front, was organized during the winter into a separate unit, under Henry O’Donnell, the Conde d’Abispal. It was rather a miscellaneous assembly—seven of its fourteen battalions having been regiments which did not march in October 1812 because they were low in numbers or equipment, and three more newly-raised units, formed to replace in the Army List old regiments which had perished in previous campaigns. However, they were filled up with recruits, re-clothed and re-equipped, and Wellington intended to use them with his own army, as étape and blockade troops. He preferred to take them with him rather than the 3rd Army, which was suspected of having many officers who had been devoted to Ballasteros, and who had resented the appointment of the new British generalissimo[457]. Moreover, O’Donnell was in every way a better officer than Del Parque, and had a good fighting reputation, though he was noted as impetuous and quarrelsome. The Army of Reserve of Andalusia was 14,000 strong, in two infantry divisions under Generals Echevari and Creagh and a weak cavalry brigade under Freire—late second in command of the Murcian army. The slow equipment of this corps, its late start, and its frequent halts for want of provisions, formed a perpetual source of dispute between Wellington and the Minister of War at Cadiz. But as it was not destined to form part of the original striking-force at the opening of the campaign, or to discharge any essential duty in the general scheme, its absence was not much felt. When it did appear, after Vittoria, it was usefully employed in blockading Pampeluna.

But in the summer campaign of 1813 it must be remembered that Wellington employed no Spanish troops save the original 21,000 Galicians and Estremadurans under Giron, and Longa’s 4,000 Cantabrians, who joined in from the North ten days before Vittoria, and took a creditable share in that battle.

It remains to be explained how Wellington intended to get an indirect profit out of the existence of the other Spanish corps—the re-named First, Second, and Third Armies, as well as out of the Anglo-Sicilian expeditionary force at Alicante, whose conduct had given him so many just causes of complaint during the autumn of 1812.

As to the ‘First Army,’ now commanded by General Copons (the defender of Tarifa), this gallant remnant of the old Catalan levies could not take the field 10,000 strong, was almost destitute of cavalry and artillery, and had no large town or secure fortress in its possession[458]. It held, in a rather precarious fashion, a considerable portion of the mountainous inland of Catalonia—the head-quarters were usually at Vich—but had no safe communications with the sea, or certainty of receiving succours, though it was intermittently in touch with Captain Codrington’s cruising squadron. Copons, who took over command in March 1813, though less disliked than his arbitrary and ill-tempered predecessor Lacy, was not popular with the Catalans. They would have liked to see their local hero, the Baron de Eroles, who had been in charge of the principality for some months after Lacy’s departure, made captain-general[459]. Weak in numbers as it was, the Army of Catalonia could obviously do no more than detain and keep employed General Decaen’s French army of occupation, which had more than double its strength. The garrisons of Barcelona, Tarragona, Figueras, Lerida, and Tortosa absorbed 13,000 of Decaen’s men. But he had 15,000 more available for field service, and his flying columns often put Copons in danger, for the Catalan army had to scatter its cantonments far and wide in order to live, and a sudden hostile concentration might easily cut off some fraction of it, when one part was as far north as the Ampurdam and the passes into France, and another as far east as the Aragonese border[460]. Normally the Catalans employed themselves in cutting the communications between the great fortresses, with an occasional foray into Roussillon. Wellington thought that they could not be better employed, and that nothing more could be expected of them. He sent them a small reinforcement of 2,000 men from the suppressed third division of the Army of Galicia, and urged that munitions should be thrown in from the side of the sea whenever possible.

There was little to be expected from the exertions of the Catalan army, persevering and meritorious though they were. It remained to be seen, however, whether something could not be done in the Principality with external help. Here came in the main problem of the Eastern Coast: Suchet must be kept employed at all costs, while the main blow was being delivered by Wellington himself on the other side of the Peninsula. Murray’s and Elio’s futile operations of April had accomplished little: the Marshal, though frightened at first by their movements, and though he had suffered the bloody check of Castalla, had been able to preserve his forward position on the Xucar: he retained complete possession of the Valencian coast-land, and his army was intact as a striking force. If, during the forthcoming campaign north of the Douro, he chose to draw off his main force towards Aragon, and to come in to join the King, there was at present nothing on foot that could stop him from such a course. Wellington resolved that this possibility must be averted, by giving the Marshal a problem of his own, which should absorb all his attention, and keep him from thinking of his neighbour’s needs. And this was all the more easy because Suchet was notoriously a selfish commander, who thought more of his own viceroyalty and his own military reputation than of the general cause of France: his intercepted dispatches, of which Wellington had a fair selection in his file of cyphers, showed that he was always ready to find plausible excuses for keeping to his own side of the Peninsula.

The plan which Wellington formulated for the use of Sir John Murray, in two dispatches dated on the 14th and 16th of April, was one which depended entirely on the judicious use of naval power. The British fleet being completely dominant in the Mediterranean, and Murray having at his disposition the large squadron of transports which had brought his troops from Sicily, it was clearly possible to land as many men as the transports could carry, at any point on the immensely long coast-line of Valencia and Catalonia that might be selected. They would have a local superiority on the selected point until the French troops, dispersed in many garrisons and cantonments, could mass in sufficient strength to attack them: and meanwhile the Catalan army would join Murray. If the French should draw together in overwhelming power, the expedition could, if proper precautions were taken, re-embark before its position became dangerous. The farther north that the landing took place, the more inconvenient would it be for Suchet, who would obviously have to draw on his field army in Valencia for numbers that would enable him to deal with the Anglo-Sicilian force. But the moment that Suchet should be forced to deplete his field army in the South, which was already too weak for the task set it, the Spaniards could advance on the line of the Xucar, and make a dash at Valencia during the Marshal’s absence. In order to give them an irresistible numerical preponderance over the divisions that Suchet might leave behind him, Del Parque should bring up the Andalusian army to reinforce Elio’s Murcians. Between them they would have some 30,000 regular troops, besides the bands of the Empecinado and Duran, who would operate on the side of the mountains against the French rear. It would be hard if such an accumulation of force could not thrust back the thinned line of the enemy on to and beyond Valencia.

Finally, the point at which the expeditionary force was to make its thrust was to be Tarragona, which was known to be in a state of bad repair, and thinly garrisoned, while it had also the advantage of being a very isolated post, and remote both from Decaen’s head-quarters at Gerona, and from Suchet’s at Valencia. Moreover, it was conveniently placed for communication with the Catalan army, but separated by difficult defiles both from Tortosa southward and Barcelona northward, at which French relieving forces would have to gather.

If the whole plan worked, and Tarragona were to fall in a few days, the Catalan army would once more have a safe debouch to the sea, and the Allies would gain a foothold such as they had never owned north of the Ebro since 1811, while at the same time Valencia ought to fall into the hands of Elio and Del Parque during Suchet’s enforced absence. But supposing that Tarragona held out firmly, and Decaen and Suchet united to relieve it, the expeditionary force could get away unharmed, and meanwhile Valencia ought to have been taken. And even if the blow at Valencia failed also, yet at least the whole French army on the East Coast would be occupied for a month or more, and would certainly not be able to spare a single man to help King Joseph or Jourdan.

As we shall see, a long series of blunders, for which Murray was mainly responsible, though Elio and Del Parque each took his share in the muddle, prevented all Wellington’s schemes for active profit from coming to a successful end. Nevertheless, the main purpose was achieved—not a Frenchman from the East Coast took any share in the campaign of Vittoria.

To descend to details. Murray was directed to ship off every man of the Alicante army for whom he could find transport, provided that the total of infantry and artillery embarked should not fall short of 10,000 of all ranks. He was to take with him both the Anglo-Sicilians and as many of Whittingham’s Spaniards as could be carried: if the ships sufficed, he might take all or some of Roche’s Spaniards also. Less than 10,000 men must not sail—the force would then be too small to cause Suchet to detach troops from Valencia. Elio and Del Parque would remain behind, with such (if any) of Roche’s and Whittingham’s battalions as could not be shipped. They were to keep quiet, till they should learn that Suchet had weakened his forces in Valencia. When it became certain that the French opposite them were much reduced in numbers, they were to advance, always taking care to turn the enemy’s positions rather than to make frontal attacks upon them.

If, which was quite possible, Murray should fail to take Tarragona, and should find very large French forces gathering around him, such as he and Copons could not reasonably hope to hold in check, he was to re-embark, and bring the Expeditionary Force back to the kingdom of Valencia, landing it at such a point on the coast as should put him in line with the front reached by Elio and Del Parque in their advance.

There was a subsidiary set of directions for a policy to be carried out if the transports available at Alicante should be found insufficient to move so many as 10,000 men. But as the shipping proved enough to carry 14,000, these directions have only an academic interest. In this case Murray and Elio were to threaten the line of the Xucar frontally, while Del Parque turned it on the side of the mountains of the interior. Duran and Villacampa were to devote themselves to cutting the line of communications between Suchet and the King. In this way employment would be found for all the French on the East Coast, for Copons was to receive a reinforcement of 3,000 men, and was to keep Decaen on the move by raids and forays.

Finally, and this clause governed the whole of the instructions, ‘the General Officers at the head of the troops must understand that the success of all our endeavours in the ensuing campaign depends on none of the corps being beaten. They must not attack the enemy in strong positions: I shall forgive anything excepting that one of the corps should be beaten and dispersed.’ Wellington afterwards said that this warning was intended for Elio and Del Parque only, but it had a deleterious effect during the ensuing operations on all the actions of the timid and wavering Murray. To say to such an officer that it would be a sin not to be forgiven if he let his corps get beaten under any circumstances, was to drive him to a policy of absolute cowardice. Wellington was an austere master, and the mental effect of such a threat was to make Murray resolve that he would not take even small and pardonable risks. The main idea that he had in his head in May and June 1813 was that he ‘must not allow his corps to be beaten and dispersed.’ Hence, like the unprofitable servant in the parable, he was resolved to wrap it up in a napkin, and have it ready to return to his master intact—though thereby he might condemn himself to make no worthy use of it whatever while it was in his hands. The threat of the Commander-in-Chief might have been addressed profitably to Robert Craufurd; when administered to John Murray it produced terror and a sort of mental paralysis.

It is true that Murray’s weakness of will and instability of purpose were so great that he would probably, in any case, have made a very poor game from the splendid cards put into his hand. But that the Tarragona expedition ended in the discreditable fiasco which we shall have to narrate, was undoubtedly the result in part of the impression which Wellington’s orders produced on his wavering mind. Yet, contemptible as his conduct of operations was, still Suchet was kept employed in the East and gave no help to King Joseph. That much was secured by Wellington’s knowledge of how sea-power can be used.

By the 1st of May everything should have been ready, but the late spring and the slow-moving pontoons delayed the start. On the 12th-13th-14th, however, every soldier, British and Portuguese, was ready to march. Every available unit was being brought up—there remained behind only the fever-ridden Guards’ brigade at Oporto; the weak 77th, which provided, along with one Veteran Battalion, a skeleton garrison for Lisbon; three Portuguese line regiments, two in Elvas, one in Abrantes, and the dismounted dragoons of the same nation, who had not taken the field for three years: only D’Urban’s and Campbell’s squadrons marched in 1813. The infantry consisted of 56 British and 53 Portuguese battalions—making about 67,000 bayonets. The British battalions were of very unequal size—a few as low as 450 men, a few others as strong as 900: the average was 700. The Portuguese battalions were rather weaker, some of the regiments never having recovered from the privations of the Burgos retreat, and did not exceed on an average 500 bayonets or 550 of all ranks. Of cavalry there were 22 regiments, of which four only were Portuguese—total 8,000 sabres. Of artillery there were 102 guns, in seventeen batteries, of which three were Portuguese and one belonged to the King’s German Legion[461]. Adding Engineers, Staff Corps, Wagon Train, &c., the whole represented 81,000 men of all ranks and all arms.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER II

OPERATIONS OF HILL’S COLUMN:
MAY 22-JUNE 3

The concentration of the southern wing of Wellington’s army for the great advance was in some ways a more difficult, in others an easier, problem than the concentration of the northern wing.

On the one hand, the distances from which the various elements of Hill’s force were to be drawn were in many cases shorter than those of Graham’s force; the roads were well known to all the troops, who had used them repeatedly in their moves up and down the Spanish-Portuguese frontier in 1811-12; and, though poor enough, they were on the whole better than those of the Tras-os-Montes, which the northern column had to employ. No part of the British army had tried these latter routes since the pursuit of Soult in 1809, and few remembered how bad they were. But, on the other hand, the concentration of the southern column was from points more remote from each other than those of the northern: the divisions of the latter had all been collected in the Douro country during the course of the spring, and started on their final march from a single area: moreover, they were moving well inside Portugal, by routes very remote from the enemy. But the larger half of the southern force had to be brought up from a region far distant from that where the smaller half was cantoned in May. For Hill’s two divisions, the British 2nd and the Portuguese independent division (so long commanded by Hamilton, but now under Silveira, the Conde de Amarante), had been sent back to the borders of Estremadura at the end of the Burgos campaign, and were lying, much scattered, at points so remote from each other as Coria, Plasencia, Bejar, Bohoyo, and Brozas. Morillo’s Spanish division, so often associated before with Hill, was even farther off, south of the Tagus, in the Caçeres-Alcantara country. All these troops would have to move up, in order to join Wellington, by routes not very remote from the French division at Avila, which (as it will be remembered) had tried to beat up Hill’s winter-quarters as late as the preceding February. And there was a chance that, if the enemy were alert and well-informed, he might try to block Hill’s march, by coming out from the Puente de Congosto or some such point. If Wellington had only known it, the French higher command had actually been fearing that Hill might make a stroke at Avila by some of the passes leading from the upper Tormes to the upper Adaja, and was nervous about this line of country.

The plan for the concentration of the southern force was that Hill should unite the 2nd Division, Morillo’s Spaniards, and Long’s Cavalry[462] at Bejar, and then march by the pass through the Sierra de Francia to Miranda de Castanar and Tamames. Silveira, with the independent Portuguese division, was to take a parallel route farther west, by the pass of Perales, Peñaparda, and Moras Verdes, to the same point[463]. These troops on arriving near Tamames would find themselves in touch with another column, which was already on the ground where operations were to begin. It consisted of the Light Division, which had been cantoned on the Coa and Agueda during the winter, and Victor Alten’s, Fane’s, and Robert Hill’s cavalry brigades—the last-named a unit new to the army, and lately arrived from Lisbon: it consisted of six squadrons from the three regiments of Household Cavalry. To join these British troops came Julian Sanchez’s Castilian lancers—now reckoned regular cavalry and not a partida—and Carlos de España’s Castilian division, which had been wintering in the valleys above Ciudad Rodrigo. When united, the whole strength of the southern wing of Wellington’s army would be about 30,000 sabres and bayonets, including only five brigades of British infantry, the equivalent of four brigades of Portuguese, and two Spanish divisions. The cavalry was very strong in proportion—this was intentional, as Wellington intended to keep out in his front such a strong cavalry screen that the enemy should have no chance of discovering for some time that the column was not the main Anglo-Portuguese army, but in fact a demonstrating force. The real strength of his army, six of his old eight divisions, was marching under Graham to turn the line of the Douro, far to the north.

On the 22nd Wellington abandoned his head-quarters at Freneda, where he had stopped ever since his return from Cadiz in January, and rode out to Ciudad Rodrigo; the Light Division and three cavalry brigades had preceded him to Santi Espiritus, ten miles in front, where they were in touch with Silveira’s Portuguese, who formed Hill’s left-hand column, and had reached Tamames. Hill himself with the 2nd Division was a march behind Silveira: Morillo’s Spaniards keeping more to the right, on the road along the mountains, was moving from Los Santos and Fuenteroble, by the track which leads straight to Salamanca from the direct south. Far out on the left Julian Sanchez’s lancers were feeling their way towards Ledesma and watching the western flank.

On the 24th the union of the forces was complete, and the news that came from all quarters was satisfactory. Villatte was in Salamanca, with no more than his own infantry division and one regiment of cavalry [464]: he had small detachments on his flanks at Ledesma and Alba de Tormes, but no friends nearer than Daricau at Zamora; and for Daricau full employment was about to be found, since Graham’s great column was marching straight upon him. It was pretty certain that King Joseph had not yet ordered the general concentration which was the only thing that could save him from destruction. The French division at Avila had not moved: Madrid was being held, and as late as the 20th Maransin’s brigade had been at Toledo, and some of the Avila division at Monbeltran on the borders of Estremadura. The map showed, therefore, that the Army of the South could not possibly meet on the Tormes in time to succour Villatte, who would have either to retreat or to be destroyed. And Villatte being driven off eastward on Cantalpino, or northward on Toro, the junction of the two wings of Wellington’s army at or near Zamora was certain.

But haste was necessary, wherefore the army advanced by very long marches, through the devastated country over which it had passed in such different conditions seven months back. On the 25th, head-quarters were at Matilla, with the infantry advancing in three parallel columns, the Light Division on the high road to Salamanca, Hill and Silveira to the right, Morillo still farther out, making for Alba de Tormes. The satisfactory news came in that Villatte had withdrawn his detachment from Ledesma, which indicated that he did not intend to keep touch with Daricau at Zamora, so that the passage of the Douro would be simplified[465]. A very long march on the 26th brought matters to a crisis. Victor Alten’s cavalry pushing for Salamanca bridge, and Fane’s for the fords which lie above the town, found that Villatte had just evacuated it, after barricading and obstructing its exits, but was visible on the heights above the fords of Santa Marta (one of Wellington’s old positions of June 1812) in line of battle. His delay in retreating is censured equally by Jourdan and by Wellington—apparently he wished to be certain that he was not being imposed upon by a mere cavalry demonstration, and had a serious force opposite him: moreover, he was waiting to pick up his detachment from Alba de Tormes, which he had only just ordered to join him, when he heard that Long’s cavalry and Morillo were moving on that place.

On seeing the French in position the British cavalry pushed on with all speed, Alten through Salamanca city, Fane by the fords above, leaving the infantry far behind them, but hoping to detain the enemy long enough to assure his destruction. Realizing over-late his danger, Villatte moved off eastward when he recognized that heavy forces were concentrating upon him, and threatening his retreat. He marched not for Toro, but due east by roads parallel with the Tormes. ‘It is rather extraordinary,’ wrote Wellington that evening, ‘that he should have marched by Cabrerizos and the ravine, which we used to think so bad for even a horse, and thence by Aldea Lengua[466].’ At any rate the two cavalry brigades caught him up not far from Aldea Lengua, and, after scattering his rearguard of dragoons, rode in upon his infantry, which were marching hard in close column. The tactical conditions were exactly the same as those which had been seen during the retreat of Picton and the 3rd Division from El Bodon to Fuente Grimaldo in September 1811. The brigadiers, after trying some partial and ineffective charges[467], judged it useless to attack steady and unbroken infantry in solid order, and contented themselves with following the column at a cautious distance and picking up stragglers—just as Montbrun had done in 1811 on the way to Fuente Grimaldo. Fane’s horse-artillery battery got up, and put in some damaging shots on the rear battalions, but they closed up and hurried on. The day was hot, many of the French fell out of the ranks exhausted and were gleaned up on the way. Their divisional ammunition train got jammed in a hollow road and was captured—the leading caisson had been overturned and blocked the exit of the rest. But the main body of the infantry held on its way in a solid mass, and after five miles, Wellington, who had just ridden up, ordered Fane and Alten to desist from the pursuit. Villatte, therefore, got off, leaving behind him a couple of hundred prisoners, and some scores of men who had fallen dead from sunstroke and over-exertion, or had been knocked over by the round-shot of Gardiner’s H.A. battery[468]. This was one more example of the incapacity of cavalry unsupported to deal with unbroken infantry, of which we have had to give so many previous instances. The only exception to the rule was the extraordinary achievement of Bock’s heavy German dragoons at Garcia Hernandez on the day after the battle of Salamanca. Clearly Villatte waited too long, and should never have allowed himself to be caught so near Salamanca. He got off better than he deserved[469], and picked up his detachment from Alba, which came in upon him from the right a few miles farther on, beyond Babila Fuente, cautiously pursued by Long’s Light Dragoons. The column went out of sight, retreating on Cantalpino, not on Toro—one more proof to Wellington that the enemy was not going to attempt to strengthen the line of the Douro, but to concentrate somewhere about Medina del Campo or Valladolid.

The various infantry columns reached the neighbourhood of Salamanca on the evening of the 26th, and crossed the Tormes, some by the bridge, some by fords, next day. They were ordered to take up the position facing north and east on the heights beyond the city which Wellington had held against Marmont in June 1812. The Light Division was on the left, the 2nd Division in the centre, Silveira’s Portuguese on the right at Cabrerizos, Morillo on the upper Tormes at Machacon with a detachment in Alba. The cavalry patrolled towards Zamora, Toro, the fords of Fresno on the Douro, and also eastward toward the Guarena. Hill now halted for six days—it was Wellington’s intention, now that he had displayed himself in force at Salamanca, and set all the lines of French intelligence quivering, that the enemy should conclude that his great attack was to be delivered between the Douro and the Tormes, and he hoped that they would attempt to parry it by a concentration in the region of Valladolid—Toro for the defence of the line of the Douro, or perhaps (but this was less likely) by a counter-offensive south of the Douro from the direction of Medina del Campo, so as to take him in flank and prevent his further progress northward. Either of these moves would fall in with his desires, since his real intention was to turn the line of the Douro much lower down, in the direction of Zamora, by means of Graham’s corps, which was about to start from Braganza and Miranda on the very day of the occupation of Salamanca, and was due to arrive on the Esla, behind Zamora, on the 30th. It pleased him well that Villatte should have retreated due east, that the cavalry found no hostile forces south of the Douro in the direction of either Zamora or Toro, and that it was reported that there was only one French infantry division holding those towns.

Having allowed time for the enemy to get full knowledge of his presence at Salamanca, and to act upon it—it was inevitable that they should regard the place where he had shown himself as the base of his future operations—Wellington made ready to transfer himself rapidly and secretly to the other and stronger wing of his army, which Graham was now conducting against the extreme western flank of the French line. On May 28th he handed over the command of the southern wing to Hill, and announced his own departure. The orders given to Sir Rowland were that he was, unless the unexpected happened, to make ready to march on the Douro at Zamora the moment that he should receive news that Graham had crossed the Esla[470]. Bridges should be ready for him, and the fortunate disappearance of the enemy’s horse from the region of Ledesma made the rapid transmission of information between the two wings certain.

There was one possibility to be considered. Though Wellington was convinced that the French would concentrate north of the Douro, in the direction of Valladolid and Medina de Rio Seco, it was just conceivable that they might take the other course of concentrating south of the river, round Medina del Campo, and marching straight on Salamanca with all the troops that could be hastily drawn together. It was impossible for them to gather their whole force in the few days that would be at their disposition; but conceivably they might think it worth while to make a counter-stroke with such divisions as could be got together in haste. It is interesting to know that such an idea did flash through Jourdan’s mind for a moment, only to be rejected by King Joseph on the advice of the other generals[471]. Should the French march on the Tormes, a grave responsibility would be placed on Hill’s head. He was told to give them battle ‘if he was strong enough’—i. e. to judge their force according to the best information to be had, not an easy thing, but Hill was pre-eminently clear-headed and averse to unnecessary risks. Should they be too numerous, he was not to retire on Rodrigo by the route by which Wellington had come, but to throw up his communication with that fortress, and move off in the direction of Zamora, carrying out at all costs the plan for the junction of the two wings of the army[472]. Nothing was to remain behind to cover the Ciudad Rodrigo road and the Portuguese frontier but the single Spanish division of Carlos de España: all convoys on the march from Salamanca were to be turned off towards Ledesma and Zamora. It might look perilous to leave Central Portugal unprotected, but Wellington was sure that the enemy would be so distracted by his great movement north of the Douro, that they would not dare to advance on Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, to strike at his old line of communications. Moreover, it would not matter if they did, for his new line of communication was now entirely north of the Douro, and Oporto, not Lisbon, would be his base.

On the 29th at dawn Wellington rode off to the north-west, almost unattended, and Hill’s responsibility began. It was not to turn out a heavy one, since (as his chief had foreseen) the enemy was not in the least thinking of taking up the offensive, but was rather expecting a continuation of the British advance from Salamanca. It did not come, and before the French had made up their minds as to what the halt of the southern column might mean, they were attacked on the 30th by the northern column, whose existence had hitherto been hidden from them. Hill therefore had only to wait for Wellington’s directions to march northward, when the date and route should be given. These orders did not come till the 2nd of June, so that the southern corps had to remain for a week in its own cantonments round Salamanca, doing nothing more than watch the French, north and east, by means of cavalry reconnaissances.

We must now turn to the operations of the more important northern corps, which crossed the Portuguese frontier on the 26th, four days after Wellington had started out in person from Ciudad Rodrigo.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER III

OPERATIONS OF GRAHAM’S COLUMN:
MAY 26-JUNE 3

On May 18th Wellington had issued his final orders for the advance of the great turning force under Graham, all of whose troops were due to converge on the remote corner of Portugal between Braganza and Miranda de Douro between the 21st and 27th of the month. Many of them came from long distances, and had to start early—the 1st Division from Vizeu as early as May 13th; and left behind it, as hopelessly inefficient from sickness, Howard’s brigade of the Guards, reduced to a strength of 800 bayonets by the fever which had ravaged its ranks during the spring. Shifted from Vizeu to Oporto for the benefit of the milder climate, this brigade could not be moved for another month, and missed the campaign of Vittoria. The 5th, 6th, and 7th Divisions left their winter quarters in the Beira on the 14th, the 3rd and 4th, who were close to the Douro or actually on it, at Moimenta and St. João de Pesqueira, could afford not to move till the 16th. To secure a rapid movement for the columns which had farthest to go, and to save any congestion of traffic at the usual ferries of passage on the Douro—bridges there were none—Wellington had collected a large number of barges and river boats at Peso de Regoa, St. João de Pesqueira, and the Barca of Poçinho near the confluence of the Coa and the Douro.

The arrangement of the marches was calculated to allow the heavy infantry columns to make use as far as possible of the only two good roads in the Tras-os-Montes, of which the one goes from the Douro to Braganza, the other to Miranda. The 1st and 5th Divisions crossed by the much-used ferry of Peso de Regoa near Lamego, and marched by Villa Real and Mirandella on two separate routes to the neighbourhood of Braganza[473]. The 3rd Division crossed the ferry at St. João de Pesqueira and went by Villaflor and Vinhas to Vimioso, half-way between Braganza and Miranda. All these columns had some cross-road marching to do, where they were forced to cut across from one chaussée to another. The third column, the 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions, more fortunate, was on the high road nearly all the way: after crossing the Douro at the ferry of Poçinho, they marched from Torre de Moncorvo by the great chaussée to the frontier town of Miranda and the neighbouring village of Malhadas, where they were due to arrive on three successive days (24th, 25th, 26th May). This column was followed by the all-important pontoon-train, and by the reserve of siege artillery—Portuguese 18-pounders under Major Ariaga[474]—as well as by the main ammunition train.

The three British cavalry brigades which Wellington had allotted to the great turning movement, those of Anson, Bock, and Ponsonby, had been cantoned in the winter months in the lower Beira, along the coast, and in the valley of the Vouga. Before the infantry had moved, they had all three been brought north of the Douro about May 1, through Oporto, and billeted in Braga, Guimaraens, San Tyrso, and neighbouring villages. On May 12th orders set them moving eastward to the Braganza country—their march was much more fatiguing than that of the infantry divisions, for there are no high roads of any value going directly from the Braga country to the direction of Miranda and Braganza—all run north and south, not east and west. Though allotted short daily stages of only three or four leagues, the cavalry found the route fatiguing—the mountain cross-roads were more like staircases than paths—the horse artillery accompanying the brigades had in some cases to swerve off from its itinerary and take circuitous turns[475]: in others it had to be man-handled down precipitous tracks. The only horsemen who had an easy job were the Portuguese brigade of D’Urban, who had been wintering at Braganza, and had only to advance a few miles to the frontier, and Grant’s newly-arrived Hussar Brigade which, coming from the south, followed the infantry column that went by Torre de Moncorvo to Miranda, along the high road all the way.

Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese infantry, who (like D’Urban’s dragoons) had wintered north of the Douro, at Penafiel and Villa Real respectively, had a short way to go, and were timed to arrive at Braganza before the heavy columns from the south came up.

Portugal and Spain, as is well known, turn their backs on each other for the greater part of their long frontier, and though there were decent chaussées from the Douro to Braganza and Miranda they stopped short at the boundary line. From thence onward there were no good roads till Zamora was reached, and those bad ones which existed were country tracks, only useful for operations in the summer. That they could be so used, for all arms, in May and June, was one of Wellington’s secrets, which he trusted that the French would never guess. For both parties during the war had left alone this remote corner of the Peninsula. The only operations seen near it had been Soult’s spring campaign of 1809, and the forays of Silveira’s militia when they occasionally raided towards Zamora.

Country roads, however, existed between the Sierra de Culebra and the bend of the Douro between Zamora and Miranda, and the whole detail of Graham’s march depended on their practicability: Wellington had caused the whole region as far as the Esla to be explored by his intelligence officers, and the report had been that the movement of all arms was possible in the summer. The permanent bridges of the Esla, from Benavente down to its confluence with the Douro, had been broken long ago; but there was a certain number of fords, and convenient places for the laying of temporary bridges. By the end of May it was calculated that the spring floods due to the melting of snows in the Galician and Asturian mountains would be over, and that the river would be down to its normal low summer level. On these facts depended the success of the operation, which must be a rapid one, in order that the French might have no time for concentration. But Wellington’s provident mind had taken into consideration the possibility of unexpected high-water, and as a matter of precaution he had ordered up his main pontoon-train from the Tagus. To get the cumbrous pontoons, 33 of them, from Abrantes to Miranda de Douro by land was no small matter. They travelled slowly on specially constructed wheeled trucks[476] by Castello Branco, Sabugal, and Pinhel, crossed the Douro at Villa Nova de Foscoa, and were then brought up on the Miranda high road as far as Villa Velha, where they were halted for a short time, as Wellington was not quite certain whether he would not lay them at Espadacinta on the middle Douro, rather than farther up, beyond Miranda. For across the pontoons he intended to lay the main line of communication between Graham’s and Hill’s wings of the army, and if the latter failed to get forward on the Tormes and to open up touch with Graham via Zamora, it might be necessary to throw the bridge at some lower point, such as Espadacinta[477]. On the 20th he made up his mind that 14 pontoons should be sent to Espadacinta, while the remaining 19 should proceed to Miranda, and from thence follow the course of the Douro to the point where they would be laid—probably the ferry of Villa al Campo, a mile below the confluence of the Esla and the Douro. The nineteen all-important trucks with their burdens reached Miranda safely, and moved close behind the right-hand column of Graham’s army during its advance.

Down to May 26 all the British troops had been kept behind the Portuguese frontier, nothing having been sent beyond it save D’Urban’s Portuguese dragoons, who formed a screen some little way on the Spanish side. Their appearance would, in the event of a French cavalry raid from Zamora, create no suspicion of there being in the rear anything more than the usual Tras-os-Montes militia. Nor could spies draw any deduction from their presence.

But on the 26th the whole of Graham’s army[478] started out in three columns arranged as follows:

1. From Braganza marched, as the northern column, Anson’s light and Ponsonby’s heavy dragoon brigades, preceding the 1st Infantry division and Pack’s Portuguese independent brigade. Crossing the frontier river, the Manzanas, at fords by Nuez, they were ordered to move on Tabara in four marches, by the country road through Sesnande.

2. From Outeiro and Vimioso marched, as the central column, following D’Urban’s Portuguese light horse (who were already over the border), Bock’s heavy German dragoons accompanied by the 3rd and 5th Divisions and Bradford’s independent Portuguese brigade. They were directed to move by Alcanizas in four marches on Losilla, five miles south of Tabara.

3. From Miranda de Douro marched, as the right column, close to the river, the 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions; their cavalry, Grant’s hussar brigade, overtook them on the second day. Having a shorter distance to cover than the other two columns, their van was to reach Carvajales on the 28th, in three marches. On the 30th the pontoons, which followed in their rear, were to reach the ferry of Villa al Campo, where it was intended that they should be laid down across the Douro.

The left-hand or northern column was to get into touch with the Army of Galicia—Barcena’s and Losada’s divisions and Penne Villemur’s cavalry, about 12,000 strong, who, marching from Astorga on the 26th, were to be at the broken bridge of Benavente on the Esla on the 29th-30th.

It will be seen that Graham’s force was marching on a very compact front, the central column being not more than five or six miles distant from each of the flanking ones, so that the whole could be assembled for action, in the unlikely event of opposition being met, in a very few hours. The cavalry screen of five brigades was so strong that it was impossible for any French horse which might be in the Zamora direction to pierce it, or discover what was behind. The whole army counted not less than 42,000 sabres and bayonets, exclusive of the Galicians—as strong an Anglo-Portuguese force as that with which Wellington had fought the battle of Salamanca, and outnumbering considerably the other wing of Wellington’s army, which was marching south of the Douro.

By an extraordinary piece of luck the attention of the French higher command was completely distracted at the moment from the Esla front, as a result of the last authentic reports received from that direction. For as late as May 20th Reille had sent Boyer’s division of dragoons across the Esla at Benavente, to make a sweep to the north and west in the direction of La Baneza and the road to Puebla Senabria. They had gone almost as far as Astorga without meeting troops of any kind; and reported that some of the Galician army were at Astorga, but that they had heard of no British save two or three commissaries, who had been buying up barley and wheat in the valley of the Tera, which were to be sent back into Portugal[479]. Reille drew the natural deduction, that there was nothing stirring in this part of the world, and Boyer, after thoroughly destroying the bridge of Castro Gonzalo outside Benavente, went back to his former cantonments east of the Esla. If the raid had been made a week later, he could not have failed to bring news of the advance of the Galicians, and would probably have heard of Graham’s movements from Braganza and Miranda de Douro. But by the 27th all the attention of the French generals was already distracted to Wellington’s march against Salamanca, at the head of Hill’s column, and the Esla front received little notice. There remained opposite the advancing troops of Graham only Daricau’s infantry division of the Army of the South, with a brigade each at Zamora and Toro, and three regiments of Digeon’s dragoons watching the Esla from San Cebrian to its juncture with the Douro, and at the same time keeping a look-out southward towards Salamanca. For the cavalry of Hill’s column was already on the 27th-28th pushing out northward towards Zamora as well as eastward towards the Guarena. On the 28th this danger began to prey so much on Daricau’s mind that he withdrew all his infantry save four companies from Zamora, leaving Digeon’s dragoons practically unsupported to watch rather than to defend the line of the Esla. Urgent requests were sent to the cavalry of the Army of Portugal, farther north along that river, to keep touch with Digeon and help him if necessary.

The cavalry at the head of Graham’s three columns reached their destinations—Tabara, Losilla, Carvajales, on May 28th—the infantry on the 29th. No French parties were found on the hither side of the Esla, and though the peasantry reported that there were vedettes on the farther bank, none were seen. Exploration of the course of the Esla, however, led to the vexatious discovery that the river was very high, owing to torrential rain on the night of the 28th-29th, and that some of the fords intended for use were probably impracticable for cavalry, most certainly so for infantry. Graham, though vexed at the delay, refused to push across the water with horsemen alone, and waited for the pontoon-train—due on the 30th—to come up, resolving to lay it across the Esla, and not across the Douro as had been at first intended. Meanwhile the French showed no signs of life on the 30th—it had been feared that Daricau might come out of Zamora, only eight miles away, with infantry and guns, to oppose the passage. But, as we have seen, he had really departed on the 28th, and there was nothing opposite Graham but a cavalry screen. The main attack seemed to the French generals to be on the side of Salamanca, where Wellington was known to have been present on May 27th. Digeon had discovered on the 29th that there were British troops on the opposite bank of the Esla, but had no notion of their strength or purpose[480].

But if Wellington’s presence marked the danger-point, it was now suddenly displaced. On the morning of the 29th the British Commander-in-Chief had gone off on one of his not unusual lightning rides. Starting early from Salamanca, he rode by Ledesma to the Douro opposite Miranda—over 50 miles—before dark. Facing Miranda there is no road on the Spanish side, the river descends fiercely in something like cataracts, with high rocks on its eastern bank. The only communication from shore to shore was by a rope and basket contrivance, worked by a windlass, and stretched high above the water. By this strange method Wellington crossed the Douro—what would have been the results of the campaign of 1813 if the ropes had been rotten? He slept at Miranda, started off at dawn on the 30th and was at Carvajales—20 miles away—by the afternoon, not so tired but that he could write dispatches to Hill and Giron that night, and settle with Graham the dispositions for next morning.

Wellington’s first decision was that the pontoons, which had come up on the 30th, should be laid not on the Douro at Villa al Campo, but on the Esla opposite Almendra, where the high road from Puebla Senabria to Zamora crossed the river. But at the same time attempts were to be made to get cavalry (and infantry if possible) across the water at other points.

At dawn on the 31st Grant’s hussar brigade entered the ford of Almendra, where it was intended that the bridge should be laid; each man of the leading squadron had an infantry soldier of the 7th Division hanging on to his stirrup. At the same time Bock’s German dragoons and D’Urban’s Portuguese essayed the ford at Pallomilla, opposite Montemarta, four miles up-stream. The hussars crossed with great trouble—the bottom was stony, the water had risen in the night, some horses lost their footing—many of the infantry stepped into holes, or stumbled and were carried away. The majority were saved, but ten of the 51st and rather more of the Brunswickers were swept right down-stream and drowned. Yet, despite mishaps, the hussars got over, and, advancing rapidly, surprised the French cavalry picquet at the village of Val de Perdrices, a little way up-stream, taking it whole—an officer and 32 men. This was certainly about the most extraordinary instance of carelessness on the part of outposts during the war, and reflects as much discredit on Digeon, whose dragoons were supposed to be watching the lower Esla, as on the wretched officer in charge of the picquet. How was it possible that such a large body as a brigade could approach in daylight the best-known ford of the neighbourhood, at a spot where the course of the high road showed the convenience of the passage, without finding a single vedette on the bank? And why was such an important point watched (or not watched) by a half-troop, instead of by a force which could have offered at least a momentary opposition, and have passed the alarm to its regiment, which, as Digeon’s report shows, was at Iniesta, only four miles to the rear?

Meanwhile Bock’s Germans and D’Urban’s Portuguese dragoons had an equally difficult, though equally unopposed, passage at the ford of Palomilla, four miles up-stream. The river was running furiously, and seven or eight horses and three or four men were washed away and drowned. Anson’s light dragoons at the head of the third column had an even worse experience at San Vincente del Barco, opposite San Cebrian: the ford was found utterly impracticable, and the brigade was ordered back toward Tabara: on its way it was turned off to a second projected crossing-spot farther south. This was also discovered to be hopeless, and finally the whole northern column was ordered to cross at Almendra, behind the southern column. After a day’s profitless countermarching[481], it came down thither, to find the pontoons laid, the infantry of the southern column all across the river, and well forward, while that of the centre column was crossing rapidly. In the end all Graham’s troops save the leading cavalry brigades had to use the bridge.

Meanwhile Grant’s hussars, advancing on Zamora, found that the French had evacuated it in haste on the first news of the crossing of the Esla. Digeon, with his two regiments of dragoons, his half-battery of horse artillery, and the four companies of voltigeurs, had gone off to Toro. Wellington therefore was able to occupy Zamora without opposition on the night following the passage of the fords[482], and moved his head-quarters thither next day. The moment that he knew that Daricau and Digeon had absconded, he sent orders to Hill to march not on Zamora, or the ford of Villa al Campo, as he had at first intended, but directly on Toro, which would save twenty miles marching for the right wing. For it was clear that Digeon and Daricau could not hold Toro with some 6,000 men against Graham’s 40,000, now across the Esla and in close pursuit of them. And there was no great body of French available to reinforce them within a couple of days’ march—at most Reille’s horse and one infantry division could have come up. On June 1st the signs were that the enemy would not stand—Digeon’s dragoons were falling back on the Toro road—Reille’s cavalry, heard of at Belver in the morning, had gone off eastward towards Medina del Rio Seco in haste. Wherefore Wellington pushed on fast on that day, sending on Graham’s columns by the two roads Zamora-Toro and Zamora-Rio Seco, which do not diverge sufficiently to make it impossible to concentrate the troops on them in a few hours. But caution proved unnecessary. The French evacuated Toro in the afternoon, so that the junction-point with Hill was safely secured, and Graham’s divisions were present in full force next morning, to cover the passage of the southern wing across the Douro.

Wellington moved his head-quarters to Toro on the morning of June 2nd, and sent out his cavalry on all the roads which branch out from it: Anson’s and Bock’s brigades going north-east occupied Vezdemarben. Grant’s hussars pushing along the river-road toward Tordesillas came up with Digeon’s rear at Morales, six miles outside Toro, and fell upon it vigorously. The French dragoons—two regiments—were drawn up in a defensive position, with a swamp in front and bridge over a ravine behind. Grant charging furiously with the 10th Hussars and the 18th in support on the flank, broke the front regiment, whereupon the enemy went to the rear in disorder, and was chased for two miles, prisoners being captured in considerable numbers. At last pursuers and pursued ran in on the rear brigade of Daricau’s infantry, drawn up in good order, with a battery across the road, on the heights of Pedroso del Rey. Grant had therefore to call off his men, and to wait for the enemy to retire, which they presently did in good order. Two officers and 208 men, all of the 16th Dragoons, were captured[483], about a hundred of them wounded[484]; the rest were mainly taken owing to the bad condition of their mounts, ‘raw-boned horses with evident marks of bad provender, escort duties, and counter-marches—nearly the whole of them had horrible sore backs.’ The 10th Hussars had only 16 casualties—one of them an officer who had pursued incautiously and ridden into the French infantry, by whom he was wounded and taken prisoner. This was a good day’s record for the 10th Hussars, who started their first Peninsular service—they had only landed in February—with a very handsome success.

During the day of the combat of Morales Hill’s infantry had started off from their billets in the villages ten miles north of Salamanca to move on Toro. A forced march of over twenty miles, through Fuentesauco, across a very bare and desolate country, brought the head of the column down to the Douro, where they encamped among well-watered fields and vegetable gardens. ‘Officers and men, after the long sultry day, devoured with zest and relish the raw cabbages, onions, and melons.’ Next morning (June 3rd) the whole column began to cross the river at Toro, the artillery and baggage by a ford no more than knee-deep, the infantry by the fine but broken bridge. Only one arch of it had been blown up, and a resourceful engineer, Lieutenant Pringle, had contrived an easy method of utilizing it. A row of long ladders had been laid against each side of the gap in the roadway: their feet inclined together and united in the shallow water below. Long and stout planks had then been laid across, resting at each end on the rungs of each pair of corresponding ladders, and making a sort of platform. The men went down the upper rungs of one set of ladders, walked a few steps over the planks, and ascended by the rungs of the ladders on the other side. This was rather tedious for the passage of four divisions, and took the whole day and the following morning. But by noon on June 4 the entire army was concentrated in the vicinity of Toro on the north bank. Its cavalry was many miles in advance, at Pedroso del Rey on the Tordesillas road, Almaraz and Villavelid on the Rio Seco road. Parties sent out northward had got in touch with Giron’s Galician army, which had passed Benavente on June 1 and reached Villalpando on the 3rd, with Penne Villemur’s squadrons out in its front.

Thus every man of Wellington’s striking force, 80,000 sabres and bayonets, was concentrated north of Toro on the night of June 3—all the British in a single mass, the Galicians some 18 miles off on the flank, but easily available. Nothing was now south of the Douro save Carlos de España’s Spanish division, left to garrison Salamanca, and Julian Sanchez’s horse, who were searching the roads south of the river, and had just captured a large French cavalry patrol at Castro Nuño, near Pollos. It seemed to Wellington incredible that the enemy would reply to his stroke at their communications by a similar stroke at his on the Salamanca-Rodrigo line. Indeed, all reports showed them moving north, in order to form opposite him on the north bank of the Douro. Moreover, it was clear that they would have the greatest difficulty in concentrating a sufficient force to fight him, for the possession of Valladolid and the defence of the great northern chaussée. The first stage of his plan had been completed with entire success.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER IV

MOVEMENTS OF THE FRENCH:
MAY 22-JUNE 4

At the moment when Wellington launched his two great columns into Spain, the French head-quarters staff was in a condition of nervous expectation. The spring was so far advanced that it had been expected that the Allies would have been already on the move, and their long quiescence was supposed, very reasonably, to cover some new plan which it was impossible to divine. The position of the French armies was very unfavourable, entirely owing to the continued absence from the front of the whole infantry of the Army of Portugal, which, by Napoleon’s desire and by the detailed instructions of the Minister of War at Paris, had been lent to the Army of the North, and sent backward into Biscay, Navarre, and Aragon to hunt the guerrilleros. Five and a half out of the six divisions of Reille’s command were still occupied on these marches and counter-marches in the rear, when May was far spent, and when the offensive of the Allies must be expected at every moment.

The French army, available for immediate operations, was therefore short of one-third of its strength, and Jourdan and King Joseph disliked the situation. Jourdan confesses in his Memoirs that he and his master ought to have ordered Clausel to suspend his operations, however incomplete they might be, and to send back all the borrowed infantry to the valley of the Douro. But the minister’s letters kept repeating so often that the campaign north of the Ebro must be completed at all costs, that the King considered that he could do no more than transmit to Paris the warnings that he was receiving, urging on the minister that it was time to suspend those operations, and that General Clausel should be ordered to come back in haste towards Burgos[485]. This self-exculpation of Jourdan shows clearly enough the miserable consequences of the system of double-command which Napoleon had always kept up in Spain. The habit of sending orders direct from Paris to fractions of the Army of Spain was so deeply ingrained, that the titular Commander-in-Chief and his Chief of the Staff dared not issue instructions of primary importance to one of the generals under them without obtaining leave from the Emperor! And at this moment the Emperor was not even at Paris—he had long been at the front in Germany, and had fought the battle of Lützen on May 2. What came from Paris was not even the orders of Napoleon, but the orders of Clarke, transmitting his impression of the imperial will from dispatches already many days old, which would be doubly out of date before they reached Valladolid. The supreme master must take the responsibility of the fact that on May 15 or May 18 his representatives in Spain were asking for leave to modify his arrangements, by petitions which could receive no reply—for mere reasons of space and time—till the crisis which they were fearing had burst upon them. The whole system was ruinous—in 1813 as it had been in 1812. The only rational method would have been to turn over the whole conduct of affairs in Spain to some local authority, supreme in everything and responsible for everything. Yet stronger men than Joseph and Jourdan would perhaps have taken the risk of offending their master, and have issued peremptory orders, which Clausel, Foy, and the other outlying generals would probably have obeyed.

On May 20 the distribution of the Army of Spain was as follows: King Joseph and the 2,500 men of his guards, horse and foot, lay at general head-quarters at Valladolid. Of the two infantry divisions of D’Erlon’s Army of the Centre, one, that of Darmagnac, had been lent to Reille, when all the infantry of the Army of Portugal had been borrowed from him, and was lying at Medina de Rio Seco, in the rear of Reille’s cavalry, who were watching from a discreet distance the Army of Galicia and the roads in the direction of Astorga and Leon. It will be remembered that on May 20 Reille, hearing vague rumours of allied movements beyond the Esla, had executed a great sweep with Boyer’s dragoons across the bridge of Benavente, and for five leagues beyond it, had found nothing, and had reported that there were no British troops in the direction, and no Spaniards nearer than Astorga[486].

The other division of the Army of the Centre, that of Cassagne, was at Segovia, far south of the Douro, keeping touch with the large garrison still left in Madrid, which, as long as it was maintained there, could not be left in a state of absolute isolation.

Of the Army of the South, Gazan had his head-quarters at Arevalo, not very far from the King at Valladolid, but retained with him only Tilly’s cavalry division. The rest of his troops were woefully dispersed. Daricau’s division and Digeon’s dragoons lay at Zamora and Toro—nearly 100 miles from head-quarters—maintaining a loose touch with Reille’s cavalry. Villatte—with one detached regiment of Digeon’s dragoons to keep watch for him—was at Salamanca—fifty miles from Daricau. Conroux, with a third division, was at Avila, with a whole block of mountains between him and Villatte. He was supposed to be watching Hill, and had detachments as far out as Monbeltran on the borders of Estremadura. He was also separated from the force at Madrid by several sierras and the formidable pass of the Guadarrama. In the capital itself lay Leval with one more division, while the independent brigade of Maransin[487], had been intermittently holding Toledo, and was actually there on the 20th, in company with a brigade of light cavalry under Pierre Soult[488]. The extreme outer flanks of the Army of the South were as far apart therefore as Zamora and Toledo—160 miles as the crow flies—and a Spanish crow has rough country to fly over—and each of them was some 90 miles by road from the head-quarters in the centre.

As to the infantry of the Army of Portugal, the only element of it which lay anywhere near head-quarters was a brigade of Maucune’s at Palencia on the Carrion, which was guarding a large dépôt of stores and transport. The other brigade of Maucune’s was at Burgos. Lamartinière’s division (late that commanded for so long by Bonnet) was watching the great chaussée from Burgos by Briviesca to Miranda del Ebro, in order to keep touch with Clausel in Navarre. Similarly Sarrut’s division, after its long and fruitless chase of Longa, was keeping safe the roads from Bilbao to Miranda, in order to link Foy with the main army. Foy himself was on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, where he had stormed Castro-Urdiales on May 12, and was trying to make an end of the local guerrilleros. The other two divisions of Reille’s infantry were lost to sight in the mountains of Navarre, where they were marching and countermarching with Clausel, in pursuit of the elusive Mina. These were the divisions of Taupin and of Barbot: the troops which were working along with them were the two ‘active’ divisions of the Army of the North, those of Abbé and Vandermaesen. Clausel’s great flying column, of 15,000 men or more, was so continually on the move through regions where cross-communication was impossible, owing to the insurrection, that it could not be located with certainty on any given date, or receive instruction without a delay that might run to eight or ten days.

Obviously it would take the French army a week to concentrate on Valladolid or Arevalo, if Wellington should be aiming at Salamanca and the Central Douro. But if he were about to attack one of the extreme wings, at Zamora or Madrid, the time required would be much greater. And Joseph and Jourdan were not at all sure that the secret plan of Wellington might not be a thrust, with Hill’s force as the spear-head, at Madrid. One of the many false rumours sent to head-quarters was that forage had been ordered for Long’s cavalry at Escalona on the Tietar, many miles in front of Talavera. While another report truly chronicled the concentration of Hill’s brigades at Bejar, and the gathering of stores there, but interpreted their meaning as preparation for a march on Avila by the Puente de Congosto.

Uncertain as to what was Wellington’s plan, the French Higher Command finally resolved to await its manifestation before giving the final orders—a system which was certain to lead to some initial loss of territory at the opening of the campaign, since the enemy would have a week in hand, before he could be opposed by a sufficient mass on the line which he might select. On May 18th Jourdan ordered Gazan to push exploring reconnaissances towards the Portuguese frontier, and, if Wellington should be met advancing, to order Leval to evacuate Madrid, to send forward all his cavalry to support Villatte at Salamanca, and, when the latter should be driven in, to have his whole army ready to receive him behind the line of the Trabancos river, except Daricau’s division, which should remain at Toro. Reille was to bring forward Darmagnac’s infantry from Rio Seco to support his cavalry on the Esla, and to unite Maucune’s scattered force by calling up his rear brigade from Burgos, so as to provide a reserve for Darmagnac. If Wellington should advance, as was thought most probable, from Ciudad Rodrigo, marching on Salamanca in full strength, and driving in Villatte, it was intended to bring in all the troops of Gazan and D’Erlon to the north bank of the Douro, and to defend the course of that river from Toro to Tordesillas, as Marmont had done in June 1812. If the British showed strength on the Esla, which was thought unlikely, Reille would reinforce Daricau and Digeon with all his cavalry and the divisions of Darmagnac and Maucune. But no definite orders were sent either to Clausel[489] or to Foy, Sarrut, and Lamartinière—the directions to be given them would depend on the strength which the British displayed, and the front on which they appeared. Thus a week or more after Wellington should have shown his hand, the two armies of the South and Centre, with the cavalry and one infantry division of the Army of Portugal, ought to be concentrated on the required points north of the Douro, with the possibility of bringing up later the five missing divisions of the Army of Portugal, and Clausel’s two disposable divisions from the Army of the North. But these last might take a very long time to appear, and meanwhile there would only be 45,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry in hand opposite Wellington[490]. Considering the latter’s estimated numerical superiority, it seemed that he might be brought to a stand, but hardly beaten, by the forces which the King could collect. A defensive campaign on the Douro was really Jourdan’s forecast of the game; it might perhaps be turned into an offensive, when the missing divisions of the Army of Portugal and Clausel should come up, with some 30,000 men of reinforcements.

It is a nervous business to wait for the move which finally betrays the enemy’s intention, as every one knows who remembers August 1914. It was probably with some feeling of relief that Gazan at Arevalo and King Joseph at Palencia heard, on the 24th, that Wellington had passed the Agueda on the 22nd, and was apparently marching on Salamanca in great strength. Conroux sent in news that Hill was at the same time marching up from Bejar northward—not turning east. The campaign therefore, as it appeared, was to take the form which had seemed most probable, and the hypothetical orders for concentration which had been issued to the generals on the 18th became valid. But Gazan lost a day in evacuating Madrid, by riding over from Arevalo to Valladolid and formally requesting the King’s authorization for the retreat of Leval from the capital. So the aide-de-camp bearing the dispatch of recall only started from Valladolid on the morning of the 25th, instead of from Arevalo on the afternoon of the 24th: it was clear therefore that Leval would be late at the concentration point.

The other parts of the French scheme were carried out according to plan between the 25th and the 29th. When Villatte found himself attacked at Salamanca, and got away with some loss eastward on the 26th, he fell back on Medina del Campo, and found waiting for him there on the 28th Conroux’s division from Avila and the division of cavalry which Gazan had been keeping at his head-quarters at Arevalo—Tilly’s dragoons. D’Erlon was in march from Segovia with Cassagne’s division and Treillard’s horse, and had reached Olmedo, only fifteen miles from Medina, so that he would be available next day. The whole made up a force of 16,000 foot and 4,000 horse. But Leval was late, and would not be up for three days more, nor had Maucune’s brigade yet come down from Burgos, while Daricau and Digeon began to look uncomfortably remote in their position at Toro and Zamora, where only Reille could reach them.

Joseph and Jourdan had intended to take position behind the Zapardiel on the 30th, there to demonstrate against Wellington, who ought by this time to be coming down upon them. It was necessary to hold him in check till Leval should have got in from Madrid to join the main body, and then all would retire beyond the Douro, to the intended defensive position. But this day two disquieting facts became notable: one was that Wellington was not advancing from Salamanca: the troops that he had brought thither had not moved since the 26th. The other was that Digeon sent word that there were allied forces approaching the lower Esla from the direction of Braganza, although Reille had reported ten days back that there were absolutely no signs of allied movement from this direction—their numbers were as yet incalculable. The suspicion, then for the first time, arose that the Salamanca advance might be a mere feint, despite of Wellington’s personal appearance in that direction.

On the morning of June 1st suspicion became certainty. Digeon reported that the British had crossed the Esla in great force, by several fords, and that he and Daricau were retiring on Toro at once. Joseph would have liked to go behind the Douro without delay, but could not possibly do so until Leval, Maransin, and Pierre Soult should have come up from the south. And the Madrid column was not due on the Douro for two more days, owing to its late start—no fault of its own, but due to Gazan’s dilatory conduct on May 24th.

Leval had only got the order to evacuate the capital on the 26th. Luckily for him Maransin had come in with his flying column from Toledo on the 21st, so that there was no need to wait to pick up this detachment. The garrison was directed to be under arms for marching at daybreak on the 27th, and with them went a considerable train of Afrancesado refugees, for many of Joseph’s ministers and courtiers had refused to start by the earlier convoys, which had gone to Valladolid in March and April, hoping that emigration might never again become necessary. The remembrance of the miserable march to Valencia in July 1812 weighed on their minds, and made them unwilling to face a second hegira of the same sort. Now all had to go; and quantities of carriages, carts, wagons, and mules belonging to civilians were mixed with, or trailed behind, the columns of Leval’s infantry. The convoy could not travel very fast; it only reached the foot of the mountains on the night of the 27th, crossed the Guadarrama pass on the 28th, and reached Espinar on the northern descent on the 29th. Here Leval turned off the baggage and refugees on to the road of Segovia, under charge of an escort commanded by General Hugo, late Governor of Madrid. He himself with the fighting men went on to Arevalo by the great chaussée, reached the Douro on the 2nd of June, and joined Gazan at Tordesillas. The latter had crossed the river on May 31st, the moment that it became clear that the Madrid column was not going to be intercepted by any British force from the Salamanca direction. D’Erlon passed the Douro only on June 2, the same day as Leval, having waited behind to cover the arrival of the column of refugees and transport from Madrid, which had been directed on Segovia and Cuellar.

On June 2nd therefore the south bank of the Douro had been at last evacuated by all the French forces, but Jourdan’s and Joseph’s plan for defending the northern bank was obviously out of date and impossible. For Wellington was already at Toro with Graham’s 40,000 men, and there was no means of preventing Hill’s 30,000 and the Galicians from joining him north of the river. The Salamanca column, if only the French had known it, was already marching north, to fall in alongside of the other and larger mass of the allied army, and was due at Toro next day (June 3rd).

This last fact was, of course, unknown at French head-quarters on the afternoon of June 2nd—all that had transpired was that Wellington was at Toro with a very large force, and the Galicians close by his flank on the Benavente road. The exact position of the imperial army was that Gazan, with four and a half infantry divisions of the Army of the South and all the cavalry of Digeon, Tilly, and Pierre Soult, was concentrated on a ten-mile front between Tordesillas and Torrelobaton: Reille, with Darmagnac’s division and Boyer’s cavalry, was at Medina de Rio Seco, twelve miles farther north. D’Erlon, with Cassagne’s division and Treillard’s dragoons, was at Valladolid, fifteen miles behind Tordesillas; the King and his Guards at Cigales, ten miles north of D’Erlon, twelve miles east of Reille. Maucune’s two brigades had at last concentrated at Palencia—some 25 miles north of Valladolid. There was now a very solid mass of troops, which could be united at one spot—Torrelobaton for example—by a concentric march, taking up one day, or could on the other hand string itself out in a well closed-up front behind the Carrion and Pisuerga rivers, from Palencia to Simancas, to defend the line of those streams. The force was formidable—over 40,000 bayonets, quite 10,000 sabres. It was physically possible either to mass and offer Wellington a battle, or to stand fast to defend the line of the Pisuerga. But would either course be prudent, considering that Hill could join Wellington with ease at Toro, so that the entire Anglo-Portuguese army could be concentrated for a general action, not to speak of the Galicians of Giron on his flank? Exact calculations as to the allied strength were impossible—but it would certainly exceed 70,000 men: some of the French generals put it at 90,000. To engage in an open battle west of the Pisuerga against such superior numbers would be insane. But what of the idea of taking up a defensive line east of that river, in the hope of rallying Foy, Clausel, and other outlying forces within a week or ten days? Marmont had done well with his position behind a river in July 1812, and had only been ruined at Salamanca because he had left his strong line and attacked with insufficient numbers.

There was much debate at head-quarters on the afternoon of June 2. Several policies were discussed, even, as it would appear, a desperate suggestion of Jourdan’s to bring the whole army back southward across the Douro, to Medina del Campo and Olmedo, and defy Wellington to cross its front so as to cut the Burgos road and the communication with France. ‘It is doubtful whether Wellington would have dared to continue his march to the Carrion, and to abandon his line of connexion with Portugal,’ writes Jourdan; ‘more probably he would have repassed the Douro, to follow the French army, which could then have retired up-stream to Aranda, and from thence either on Burgos or on Saragossa. Time would have been gained—Clausel would have come up, and we could have fought on ground more suitable for cavalry[491].’ This most hazardous plan would have commenced by abandoning to the enemy all Old Castile and Biscay, with the French forces scattered in them; for even if Wellington had followed the King with his Anglo-Portuguese army, Giron’s Galicians and the insurgents of the North—Longa, Porlier, El Pastor, and the rest—would have been left free to clear the whole country up to the Pyrenees. The French detachments in the North must have retired on Bayonne. King Joseph and the generals rejected the scheme at once, on the ground that Napoleon’s orders had always insisted on the retention of the direct road to France, by Burgos and Vittoria, as the most important of all considerations. This was undoubtedly a correct decision. Not only was the road along the south bank of the Douro to Aranda a very bad one, through an exhausted country, but it is clear that, if they took it, the French would never have got back again on to the Burgos line, but would have been forced to take the Saragossa line. The way from Aranda by Soria to Saragossa was through a rough country infested by Duran, the Empecinado, and other active guerrillero leaders. It could never have served as the main artery of communication for an army of the size of King Joseph’s. But supposing that the King should have reached Saragossa, his only touch with France would be through Barcelona and Roussillon, for there is no decent carriage road from Saragossa across the Central Pyrenees—the difficult pass by Jaca having often been tried and found wanting, save for small and unencumbered detachments. To base the whole army of Spain on Perpignan instead of Bayonne would have been hopelessly impracticable.

The question as to whether the line along the Pisuerga, from Palencia to opposite Simancas, could not be held was the really hard problem. It was 35 miles long, well marked, but with local faults; the water was low; there were points where the west bank commanded the east; from near Palencia to Cabezon the only good road was on the western side of the river, and so out of control; while the bad path on the eastern side was cut up by three streams coming in from the high plateaux of the province of Burgos. In the rear there was the defile of Torquemada, where the road and the Pisuerga itself came out of the upland. After pondering over the question, Joseph decided that the Pisuerga was too dangerous a line to hold, that he was still too weak in numbers, and that he had better fall back on Burgos, and wait in position there, on ground much more defensible than the broad plains of the Pisuerga and the Carrion, for the arrival of the missing divisions of the Army of Portugal and of Clausel.

On the evening of the 2nd orders were issued that all the impedimenta of the Army of Spain should move off northward at once. The Grand Park and other transport, the Spanish refugees with all their carriages and lumber, the French civil administrators, the King’s ministers with his private baggage and treasure, and much miscellaneous stuff from the royal palaces—pictures, books, and antiquities—were to start off at once on the road to Burgos. One great convoy was dispatched that night, a second and still larger one the following morning. Escort was found for them from the King’s Spanish troops, the so-called ‘division’ of Casa Palacios, and other detachments, making up 4,000 men in all. On the afternoon of the 3rd the army executed a general movement of retreat, leaving only a cavalry screen behind, to observe Wellington’s advance. The Army of the South came back through Valladolid, after blowing up all the bridges on the lower Pisuerga and the neighbouring streams, and then marched up its western bank to Cabezon. Reille evacuated Medina de Rio Seco and fell back on Palencia, where he picked up Maucune. Head-quarters and the King’s guard moved to Magaz, just south of Palencia. D’Erlon marched from Valladolid to Dueñas, ten miles farther south than Magaz, and made ready to blow up the bridge there and cross to the other side of the Pisuerga. The whole army was collected in a space of 15 miles, and halted for two days, in a safe position for retreat on Burgos, when it should be pressed. For Joseph and Jourdan naturally wished to gain time—every day that passed made it more likely that the missing divisions from the North would be heard of, or even be reported as approaching. Yet it would seem that even yet no direct and peremptory orders had been sent to Clausel, for Jourdan writes in his Memoirs that ‘the King suspended the retrograde movement because he thought to gain time, and hoped that the Minister of War would have given orders to General Clauzel to come down on Burgos[492].’ Again the wretched system of double-command and constant reference to Paris was working! If it be remembered that it was only on the 18th of May that the King had made his final appeal to the minister to let loose Clausel from the northern operations, and that the news of Wellington’s actual advance had only been sent to France on the 24th, when could it be expected that the directions from Paris would reach the scattered columns lost in the mountains of Navarre? And was there any certainty that Clarke would visualize the full danger of the position, and give at once the kind of orders that the King desired? He might send instead a lecture on the Emperor’s intentions, if past experience was to be trusted, and some suggestions which the events of the last ten days would have put completely out of date.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER V

THE OPERATIONS AROUND BURGOS:
JUNE 4-14, 1813

On June 3rd Wellington had halted the infantry of Graham’s column at Toro, in order to allow the whole of Hill’s column to cross the bridge and fords, and to complete the junction of the army. He gave as his reasons that he expected to meet Gazan, D’Erlon, and the King, on the Hormija river, when he should have debouched from Toro, and that he intended to fight them with his whole force, not with the northern column only. ‘I do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that we are so close up or so well concentrated as we ought to be, to meet the enemy in the strength in which he will appear on the Hormija, probably to-morrow; and therefore I propose to halt the heads of the different columns to-morrow, and close up the rear of each, moving Hill in this direction preparatory to our further movement[493].’ Only the cavalry continued to press forward on the 3rd; they found no signs of resistance, but only vedettes, which retired cautiously on their approach. Wellington was so far right in his apprehension, that the idea of fighting in front of Valladolid had been one of the three plans which the French Head-quarters Staff had considered on June 2. But, as we have already seen, that scheme had been rejected as rash, and during Wellington’s halt upon June 3 the enemy were evacuating Valladolid and all its neighbourhood, and commencing their retreat behind the Pisuerga. By eight o’clock on the evening of that day the cavalry reports, all along the front, showed that the enemy was retiring on every road, and it appeared certain that they did not intend to fight; the army therefore advanced in three main columns, Wellington himself with the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions, followed by Hill, by the high road on Valladolid through La Mota: Graham with the 1st and 5th Divisions, Pack and Bradford, by the more northern parallel road, by Villavelid and Villar de Frades, on Medina de Rio Seco. The Galicians were converging on the same point as Graham, by the high road from Villalpando and Villafrechos, but were directed not to approach too close to Medina till further notice. The reason for their delay was a curious one—Giron had just written on the previous day to say that he had no reserve of infantry cartridges, and only 60 rounds a man in the soldiers’ pouches. He wanted to borrow a supply from the British army. Wellington replied in considerable heat: when he was on the move he could not give away his own reserve ammunition: no doubt Giron was not personally to blame—nor his men—but the administration in Galicia. Yet the unfortunate result would be that the Galicians must never be put in a position where there would be a heavy consumption of cartridges, i. e. must be held in reserve, or used for subsidiary operations only. Giron was directed to make small regimental reserves, by taking away a proportion of the cartridges from each man and carrying them on mules. The general got off easily—but Wellington thundered that night on the War Minister O’Donoju, ‘Here is an army which is clothed, armed, and disciplined, but cannot be brought into action with the enemy: I am obliged to keep it in the rear. How can troops march without provisions, or fight without ammunition? The cause of the country may be lost unless the Government establish in the provinces some authority to which the people will pay obedience, and which will insure their resources for the purposes of the war[494].’ It will be noted that all through the rest of the campaign Giron’s corps was used for flanking movements, and never put in the forefront of the fighting—though the other Spanish troops with the army, Morillo’s and later Longa’s divisions, were used freely.

On the 4th June Wellington moved with the ‘Head-Quarters Column’ as far as La Mota, Hill getting no farther than Morales. At La Mota the information received showed that the French were in general retreat—the cavalry advance got into Valladolid and found some undestroyed stores of ammunition there. Julian Sanchez, scouting far towards the south, discovered a considerable magazine of grain at Arevalo, where Gazan’s head-quarters had been. In view of the new situation it was necessary to recast the movements of the army—there was to be no fight on the Hormija, or for the possession of Valladolid. The initial strategical success of the passage of the Esla had settled the event of the first phase of the campaign, and cleared the French not only out of New Castile, but out of the kingdom of Leon and great part of Old Castile. The fact that the enemy had abandoned Valladolid and the lower crossings of the Pisuerga, would seem to show that he intended to fall back on the Burgos country: he could hardly be intending to defend a position behind the middle Pisuerga and the Carrion, since he had surrendered the passages at and about Valladolid, by which the southern flank of such a position could be turned.

Now nine months ago Wellington had been in these same regions, with the army of Clausel retreating before him from Valladolid on Burgos. On that occasion he had followed the enemy in a straightforward pursuit along the great high road, by Cabezon and Torquemada. On this occasion his strategy was entirely different. Leaving only a cavalry screen between himself and the enemy, he proceeded to move his whole army towards the north-west by secondary roads, marching in four parallel columns not on Burgos but on the upper Pisuerga north-west of that fortress, so as to turn entirely any position that the enemy might take up on the Hormaza, the Arlanzon, or the Urbel. It can hardly be doubted that he had already in his mind the great manœuvre which he was to accomplish during the next fortnight—that of outflanking the French right wing by a wide sweeping movement, which would not only force Joseph and Jourdan to evacuate Burgos and its neighbourhood, but would cut them off from the royal road to Bayonne and their main communication with France. The first order in his dispatch book which definitely reveals this intention does not appear till June 10[495], but the facts which it contains prove that the plan must have been laid long ere Wellington started from Portugal.

This plan was no less a scheme than the transference of the base of the British army from the port of Lisbon to the Bay of Biscay, so that when, in its wide turning movement, it should have passed the Ebro and neared the Cantabrian coast, it should find stores and munitions awaiting it, and be no longer tied to the long line of communication with Portugal, which it had always used hitherto. It was an astonishing example of the strategical use of sea-power, to which there had hitherto been no parallel in the Napoleonic wars. The only manœuvre at all resembling it was that by which Sir John Moore in December 1808 had changed his line of communication from Lisbon to Corunna. But this was for a sudden hasty retreat, made by a small army—a very different thing from an advance made by a large army. For Moore had only wanted transports on which to abscond from the Peninsula; Wellington had planned the arrival of a fleet of supply vessels, on whose contents he was to rely for the future sustenance of his army during a long campaign.

Their existence was his second great secret in 1813—the first had been his plan for the crossing of the Esla. But the latter might have been guessed at as a possibility by any intelligent French general: the former, it is safe to say, had never been dreamed of as a conceivable move. Santander is so remote from Portugal, and the French were so firmly rooted in Northern Spain in the spring of 1813, that it could never enter into the head of any of Napoleon’s subordinates that the British Commander-in-Chief was planning such an elaborate surprise. They were bound to believe that all Wellington’s operations would be founded on, and circumscribed by, the basic fact that his line of communication was on Lisbon. A manœuvre which presupposed the complete abandonment of that line was not conceivable by officers reared in Continental campaigns, and unused to contemplating the correlation of land operations and naval strategy. Yet the fact that the supply fleet had been gathered at Corunna long weeks before, and kept there till the conquest of Northern Spain was well on its way to completion, is conclusive evidence as to Wellington’s intentions. The crucial dispatch of June 10 ran as follows—it was addressed to Colonel Bourke in charge of the British dépôts in Galicia:

‘There are at Corunna certain ships loaded with biscuit and flour, and certain others loaded with a train of heavy artillery and its ammunition, and some with musket ammunition, and I shall be much obliged if you will request any officer of the navy who may be at Corunna, when you receive this letter, to take under his convoy all the vessels loaded as above mentioned, and to proceed with them to Santander. If he should find Santander occupied by the enemy, I beg him to remain off the port till the operations of this army have obliged the enemy to abandon it.

‘If the enemy is not occupying Santander, I beg him to enter the port, but to be in readiness to quit it again if the enemy should approach the place, until I shall communicate with him[496]’.

It should be noted that Wellington had carefully avoided calling attention to the accumulation of ships and stores at Corunna, even in his letters to the ministers at home[497]. Their existence there was plausibly explained by the need for supplying the Spanish army of Galicia—which had indeed received much material during the spring. The provision of heavy artillery shows that he was contemplating as a probability the siege of San Sebastian and the other northern fortresses. He had failed at Burgos in 1812 for lack of the 24-pounders which Home Popham had vainly offered to send him from Santander: now he was quite ready to receive them from that port. As things stood on the Pisuerga, at the moment that he sent this prescient dispatch to Bourke, it was certainly a bold prophecy to write that he was about to clear the Cantabrian coast by his next move. The French were still unbeaten, and he was more than a hundred miles from the Bay of Biscay, from which he was separated by a most rough and complicated land of mountains. But he had already taken his measure of the capacity of the hostile commanders, and his hopes were high.

The great flank movement’s initial stages can be best traced by following on the map Wellington’s nightly head-quarters. They were La Mota on the 4th, Castromonte on the 5th, Ampudia on the 6th—all these carefully avoid the neighbourhood of the Pisuerga, though the cavalry pushed on to feel the lines of the French along the river. But the army, instead of making for the crossings at Valladolid, Cabezon, or Dueñas, kept steadily on in four parallel columns, on roads far from the river. Hill, still as always on the right, went by Torrelobaton, Mucientes, and Dueñas; Graham, on the left, by Medina de Rio Seco and Grixota; ‘the Head-Quarters Column’ under Wellington himself, by Castromonte and Ampudia—while, far off, the Galician army on the north moved by Villaramiel and Villoldo on Aguilar de Campos. The flanking cavalry kept up a continual bickering along the Pisuerga with French outposts; on the 6th those at the head of the advance had a distant glimpse of a great review of the Army of the Centre, which King Joseph was holding outside Palencia, from the heights which overlook that city from the west. In front of Dueñas there was an exchange of letters under a flag of truce between Wellington and Gazan—a most odd proceeding at such a moment—from which both parties thought they had derived useful information[498]. The British parlementaire reported to the Commander-in-Chief that Dueñas was still held by French infantry—which was good to know: the French, on the other hand, got a reply to Gazan’s letter to Wellington within four hours—which proved that British Head-Quarters must be a very short way from them—which was equally a valuable scrap of knowledge.

The King had now waited three days in the temporary position behind the Pisuerga, without being attacked, though he was in the close neighbourhood of the enemy. The quiescence of such an adversary made him uncomfortable, and at last he guessed part of what was going on opposite him. The British must be pushing up northward parallel to his line, and preparing to turn his right flank (which extended no farther than Palencia) by way of Amusco and the upper Carrion. Whereupon Joseph on the 7th hastily resumed his retreat, and got behind the defile of Torquemada. There was danger in waiting—nothing had been heard of Clausel, but news were to hand that Lamartinière, with one of the missing divisions of the Army of Portugal, was nearing Burgos from the north. The main body took post on the Arlanzon—but Reille with his two divisions at Castroxeriz on the Odra. Jourdan went forward to report on the condition of Burgos, where important new works had been commenced in the spring, and to choose good defensible positions in its neighbourhood. It was expected that the British army would follow in pursuit, up the great chaussée from Palencia to Torquemada.

And at first it looked as if this might be the case: entering Palencia on the same day that the King had left it, Wellington pushed up the chaussée part of Hill’s column—Grant’s and Ponsonby’s cavalry brigades and the Light Division, which kept in touch with the enemy’s rear. The rest of the right column had got no farther forward than Palencia. But the main body of the army continued its north-westerly turning movement, Graham’s infantry that day reached Grixota, five miles north of Palencia; the Galicians were up parallel with Graham farther west, somewhere near Becceril. The movements of June 8 and 9, however, were the decisive revelations of Wellington’s intentions. He moved his head-quarters not up the Torquemada road, but to Amusco on the Carrion river, and continued to urge his columns straight northward—Graham to San Cebrian and Peña on the 8th and Osorno on the 9th, the main body of Hill’s column to Amusco and Tamara, the Galicians to Carrion. He was thus getting his army well north of any positions which the enemy would be likely to take up in the neighbourhood of Burgos, giving it very long marches, but still keeping it closely concentrated.

On the 10th he judged that he had got sufficiently round the enemy, and turned all his columns due east towards the upper Pisuerga—Graham’s and Wellington’s own divisions crossing it at Zarzosa and Melgar, Hill at Astudillo, some miles farther south. Head-quarters were fixed that night at Melgar. With the passage of the Pisuerga ended the long march through the great flat corn-bearing plainland of Northern Spain, the Tierra de Campos. The next ten days were to be spent among rougher paths. The triumphant and almost unopposed advance from the Esla to the Pisuerga, executed in one sweep and at high speed, was an episode which those who were engaged in it never forgot.

‘From the time of our crossing the Esla up to this period,’ wrote one diarist, ‘we have been marching through one continuous cornfield. The land is of the richest quality, and produces the finest crops with the least possible labour. It is generally wheat, with a fair proportion of barley, and now and then a crop of vetches or clover. The horses fed on green barley nearly the whole march, and got fat. The army has trampled down twenty yards of corn on each side of the roads by which the several columns have passed—in many places much more, from the baggage going on the side of the columns, and so spreading farther into the wheat. But they must not mind their corn if we get the enemy out of their country!... The country gives bread and corn, and hitherto these have not failed, and this is a region that has been plundered and devastated for five years by the enemy! It was said before our march that until the harvest came in, not a pound of bread by way of supplies for the army could be procured[499].’

A Light Division diarist writes in a more romantic frame of mind: ‘The country was beautifully diversified, studded with castles of Moorish architecture, recalling the chivalric days of Ferdinand and Isabella. The sun shone brilliantly, the sky was heavenly blue, and clouds of dust marked the line of march of the glittering columns. The joyous peasantry hailed our approach and came dancing to meet us, singing, and beating time on their small tambourines; and when we passed through the principal street of Palencia, the nuns, from the upper windows of a convent, showered down rose-leaves upon our dusty heads[500].’

The dry comment of the Commander-in-chief, in his report to the War Minister at home, contrasts oddly with this enthusiasm: ‘I enclose the last weekly and daily states. We keep up our strength, and the army are very healthy and in better order than I have ever known them. God knows how long that will last. It depends entirely upon the officers[501].’

While Wellington’s columns were hurrying northward, the French remained for two days (June 7-9) in position behind the Pisuerga—Reille on the right at Castroxeriz, the rest of the army holding the heights down to Villadiego and the Arlanza river. Only British cavalry scouts appeared in front of them. ‘The position was excellent,’ says Jourdan, ‘and it was hoped to hold it for some days. But the generals commanding the armies represented to the King that the troops lacked bread, and that they dared not send out large detachments far afield to requisition food from the peasantry, wherefore the whole force retired on Burgos.’ No doubt the country was bare; and, when the enemy is known to be near, it is unsafe to make large detachments: but it may be suspected that the real cause for retreat was the continuous uncertainty as to Wellington’s northward movement. Yet it is clear that the French Head-Quarters had no suspicion how far that movement was going.

For on the 9th, when they retreated, they took up position on a very short line north and south of Burgos. Reille’s two divisions lay behind the Hormaza river, ten miles west of the fortress—with the right opposite Hormaza village, the left at Estepar—forming a front line. The Army of the South was on both banks of the Arlanzon, five miles behind Reille—right wing behind the Urbel river, left wing behind the Arcos river. The Army of the Centre and the King’s Guards were in reserve, billeted in Burgos itself. But already Wellington’s columns were aiming at points far north of Reille’s position. That day the northernmost divisions of Graham’s infantry[502] were at Osorno, next day (June 10th) at Zarzosa, beyond the Pisuerga, a point from which they could easily march round the Hormaza position, and on June 11th, at Sotresgudo, where they halted for a day[503]. The centre[504], with Wellington himself, on the same day had reached Castroxeriz on the Odra river, while Hill was close by at Barrio de Santa Maria and Valbases. Nothing had been sent south of the Arlanzon save Julian Sanchez’s lancers, who were scouring the country in the direction of Lerma, on the look-out for belated French convoys or detachments. The Galician army, keeping (as always) far out on the left wing, had reached the Pisuerga at Herrera, ten miles north of Graham’s extreme flank. They were now within two marches of the upper Ebro, and there was absolutely no enemy in front of them for scores of miles—the nearest Frenchmen in that direction were the columns with which Foy was scouring the roads of Biscay, after his capture of Castro-Urdiales.

The halt of the French army in the neighbourhood of Burgos was not to mark the end of its retreat, and the commencement of offensive operations, as King Joseph had hoped. The only cheering features in the general outlook were that Lamartinière’s division of the Army of Portugal was now in touch—it was reported coming up from Briviesca—and that a bulletin of the Grand Army was received from Germany, telling of the victory of the Emperor at Bautzen. But the discouraging news was appalling—the first instalment of it was that Jourdan reported, after investigating the fortifications of Burgos, that he considered the place untenable. During the spring building and demolition had been taken in hand, for the purpose of linking up the old castle, which had given so much trouble to Wellington in 1812, with the high-lying ‘Hornwork of St. Miguel’ on the rising ground above. The scheme was wholly unfinished—the only result achieved was that St. Miguel, as reconstructed, commanded the castle, and that the alterations started in the enceinte of the latter, with the object of linking it up with the former, had rendered it, in the marshal’s opinion, incapable of holding out for a day. Yet this would not have mattered so much if the army had been about to resume the offensive, or to put up a stable defence in the Burgos region.

But it was declared that this was impossible—the governor reported that the immense convoys which had been passing through Burgos of late, and the recent stay of considerable bodies of troops in the place[505], had brought his magazines to such a low ebb that he could not feed an army of 50,000 men for more than a few days. The town was still crammed with the last great horde of Spanish and French refugees, who had come on from Madrid, Segovia, and Valladolid, and all the King’s private train. They were sent on at once towards Vittoria, under escort of Lamartinière’s division—which thus no sooner became available than it was lost again. No news had arrived either from Foy or from Clausel: but Sarrut’s division of the Army of Portugal had been located north of the Ebro, and would be coming in ere very long. The news that Clausel was undiscoverable brought King Joseph to such a pitch of excitement that he took, on June 9th, a step which he should have taken a fortnight before, and threw over all his fears of offending the minister at Paris or the Emperor in Saxony. He sent direct peremptory orders to Clausel to join him at once, and told off a column of 1,500 men to escort the aide-de-camp who bore them: it went off by Domingo Calzada and Logroño. As a matter of fact the order reached the general in six days—but it might have taken longer for all that Joseph could guess. And the King came to the conclusion that if he were at all pushed by Wellington within the next few days, he must abandon Burgos and retire behind the Ebro. He might even have to go without hostile persuasion, on the mere question of food-supplies.

But on June 12 the pressure was applied. Wellington had now got all his forces over the Pisuerga, and his two southern columns were concentrated between Castroxeriz and Villadiego: Graham was farther off, but not out of reach. Having reconnoitred the advanced position of Reille on the Hormaza river, and found that his supports were far behind, he resolved to attack him in front and flank that morning. Only the southern column—Hill’s troops—was employed, the centre divisions being halted in a position from which they might be brought in on the enemy’s rear, if the King reinforced Reille, but not if the French showed no signs of standing. But the push against the Army of Portugal, made by the 2nd Division, Silveira’s Portuguese, and Morillo’s Spaniards, was sufficient to dislodge the enemy: for while they were deploying against the French front, the cavalry brigades of Grant and Ponsonby, supported by the Light Division, appeared behind Reille’s right flank. The enemy at once gave way, before infantry fighting had begun, and retreating hastily southward got behind the Urbel river, where the Army of the South was already in line. Reille then crossed the Arlanzon by the bridge of Buniel and took post south of Burgos. The French loss was small—the retreat was made in good order and with great speed, before the British infantry could arrive. Grant’s and Ponsonby’s horse, already outflanking the rearguard, got in close, but did not deliver a general attack—by Wellington’s own orders as it is said[506]: for (despite of Garcia Hernandez) he held to his firm belief that cavalry cannot break intact infantry. A half troop of the 14th Light Dragoons, under Lieut. Southwell, charged and captured an isolated French gun, which had fallen behind the rearguard; but this was the only contact between the armies that day. Jourdan says that Reille lost about fifteen men only—an exaggeration no doubt, but not a very great one.

The result, however, was to determine King Joseph to retreat at once, and to abandon Burgos, before his obviously outflanked right wing should be entirely circumvented. That night desperate measures were taken—everything that could travel on wheels was sent off by the high road towards the Ebro: the infantry followed, using such side roads as were available. At dawn only cavalry rearguards were covering Burgos. Jourdan explains the haste of the retreat as follows. ‘It was easy to foresee that next morning that part of the Army of the South which lay behind the Urbel river would be attacked, and that being separated by the Arlanzon from the bulk of the army, which lay on the south bank, it would be compromised. Three choices lay open—first, to bring the whole army across the Arlanzon and to fight on the Urbel; but this would have brought on the general action which it had been determined to avoid, ever since the King had made up his mind to call in Clausel. Second—to bring the whole army across to the south bank of the Arlanzon, where there was a good position: but this move would have allowed the enemy to cut the great road and our communications with France—and the same motives which had caused the rejection of the scheme to retire south of the Douro on June 2 caused this alternative to be disapproved on June 12. Third—to fall back by the great road to the Ebro, and so secure the earliest possible concentration of all the armies of Spain. This was the scheme adopted[507].’

It is said that Gazan was for fighting on the Urbel[508], while Reille and D’Erlon opted for the second choice—that of abandoning the high road to France, going south of the Arlanzon, and retreating by the bad track to Domingo Calzada and Logroño, because Clausel, being certainly somewhere in Navarre, would be picked up much sooner at Logroño than at Miranda or other points higher up the Ebro. But the Emperor’s orders that the direct communication with France must be kept up at all costs, were adduced against them, and settled the question.

Before leaving, the French made arrangements to blow up the castle which had served them so well in the preceding October, and to destroy a great store of powder and munitions for which no transport could be procured. According to Jourdan the disaster which followed was due to the professional ignorance of General d’Aboville, the director-general of artillery, who maintained that shells would do no great harm if they were exploded, not in a great mass but placed in small groups, at distances one from another. He had 6,000 of them laid in parcels on the ground in the castle square, and connected with the mines which were placed under the donjon keep. Orders were given that the fuses were only to be lit when the last troops should have left, and the inhabitants were told that if they would keep to their houses they would incur no danger. But the mines by some error were fired before seven o’clock in the morning, and the effects of the explosion had been so badly calculated, that not only were many houses in the city injured, all the glass blown out of the splendid cathedral, and its roof broken in several places, but a hail of shells fell all over the surrounding quarter, and killed 100 men of Villatte’s division, who were halted in the Plaza Mayor, and a few of Digeon’s dragoons who were crossing the bridge[509]. There were casualties also, of course, among the unfortunate citizens. When the smoke cleared away, and the fire had gone out, it was found that the destruction of the donjon keep and upper works of the castle had been complete, but that most of the outer wall was standing—as indeed it is to this day. Wellington remarked that it was quite capable of restoration, if the fortunes of the war made it necessary[510]. They did not; and the skeleton of the castle still remains ruined and riven on its mound, to surprise the observer by its moderate size. Those who go round it can only marvel that such a small fortress should have held all Wellington’s army at bay during so many eventful days in 1812.

The British general, hearing at Castroxeriz, on the early morning of June 13, that the French had evacuated Burgos and blown up its works, did not even enter the town, and sent nothing more than cavalry scouts to follow the retreating enemy, but ordered the instant resumption of the north-westward march of the whole army. It was now his intention to turn the line of the Ebro, in the same fashion that he had turned the line of the Douro on May 31—by passing it so far to the westward that any position which the enemy might adopt would be outflanked, even before it was fully taken up. And he was aiming not only at turning the Ebro line, but at cutting Joseph’s communication with France: he was already taking Vittoria, far behind the Ebro, as the goal for which he was making.

We have Wellington’s own word for the fact that it was the collapse of the French opposition in front of Burgos which finally induced him to develop his original plan of campaign, spoken of above, into the more ambitious scheme for driving the French completely out of the Peninsula, which he now took in hand. Unfortunately his statement was taken down many years after the event, and his memory of details was not all that it might have been in his old age. But the story is so interesting and fits into the psychology of the moment so well that it must not be omitted.

‘When I heard and saw the explosion (I was within a few miles, and the effect was tremendous) I made a sudden resolution forthwith—to cross the Ebro instanter, and to endeavour to push the French to the Pyrenees. We had heard of the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, and of the Armistice, and the affairs of the Allies looked very ill. Some of my officers remonstrated with me about the imprudence of crossing the Ebro, and advised me to “take up the line of the Ebro”, &c. I asked them what they meant by “taking up the line of the Ebro”,—a river 300 miles long, and what good I was to do along that line? In short I would not listen to that advice, and that evening (or the very next morning) I crossed the river and pushed the French till I afterwards beat them at Vittoria. And lucky it was that I did! For the battle of Vittoria induced the Allies to denounce the Armistice—then followed Leipzig and all the rest.

‘All my staff were against my crossing the Ebro: they represented that we had done enough, that we ought not to risk the army and all that we had obtained, that the Armistice would enable Bonaparte to reinforce his army in Spain, and we therefore should look for a defensive system. I thought differently—I knew that the Armistice could not affect in the way of quick reinforcement so distant an army as that of Spain. I thought that if I could not hustle them out of Spain before they were reinforced, I should not be able to hold any position in Spain after they should be. Above all I calculated on the effect that a victory might have on the Armistice itself, so I crossed the Ebro and fought the battle of Vittoria.’

How far is this curious confidence, made to Croker in January 1837, and taken down by him in two separate drafts (Croker Papers, ii. p. 309, and iii. pp. 336-7), a blurred impression, coloured by after events? It is quite true that the Burgos explosion took place early on the morning of June 13, that the orders dictated at Villadiego that day (Suppl. Disp. vii, p. 637) give a sudden new direction to the army, and that next evening (June 14) the heads of the columns were over the Ebro. But Wellington’s own dispatches seem to show that he did not know anything of the Armistice on June 13, for he wrote to his brother Henry that day, ‘I have no news from England. The French have a bulletin of May 24th, when Napoleon was at Dresden—they talk of successes, but as he was still at Dresden on the 24th, having arrived there on the 8th, they cannot have been very important.’ Now the Armistice of Plässwitz was signed on June 4, and on the 13th Wellington’s latest news was of May 24. But on the 17th, when he had been two days across the Ebro, he did at last hear something. Again he writes to his brother:

‘I have got, by Corunna, English papers of the 3rd. There were several actions in the neighbourhood of Bautzen on the 20th-22nd May.... Bonaparte turned then, and they retired. The Allies have lost ground but are unhurt. He has offered (before the battle) to consent to a congress at Prague.... An armistice is to commence when the ministers shall arrive at Prague.... I do not think that the Russians and Prussians can agree to the armistice, unless they submit entirely’ (Disp. x. p. 443).

Clearly, then, Wellington on the 13th knew nothing of any armistice, since he introduces the proposal, not the accomplishment, of it to his most trusted correspondent on the 17th, as the last news to hand. He was committed to the advance on Vittoria long before he could know of its subsequent political effects. And thus in his old age he underrated his own prescience. But the fact that his officers doubted the wisdom of the advance, and that he swept their objections away, is probably correct. That he had considered the possibility of an advance far beyond the Ebro seems, as has been said before (pp. 301-3), to be proved by orders given in the spring, before the campaign began.

On the evening of the 13th head-quarters were at Villadiego, while the columns were all heading northward on parallel routes. The Galicians were moving from Aguilar on the bridge of Rocamonde[511], the highest on the Ebro save that at its source near Reynosa. The bulk of Graham’s column was marching by La Piedra on the bridge of San Martin, a few miles lower down than Rocamonde, though some of its flanking cavalry crossed at the latter passage, ahead of the Galicians. The Head-Quarters divisions and Hill’s column moved, using all available secondary roads, from their position opposite the lower Urbel, by Villadiego and Montorio respectively, on the bridge of Puente Arenas, some fifteen miles below that of San Martin. All three columns had on the 13th-14th-15th very hard marches, of four long Spanish leagues on three successive days, across upland roads where artillery had never been seen before. The move would only have been practicable at midsummer. But the columns were absolutely unopposed, and the upper Ebro country had been entirely neglected by the French, as Wellington had foreseen. ‘One division could have stopped the whole column at the bridge of San Martin,’ wrote an intelligent observer, ‘or the other at Rocamonde, where some of our column likewise crossed—the enemy cannot be aware of our movement[512].’ Graham was all across the Ebro by noon on the 14th, Hill by the morning of the 16th. Wellington who had fixed his head-quarters at the lost village of Masa in the hills, was able to declare with confidence that the whole army would be over the river by the night—‘and then the French must either fight, or retire out of Spain altogether.’

The Ebro country was a surprise to the British observers who had spent so many years in the uplands of Portugal or the rolling plains of the Tierra de Campos. ‘Winding suddenly out of a narrow pass, we found ourselves in the river valley, which extended some distance on our right. The beauty of the scenery was beyond description: the rocks rose perpendicularly on every side, without any visible opening to convey an idea of an outlet. This enchanting valley is studded with picturesque hamlets and fruitful gardens producing every description of vegetation. At the Puente Arenas we met a number of sturdy women loaded with fresh butter from the mountains of the Asturias. We had not tasted that commodity for two years, therefore it will be unnecessary to describe how readily we made a purchase, nibbling by the way at such a luxury[513].’ Northern or Pyrenean Spain is a very different country from the dusty wind-swept central plateaux: above all the lack of water, which is the curse of Castile, ceased at last to be the bane of marching columns.

After crossing the Ebro on the 14th Graham’s column made another four-league march on the 15th to the large town of Villarcayo, while the Galicians got to Soncillo on the main road from Santander to Burgos; thus Wellington was certain of the new naval base to which he had bid the Corunna transports sail only five days before. Hill’s troops, who had a longer march during the last two days than the other columns, were not so far forward, but nearing the river had occupied the heights on the southern side of the Puente de Arenas. The three columns forming the Anglo-Portuguese army were, as a glance at the map shows, in close touch with each other, and in a position where the whole 80,000 men could be concentrated by a single march. Undoubtedly the most surprising features of the advance is that Wellington’s commissariat was able to feed such a mass of troops in such a limited area, after they had left the plains of Castile and plunged into the thinly inhabited mountains. The local supplies obtainable must have been very limited. Several diarists speak of biscuit being short[514], though meat was not. But somehow or other the commissaries generally contrived to find more or less food for the army—the well-organized mule trains were not far behind the infantry columns, and the long and difficult movement was never checked—as earlier marches had been in 1809 and 1811[515]—by the mere question of provisions, though many brigades got but scanty meals.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER VI

WELLINGTON ON THE EBRO.
JUNE 15-20,1813

After evacuating Burgos the French army had retired, at a rather leisurely rate, down the high road which leads by Briviesca and the defile of Pancorbo to the valley of the Ebro. The rearguard, as we have seen, had left Burgos on the morning of the 13th, and halted for great part of the day at Gamonal, a few miles east of the city, on the spot where Napoleon had won his easy victory over the Conde de Belveder on November 10, 1808. It was only followed by Spanish irregular horse—some of Julian Sanchez’s ubiquitous lancers. Head-quarters that night and the next (June 14) were at Briviesca, and remained there for forty-eight hours: on the 15th they were moved on to Pancorbo, an admirable position with a high-lying fort in the centre, while the road is flanked for miles by steep slopes, on which an advantageous rearguard action might have been fought. But no pursuing enemy came in sight: this fact began to worry the French Head-quarters Staff. ‘What could have become of Lord Wellington? The French Army, in full retreat, was permitted to move leisurely along the great route, without being harassed or urged forward, not a carriage of any description being lost. It appeared inexplicable[516].’ The French retreat was leisurely for two reasons—the first was that King Joseph wished to gain time for the immense convoys lumbering in front of him to reach Miranda and Vittoria without being hustled. The second was that he thought that every day gained gave more time for Clausel to come up: at the slow rate at which he was proceeding he might almost hope to find the missing divisions of the Army of Portugal converging on Miranda, at the moment when he should arrive there himself. The Council of War at Burgos had decided that Wellington must inevitably pursue by the great chaussée. The routes from the Burgos region to the upper Ebro had been reported both by French officers who claimed to know the country, and by local Afrancesados, as presenting insuperable difficulties to a large army. There was, it is true, the high road Burgos-Santander by Santijanez, Pedrosa, and Reynosa—but this led north-west in an eccentric direction, not towards Miranda or Vittoria. That the danger lay on the rough mountain ways a little farther east, which fall down to San Martin and Puente de Arenas, seems not to have been suspected. Yet it was disquieting to find no pursuit in progress: could the Allied Army possibly have been forced to halt at Burgos for want of supplies?

On the 16th the French army descended from the defile of Pancorbo to the Ebro, and proceeded to distribute itself in the region round Miranda, in cantonments which permitted of rapid concentration when it should become necessary. Nothing was yet to be heard of Clausel—but on the other hand Lamartinière’s division was again picked up—it handed over the duty of escorting the convoys toward Vittoria to Joseph’s Spanish contingent, the small division of Casapalacios. Sarrut’s division also came in from Biscay, and reported that it had been lately in touch with Foy, who was successfully hunting the local guerrilleros in the coast-land. But neither Foy himself, nor the troops of the Army of the North which had been co-operating with him of late, were anywhere near. Strange as it may appear, that very capable officer had wholly failed to understand the general situation: though apprised ere now of the evacuation of Madrid and Valladolid, he had nothing in his mind save his wholly secondary operations against the Biscay bands. His dispatches of this period show him occupied entirely with the safety of Bilbao, and the necessity for guarding the high road from Bergara and Tolosa to France. There were 20,000 troops in Biscay, but they were entirely dispersed on petty expeditions and convoy work. On June 19, when he got from head-quarters the first dispatch that caused him to think of concentrating and joining the main army, Foy had only one battalion with him at the moment at Bergara. A column of 1,000 men was moving to reinforce the garrison of Bilbao, a brigade was at Villafranca escorting towards France the large body of prisoners whom he had captured in his recent operations—another brigade was waiting on the road between Vittoria and Mondragon, to pick up a large convoy which, as he had been warned, would be coming up the Royal Road and would require to be protected as far as San Sebastian. He was making efforts to send provisions by sea to Bilbao and Castro-Urdiales—a task in which he was being worried by British cruisers off the coast—and was preparing to go to Bilbao himself[517].

No doubt the main blame for this untimely dispersion of forces lay with General Head-Quarters. Jourdan and Joseph ought to have sent orders to Foy, after the evacuation of Madrid, ordering him to cease all secondary operations, to leave minimum garrisons at a few essential points, abandon all the rest, and collect as strong a field-force as possible, with which to join the main army. But they had written to the minister at Paris suggesting such moves, instead of dispatching direct orders to that effect to the general himself. Foy had been sent information, not orders, and had failed to realize the full meaning of the information—absorbed as he was in his own particular Biscayan problems. Events were marching very quickly: it was hard to realize that Wellington, who had been on the Esla on May 31, would have been across the upper Ebro with 70,000 men on June 15. It had taken little more than a fortnight for him to overrun half of Northern Spain. The fact remained that of all the French troops operating in Biscay in June, only Sarrut’s division, from Orduña, joined the King in time for the battle of Vittoria. Yet Foy had under his orders not only his own division but the Italian brigade of St. Pol, and the mobile brigade of Berlier from the Army of the North, in addition to 10,000 men of the garrisons of the various posts and fortresses of the North and the littoral. And he had no enemy save the great partisan Longa in the western mountains, and the scattered remains of the local insurgents under El Pastor and others, whom he had defeated in April and May, and whom he was at present harrying from hill to coast and from coast to hill. We are once more forced to remember that the French armies in Spain were armies of occupation as well as armies of operation, and that one of their functions was often fatal to the other.

But to return to the moment when the King’s army came back to the Ebro. Head-quarters were, of course, established at Miranda, where the royal Guard served as their escort. The Army of the South sent three divisions across to the north bank of the river; they were cantoned on the lower Zadorra about Arminion; but Gazan kept three brigades on the south bank as a rearguard for the present, but (as the King hoped) to form a vanguard for a counter-advance, if only Clausel should come up soon, and an offensive campaign become possible. A small observing force was left at Pancorbo, into whose castle a garrison was thrown. Cavalry exploring parties, pushed out from this point, sought for Wellington’s approaching columns as far as Poza de la Sal on the right, Briviesca on the high road, and Cerezo on the left; but to no effect. They came in touch with nothing but detachments of Julian Sanchez’s Lancers. D’Erlon, with the Army of the Centre, went ten miles down the Ebro to Haro: he had now recovered his missing division, Darmagnac’s, which had been lent to Reille for the last two months. For the Army of Portugal having now three infantry divisions collected—Maucune’s, Sarrut’s, and Lamartinière’s—was ordered to give back the borrowed unit to its proper commander. Reille took the right of the Ebro position, having Maucune’s division at Frias, Sarrut’s at Espejo, and Lamartinière’s at the Puente Lara. He was ordered to use his cavalry to search for signs of the enemy along the upper Ebro. The King had thus an army which, by the junction of Sarrut and Lamartinière, had risen to over 50,000 infantry and nearly 10,000 cavalry, concentrated on a short front of 25 miles from Frias to Haro, covering the main road to France by Vittoria, and also the side roads to Orduña and Bilbao on the one flank, and Logroño and Saragossa on the other. His retreat, though dispiriting, had not yet been costly—it is doubtful whether he had lost 1,000 casualties in the operations of the last six weeks. With the exception of the combats at Salamanca on May 26 and Morales on June 2, there had been no engagements of any importance. The army was angry at the long-continued retreat; the officers were criticizing the generalship of their commanders in the most outspoken fashion, but there was no demoralization—the troops were clamouring for a general action.

But on June 17, when the French armies settled down into their new position, with no detected enemy in their neighbourhood, their fate was already determined—the Ebro line had been turned before it was even taken up. For on this same day Wellington had not only got his whole army north of the Ebro, but was marching rapidly eastward, by the mountain roads twenty miles north of the river, into the rear of Reille’s cantonments. Of all his troops only Julian Sanchez and Carlos de España’s infantry division were left in Castile.

The movements of the Allied Army on the 15th-16th-17th June had been carried out with surprising celerity. The Galician infantry, who had crossed the river first, at Rocamonde, the bridge highest up on its course, on the 13th were hurrying northward, by cross roads not marked on the map, and obviously impracticable for guns, to Soncillo (15th), Quintanilla de Pienza (16th), Villasana (17th), and Valmaseda in Biscay (18th). When they had reached the last-named town they were threatening Bilbao, and almost at its gates. This was the great demonstration, intended to throw confusion among all the French detachments on the northern coast. Several of the stages exceeded thirty miles in the day.

Meanwhile the three great columns of the Anglo-Portuguese army were executing a turning movement almost as wide as that of Giron’s Galicians. Converging from different bridges of the Ebro—Rocamonde (where some of Graham’s cavalry passed), San Martin de Lines (where the bulk of Graham’s force debouched northward on the 14th), and Puente Arenas (used by the Head-quarters column on the 15th and by Hill’s column on the 16th[518])—the whole army came in by successive masses on to the two neighbouring towns of Villarcayo and Medina de Pomar. At the latter place Longa turned up with his hard-marching Cantabrian division, and joined the army. These considerable towns are the road-centres of the whole rugged district between the Ebro and the Cantabrian mountains. From them fork out the very few decent roads which exist in the land—those northward over the great sierras to Santander, Santoña, and Valmaseda-Bilbao: those eastward across their foot-hills to Orduña-Vittoria and to Frias-Miranda. These five roads are the only ones practicable for artillery and transport: there are, however, minor tracks which can take infantry in good summer weather.

From his head-quarters at Quintana, near the bridge of Puente Arenas, Wellington dictated on the 15th the marching orders which governed the next stage of the campaign. With the exception of the Galicians, already starting on their circular sweep towards Bilbao, all his columns were directed to utilize the road parallel to the Ebro, but twenty miles north of it, which runs from Medina de Pomar to Osma, Orduña, and Vittoria. He deliberately avoided employing the other high road, which runs closer to the river from Medina de Pomar to Frias and Miranda, even for a side-column or a flying corps: only cavalry scouts were sent along it. The reason why the whole army was thrown on to a single road—a thing generally to be avoided, especially when time is precious—was partly that the appearance of British troops before Frias, where the enemy was known to have a detachment, would give him early warning of the move. But the more important object was to strike at the French line of communication with Bayonne as far behind the known position of King Joseph’s army as possible. If the line Frias-Miranda had been chosen, the enemy would have had many miles less to march, when once the alarm was given, if he wished to cover his proper line of retreat. If a fight was coming, it had better be at or about Vittoria, rather than at or about Miranda. Moreover, the high road, for a few miles east of Frias, passes to the south bank of the Ebro, which it recrosses at the Puente Lara—there is only a bad track north of the river from Frias to that bridge. It would be absurd to direct any part of the army to cross and recross the Ebro at passages which might be defended.

So the whole force was committed to the Medina-Osma road, except that the infantry occasionally took cross-cuts by local tracks, in order to leave the all-important main line, as far as possible, to the guns and transport. The three corps in which the army had marched from the Pisuerga fell in behind each other, in the order in which they had crossed the Ebro—Graham leading—the Head-Quarters column following—Hill bringing up the rear. Longa’s Cantabrians went on as a sort of flying vanguard in front of Graham, not being burdened with artillery[519]. The road was one which could only have been used for such a large force in summer—it hugged the foot-hills of the Cantabrian sierras, crossing successively the head-waters of several small rivers running south to the Ebro, each in its own valley. The country was thinly peopled and bare, so that little food could be got to supplement the mule-borne rations. For this reason, as also with the object of granting the French as little time as possible after the first alarm should be given, the pace had to be forced. The marches were long: on the 15th the head of Graham’s infantry was at Villarcayo: on the 16th at La Cerca (five miles beyond Medina de Pomar): on the 17th at the mountain villages of San Martin de Loza and Lastres de Teza: on the 18th it was due at Osma and at Berberena—a few miles up the Osma-Orduña road. The Head-Quarters column having no exploration to do, since the way was reported clear in front, covered the same distance in three marches instead of four, and was expected to reach the neighbourhood of Osma on the 18th. Hill’s column had also to hurry—its leading division was on that same day expected to be at Venta de Membligo, a posting station six miles short of Osma, so that its head would be just behind the tail of the preceding corps. But Hill’s rear would be strung out for many miles behind. However, all the fighting army was again in one mass—with a single exception. Wellington had ordered the 6th division, commanded temporarily by his own brother-in-law Pakenham, to halt at Medina de Pomar. The reason which he gives in his dispatch[520] for depriving himself, now that the day of crisis was at hand, of a good division of 7,000 men, is that he left it ‘to cover the march of our magazines and stores.’ This is almost as puzzling a business as his leaving of Colville’s corps at Hal on the day of the battle of Waterloo—the only similar incident in the long record of his campaigns. If this was his sole reason, why should not a smaller unit—Pack’s or Bradford’s independent brigade—or both of them—have been left behind? For that purpose such a force would have sufficed. We are not informed that the 6th Division was more afflicted with sickness than any other, or that it was more way-worn. The only supposition that suggests itself is that Wellington may have considered the possibility of Giron’s raid into Biscay failing, and bringing down on his rear some unsuspected mass of French troops from Bilbao. If this idea entered his head, he may easily have thought it worth while to leave behind a solid reserve, on which Giron might fall back, and so to cover the rear of his main army while he was striking at the great road to France. But it must be confessed that this is a mere hypothesis, and that the detachment of Pakenham’s division seems inexplicable from the information before us. It was ordered to follow when the whole of the transport should be clear, if no further developments had happened to complicate the situation. Carrying out this direction literally, Pakenham waited three days at Medina de Pomar, and so only got to the front twenty-four hours after the battle of Vittoria.[521]

The orders which Wellington issued upon the 17th[522] brought the head of his columns into touch with the enemy. They directed that Graham, with the 1st and 5th Division, Pack and Bradford, should move past Osma on to Orduña, by the two alternative routes available between those places, while the Head-Quarters column should not turn north toward Orduña on reaching Osma, but pursue the roads south-eastward by Espejo and Carcamo, which lead to Vittoria by a more southerly line. The result contemplated was very much that which was worked out in the battle of the 21st—a frontal attack by the main body, with an outflanking move by Graham’s corps, which would bring it into the rear of the enemy. But the route via Orduña was not the one which the northern column was actually destined to take, as the events of the 18th distracted it into a shorter but rougher road to the same destination (Murguia), which it would have reached by a much longer turn on the high road via Orduña.

But all the columns were not moving on the main track from Medina de Pomar to Osma this day, for Wellington had directed the Light Division to drop its artillery to the care of the 4th Division, and cut across the hills south of the high road, by a country path which goes by La Boveda, San Millan, and Villanan to a point, a few miles south of Osma, in the same valley of the Omecillo in which that town lies. And Hill, still far to the rear, was told to detach two brigades of the 2nd Division, and send them to follow the Light Division along the same line: if Alten should send back word that the route was practicable for guns, Hill was to attach his Portuguese field battery to this advance-column.

It was, apparently, on the morning of the 17th June only that the French got definite indications of the direction in which the British army might be looked for. Maucune reported from Frias, not long after his arrival there, that hostile cavalry were across the Ebro in the direction of Puente Arenas, and that other troops in uncertain strength were behind them. It was clearly necessary to take new measures, in view of the fact that the enemy was beyond the Ebro, in a place where he had not been expected. How much did the move imply? After consideration Joseph and Jourdan concluded, quite correctly, that since the main body of Wellington’s army had been invisible for so many days—it had last been seen on the Hormaza on June 12th—it was probably continuing its old policy of circular marches to turn the French right. This was correct, but they credited Wellington with intending to get round them not by the shorter routes Osma-Vittoria, but by the much longer route by Valmaseda and Bilbao, which would cut into the high road to France at Bergara, far behind Vittoria.

With this idea in their heads the King and the Marshal issued orders of a lamentably unpractical scope, considering the position occupied by Wellington’s leading divisions on June 17th. Reille was ordered to collect his three infantry divisions at Osma, and to hurry across the mountains by Valmaseda, to cover Bilbao from the west, by taking up a position somewhere about Miravalles. He would find the Biscayan capital already held by St. Pol’s Italians, and Rouget’s brigade of the Army of the North. Foy, who was believed to be at Tolosa, was instructed to bring up his division to the same point. Thus a force of some 25,000 men would be collected at Bilbao. Meanwhile Reille’s original positions at Frias and the Puente Lara would be taken over by Gazan, who would march up the Ebro from Arminion with two divisions of infantry and one of cavalry, to watch the north bank of the Ebro. ‘These dispositions,’ remarks Jourdan, ‘were intended to retard the advance of the enemy in this mountainous region, and so to gain time for the arrival of the reinforcements we were expecting [i.e. Clausel]. But it was too late![523]’

No worse orders could have been given. If Wellington had struck twenty-four hours later than he did, and Reille had been able to carry out his first day’s appointed move, and to get forward towards Bilbao, the result would have been to split the French army in two, with the main range of the Cantabrian sierras between them: since Reille and Foy would have joined at Bilbao—three days’ forced marches away from the King. Meanwhile Joseph, deprived of the whole Army of Portugal, would have had Wellington striking in on his flank by Osma, and would have been forced to fight something resembling the battle of Vittoria with 10,000 men less in hand than he actually owned on June 21. Either he would have suffered an even worse defeat than was his lot at Vittoria, or he would have been compelled to retreat without fighting, down the Ebro, or towards Pampeluna. In either case he would have lost the line of communication with France; and while he was driven far east, Foy and Reille would have had to hurry back on Bayonne, with some risk of being intercepted and cut off on the way.

As a matter of fact, Reille was checked and turned back upon the first day of his northward march. He had sent orders to Maucune to join him from Frias, either by the road along the Ebro by Puente Lara, or by the mountain track which goes directly from Frias to Espejo. Then, without waiting for Maucune, he started from Espejo to march on Osma. He had gone only a few miles when he discovered a British column debouching on Osma, by the road from Berberena[524] and the north-west, which he had been intending to take himself. Seeing his path blocked, but being loth to give way before what might be no more than a detachment, he drew up his two divisions on the hillside a mile south of Osma and appeared ready to offer battle. Moreover, he was expecting the arrival of Maucune, and judged that if he made off without delaying the enemy in front of him, the column from Frias might be intercepted and encircled.

The troops which Reille had met were Graham’s main column—the 1st and 5th divisions with Bradford’s Portuguese and Anson’s Light Dragoons, on their march towards Orduña. Graham prepared to attack, sent forward the German Legion light battalions of the 1st Division, and pushed out Norman Ramsay’s horse artillery, with a cavalry escort, to the right of Osma, forming the rest of his force for a general advance across the Bilbao road. After estimating the strength of the British, Reille appeared at first inclined to fight, or at least to show an intention of fighting. But a new enemy suddenly came up—the 4th Division appeared on a side road, descending from the hills on the right of Graham’s line. It had just time to throw out its light companies to skirmish[525] when Reille, seeing himself obviously outnumbered and outflanked, retreated hastily on Espejo; the 5th Division followed him on the left, with some tiraillade, the 4th Division on the right, but he was not caught. ‘Considerable fire on both sides but little done,’ remarked an observer on the hillside[526]. Reille’s loss was probably about 120 men, nearly all in Sarrut’s division[527]: that of the British some 50 or 60.

Meanwhile there had been a much more lively fight, with heavier casualties, a few miles farther south among the mountains nearer the Ebro. Maucune had started before dawn from Frias, intending to join Reille by a short cut through the hills, instead of sticking to the better road along the river-bank by the Puente Lara. He only sent his guns with a cavalry escort by that route. He was marching with his two brigades at a considerable distance from each other, the rear one being hampered by the charge of the divisional transport and baggage.

The leading brigade had reached the hamlet of San Millan and was resting there by a brook, when British cavalry scouts came in upon them—these were German Legion Hussars, at the head of the Light Division, which Wellington had sent by the cross-path over the hills by La Boveda. The approaching column had been marching along a narrow road, shrouded by overhanging rocks and high banks, in which it could neither see nor be seen. On getting the alarm the four French battalions formed up to fight, in the small open space about the village, while the head of the British column, Vandeleur’s brigade, deployed as fast as it could opposite them, and attacked; the 2/95th and 3rd Caçadores in front line, the 52nd in support. Maucune was forced to make a stand, because his rear brigade was coming up, unseen by his enemies, and would have been cut off from him if he had retreated at once. But when the head of Kempt’s brigade of the Light Division appeared, and began to deploy to the left of Vandeleur’s, he saw that he was outnumbered, and gave ground perforce. He had been driven through the village, and was making off along the road, with the Rifle battalions in hot pursuit, when his second brigade, with the baggage in its rear, came on the scene—most unexpected by the British, for the track by which it emerged issued out between two perpendicular rocks and had not been noticed. Perceiving the trap into which they had fallen, the belated French turned off the road, and made for the hillside to their right, while Kempt’s brigade started in pursuit, scrambling over the rocky slopes to catch them up. The line of flight of the French took them past the ground over which Vandeleur’s men were chasing their comrades of the leading brigade, and the odd result followed that they came in upon the rear of the 52nd, and, though pursued, seemed to be themselves pursuing. The Oxfordshire battalion thereupon performed the extraordinary feat of bringing up its left shoulder, forming line facing to the rear at a run, and charging backward. They encountered the enemy at the top of a slope, but the French, seeing themselves between two fires, for Kempt’s men were following hotly behind them, avoided the collision, struck off diagonally, and scattering and throwing away their packs went off in disorder eastward, still keeping up a running fight. The large majority escaped, and joined Gazan’s troops at Miranda. Meanwhile the first brigade, pursued by the Rifles and Caçadores, got away in much better order, and reached Reille’s main body at Espejo. The transport which had come out of the narrow road too late to follow the regiments, was captured whole, after a desperate resistance by the baggage-guard. Maucune got off easily, all things considered, with the loss of three hundred prisoners, many of them wounded, and all his impedimenta[528]. The fight was no discredit to the general or to his men, who saved themselves by presence of mind, when caught at every disadvantage—inferior troops would have laid down their arms en masse when they found themselves between two fires in rough and unknown ground[529]. The total British loss in the two simultaneous combats of Osma and San Millan was 27 killed and 153 wounded.

Reille, having picked up Maucune’s first brigade at Espejo, continued his retreat, and got behind the Bayas river at Subijana that night. The report which he had to send to head-quarters upset all the plans of Jourdan and the King, and forced them to reconsider their position, which was obviously most uncomfortable, as their line of defence along the Ebro was taken in flank, and the proposed succour to Bilbao made impossible. At least four British divisions had been detected by Reille, but where were the rest, and where were the Spaniards, who were known to be in some strength with Wellington? Was the whole Allied host behind the force which had driven in the Army of Portugal, or was there some great unseen column executing some further inscrutable movement?

There was hot discussion at Miranda that night. Reille repeated the proposition which had already been made at Burgos six days back, that in consideration of the fact that the army was hopelessly outflanked, and that its retreat by the high road to Vittoria and Bayonne was threatened by the presence of Wellington on the Bayas, it should abandon that line of communication altogether, march down the Ebro, and take up the line of Pampeluna and Saragossa, rallying Clausel and, if possible, Suchet, for a general concentration, by which the British army could be driven back as it had been from Burgos in 1812. Foy and the Biscay garrisons would have to take care of themselves—it was unlikely that Wellington would be able to fall upon them, when the whole of the rest of the French armies of Spain were on his flank, and taking the offensive against him.

Joseph, for the third time, refused to consider this scheme, alleging, as before, the Emperor’s strict orders to keep to the Bayonne base, and to hold on to the great royal chaussée. But, as is clear, his refusal was affected by another consideration which in his eyes had almost equally decisive weight. Vittoria was crammed with the great convoys of French and Spanish refugees which had accumulated there, along with all the plunder of Madrid, and the military material representing the ‘grand train’ of the whole army of Spain—not to speak of his own immense private baggage. There had also arrived, within the last few days, a large consignment of hard cash—the belated arrears of the allowance which the Emperor had consented to give to the Army of Spain. One of Foy’s brigades had escorted these fourgons of treasure to Vittoria, and dropped them there, returning to Bergara with a section of the refugees in charge, to be passed on to Bayonne.[530] The amount delivered was not less than five million francs—bitterly needed by the troops, who were in long arrears. All this accumulation at Vittoria was in large measure due to the King’s reluctance during the retreat to order a general shift of all his officials and impedimenta over the border into France. As long as his ministers, and all the plant of royalty, remained on the south side of the Pyrenees, he still seemed a king. And he had hoped to maintain himself first on the Douro, then about Burgos, then on the Ebro. It was only when this last line was forced that he made up his mind to surrender his theoretical status, and think of military considerations alone. The lateness of his decision was to prove most fatal to his adherents.

Having resolved to order a general retreat on Vittoria, Joseph and Jourdan took such precautions as seemed possible. Reiterated orders for haste were sent to Foy and Clausel: the latter was told to march on Vittoria not on Miranda. Unfortunately he had received the dispatch sent from Burgos on June 15th, which gave him Miranda as the concentration-point, and had already gathered his divisions at Pampeluna on June 18, and started to march by Estella and Logroño and along the north bank of the Ebro. This gave him two sides of a triangle to cover, while if he had been assigned the route Pampeluna-Salvatierra-Vittoria, he would have been saved eighty miles of road. But on June 9th, when the original orders were issued, no one could have foreseen, save Wellington, that the critical day of the campaign would have found the French army far north of the Ebro. And the new dispatch, sent off on the night of the 18th-19th, started far too late to reach Pampeluna in time to stop Clausel’s departure southward. Indeed, it did not catch him up till the battle of Vittoria had been fought, and the King was a fugitive on the way to France. Foy received orders a little earlier, though not apparently those sent directly by the King, but a copy of a dispatch to Thouvenot, governor of Vittoria, in which the latter was instructed ‘that if General Foy and his division are in your neighbourhood, you are to bid him give up his march on Bilbao, and draw in towards Vittoria, unless his presence is absolutely necessary at the point where he may be at present[531].’ This unhappy piece of wording gave Foy a choice, which he interpreted as authorizing him to remain at Bergara, so as to cover the high road to France, a task which he held to be ‘absolutely necessary.’

As to the troops already on the spot, Reille was ordered to defend the line of the Bayas river, until the armies of the South and Centre should have had time to get past his rear and reach Vittoria. Gazan was ordered to collect the whole of the Army of the South at Arminion, behind Miranda, drawing in at once the considerable detachment which he had left beyond the Ebro. In this position he was to wait till D’Erlon, with the Army of the Centre, who had to move up from Haro, ten miles to the south, should have arrived and have got on to the great chaussée. He was then to follow him, acting as rearguard of the whole force. Between Arminion and Vittoria the road passes for two miles through the very narrow defile of Puebla, the bottle-neck through which the Zadorra river cuts its way from the upland plain of Vittoria to the lower level of the Ebro valley.

D’Erlon, starting at dawn from Haro, reached Arminion at 10 o’clock in the morning of the 19th, and pushed up the defile: the head of his column was just emerging from its northern end when a heavy cannonade began to be heard in the west. It continued all the time that the Army of the South was pressing up the defile, and grew nearer. This, of course, marked the approach of Wellington, driving the covering force under Reille before him toward the Zadorra. The British commander-in-chief had slept the night at Berberena near Osma, and had there drafted a set of orders which considerably modified his original scheme: probably the change was due to topographical information, newly garnered up from the countryside. Instead of sending Graham’s column via Orduña, to cut in on the flank of the chaussée behind Vittoria, he had resolved to send it by a shorter route, a mere country road which goes by Luna, Santa Eulalia, and Jocano to Murguia—the village which it had been ordered on the previous day to reach via Orduña and the high road. Presumably it had been discovered that this would save time,—the advantage of using a first-rate track being more than counterbalanced by the fact that the Orduña road was not only ten miles longer but crossed and recrossed by steep slopes the main sierra, which forms the watershed between Biscay and Alava. Or possibly it was only the discovery that the Luna-Jocano route could be taken by artillery that settled the matter: if it had been reported useless for wheeled traffic the old orders might have stood. At any rate, the turning movement, which was to take Graham into the rear of Vittoria, was made south of the main mountain chain, and not north of it[532].

Meanwhile, though Graham diverged north-eastward, the rest of the Army moved straight forward from the valley of the Omecillo to that of the Bayas in four columns, all parallel to each other, and all moving by country roads. The 3rd Division was ordered from Berberena to Carcamo—the 7th followed behind it. The 4th Division with D’Urban’s cavalry in front, and the Light Division with V. Alten’s hussars in front, were directed on Subijana and Pobes, keeping in close and constant communication with each other. Behind them came the cavalry reserve—R. Hill’s, Grant’s, and Ponsonby’s brigades—also the heavy artillery. Hill’s column, which had now come up into touch with the leading divisions, kept to the high road from Osma and Espejo towards the Puente Lara and the Ebro. But only cavalry reconnaissances went as far as the river—the mass of the corps turned off eastward when it had passed Espejo, and moved by Salinas de Añana, so as to come out into the valley of the Bayas south of the route of the Light Division. It thus became the right wing of the army which was deploying for the frontal attack.

It has been mentioned above that a local Spanish force from the Cantabrian mountains had joined Wellington at Medina de Pomar; this was the so-called ‘division’, some 3,500 bayonets, of the great guerrillero of the coast-land, Longa, now no more an irregular but a titular colonel, while his partida had been reorganized as four battalions of light infantry. Longa was a tough and persistent fighter—a case of the ‘survival of the fittest’ among many insurgent chiefs who had perished. His men were veteran mountaineers, indefatigable marchers, and skilled skirmishers, if rudimentary in their drill and equipment. Wellington during the ensuing campaign gave more work to them than to any other Spanish troops that were at his disposal—save the Estremaduran division of Morillo, old comrades of Hill’s corps, to which they had always been attached since 1811. The use which Wellington now made of Longa’s men was to employ them as a light covering shield for Graham’s turning force. They had been sent across the hills from Quincoces[533] on the 17th to occupy Orduña—from thence they descended on the 19th on to Murguia, thus placing themselves at the head of the turning column. The object of the arrangement was that, if the enemy should detect the column, he would imagine it to be a Spanish demonstration, and not suspect that a heavy British force lay hid behind the familiar guerrilleros. While Longa was thus brought in sideways, to form the head of Graham’s column, the other Spanish force which Wellington was employing was also deflected to join the main army. Giron’s Galicians, as has been mentioned above, had been sent by a long sweep through the sierras to demonstrate against Bilbao. They had reached Valmaseda on the 18th, and their approach had alarmed all the French garrisons of Biscay. Now, having put themselves in evidence in the north, they were suddenly recalled, ordered to march by Amurrio on Orduña and Murguia, and so to fall into the rear of Graham’s column. The distances were considerable, the roads steep, and Giron only came up with the Anglo-Portuguese army on the afternoon of the battle of Vittoria, in which (unlike Longa) he was too late to take any part. Somewhere on his march from Aguilar to Valmaseda he picked up a reinforcement, the very small Asturian division of Porlier—three battalions or 2,400 men—which Mendizabal had sent to join him from the blockade of Santoña. This raised the Galician Army to a total of some 14,000 bayonets.

The 19th June was a very critical day, as no one knew better than Wellington. The problem was whether, starting with the heads of his column facing the line of the Bayas, where Reille had rallied his three divisions and was standing at bay, he could drive in the detaining force, and cross the Zadorra in pursuit of it, fast enough to surprise some part of the French army still in its march up from the south. And, as an equally important problem, there was the question whether Graham, marching on Murguia, could reach the upper Zadorra and cut the great road north of Vittoria, before the French were in position to cover it. If these operations could be carried out, there would be a scrambling fight scattered over much ground, rather than a regular pitched battle. If they could not, there would be a formal general action on the 20th or 21st against an enemy established in position—unless indeed King Joseph should choose to continue his retreat without fighting, which Wellington thought quite possible[534].

Wellington is censured by some critics, including Napier[535], for not making a swifter advance on the 19th. It is said that a little more haste would have enabled him to get to Vittoria as soon as the enemy, and to force him to fight in dislocated disorder on ground which he had not chosen. This seems unjustifiable. The distance between the camps of the Allied Army, in front of Osma and Espejo, and Vittoria is some twenty miles—difficult ground, with the Bayas river flowing through the midst of it and a formidable position held by 15,000 French behind that stream. As Reille, conscious how much depended on his gaining time for the King to retreat from Miranda, was determined to detain the Allied Army as long as he could, it would have been useless to try to drive him away by a light attack. The rear of each of Wellington’s columns was trailing many miles behind the leading brigade. It was necessary to bring up against Reille a force sufficient to make serious resistance impossible, and this Wellington did, pushing forward not only the 4th and Light Divisions, but Hill’s column in support, on the southern flank. It took time to get them deployed, and the attack was opened by a cannonade. By the time that a general advance was ordered Reille had begun to retire—he did so very neatly, and crossed the Zadorra by the four nearest bridges without any appreciable loss. By this time the afternoon had arrived, the rest of the French army had passed the defile of Puebla, and Wellington judged the hour too late for the commencement of a pitched battle[536]. Moreover, he did not intend to fight without the co-operation of Graham’s column, and the latter was not where he would have wished it to be. The day had been very rainy, the cross roads were bad, and by some error of staff-work the head of the column had not received the countermarching orders directing it to march direct on Murguia, but had started in accordance with the earlier plan on to the Orduña road; the 1st and 5th Divisions had gone some way upon it before they were recalled and counter-marched into the right path[537]. Owing to blocks and bad weather they only reached Jocano, some six or eight miles east of Osma, by six in the evening. Murguia was still nine miles ahead, the rain was still falling in torrents, and Graham ordered the divisions to halt and encamp for the night. The fate of the campaign was not to be fought out that day, nor on the next, but on the third morning—that of June 21st, 1813.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER VII

THE BATTLE OF VITTORIA. JUNE 21, 1813

(A) The First Stage

The plain of Vittoria, into which the French army debouched on the afternoon of June 19th, is a plain only by comparison with the high hills which surround it on all sides, being an oval expanse of rolling ground drained by the swift and narrow Zadorra river, which runs on its north-eastern side. Only in its northern section, near the city, does it show really flat ground. It is about twelve miles long from north-east to south-west, and varies from six to eight miles in breadth. The Zadorra is one of those mountain streams which twist in numberless loops and bends of alternate shallows and deep pools, in order to get round rocks or spurs which stand in the way of their direct course[538]. At one point seven miles down-stream from Vittoria it indulges in a complete ‘hairpin-bend’ in which are the bridges of Tres Puentes and Villodas, as it circles round a precipitous knoll. At several other spots it executes minor loops in its tortuous course. The little city of Vittoria stands on an isolated rising ground at its northern end, very visible from all directions, and dominating the whole upland with two prominent church spires at its highest point. The great road from France enters the plain of Vittoria and the valley of the Zadorra three miles north-east of the city, descending from the defile of Salinas, a long and difficult pass in which Mina and other guerrilleros had executed some of their most daring raids on French convoys. After passing Vittoria the road keeps to the middle of the upland in a westerly direction, and issues from it by the defile of La Puebla, where the Zadorra cuts its way through the Sierra de Andia in order to join the Ebro. There is not much more than room for road and river in the gorge, which is dominated by the heights of La Puebla, a spur of the Andia, on the east, and by a corresponding but lower range, the end of the heights of Morillas on the west.

But the Bayonne chaussée is by no means the only road in the Vittoria upland. The city is the meeting point of a number of second-class and third-class routes, debouching from various subsidiary valleys of the Pyrenees and leading to various towns in Navarre or Biscay. Of these the chief were (1) the Salvatierra-Pampeluna road, running due east, and then crossing from the valley of the Zadorra to the upper waters of the Araquil, by which it descends into Navarre. This was a route practicable for artillery or transport, but narrow, ill repaired, and steep—eminently not a line to be taken by a large force in a hurry; (2) the main road to Bilbao by Villareal and Durango, a coach road, but very tortuous, and ascending high mountains by long curves and twists; (3) the alternative coach route to Bilbao by Murguia and Orduña, easier than the Villareal road in its first section, but forced to cross the main chain of the Pyrenees by difficult gradients before descending into Biscay; (4) a bad side road to the central Ebro, going due south by Trevino and La Guardia to Logroño; (5) a similar route, running due east from Subijana on the Bayas to the bridges of Nanclares three miles up-stream from the defile of Puebla. At the opening of the battle of Vittoria Graham’s column was already across the Murguia-Bilbao road, and in its earliest advance blocked the Durango-Bilbao road also. Thus the only route beside the great chaussée available for the French was that to Salvatierra and Pampeluna. The road to Trevino and Logroño was useless, as leading in an undesired direction.

In addition to these five coach roads there were several country tracks running from various points on the Bayas river to minor bridges on the Zadorra, across the lofty Monte Arrato, the watershed between the two streams. It was these fifth-rate tracks which Wellington used on the battle-day for the advance of some of his central columns, while Hill on the right was forcing the defile of La Puebla, and Graham on the left was descending from Murguia on to the bridges of the upper Zadorra north-east of Vittoria.

Having their troops safely concentrated east of the Zadorra on the evening of June 19, Joseph and Jourdan made up their minds to stand on the position behind that river, even though Clausel had not yet come up, nor sent any intelligence as to the route by which he was arriving. Aides-de-camp were searching for him in all directions—but nothing had yet been ascertained, beyond the fact that he had started from Pampeluna on June 15th, marching on Logroño[539]. There was a high chance that some one of many missives would reach him, and turn him on to Vittoria. But the idea that Clausel must now be very near at hand was less operative in compelling Joseph to fight than the idea that he must at all cost save the vast convoys accumulated around him, his treasure, his military train, his ministers, and his refugees. He was getting them off northward by the high road as fast as he could: one convoy marched on the 20th, under the charge of the troops of the Army of the North who had formed the garrison of Vittoria, another and a larger at dawn on the 21st, escorted by the whole of Maucune’s division. It had with it many of the Old Masters stolen from the royal palace at Madrid—the pictures of Titian, Rafael, and Velasquez, which had been the pride of the old dynasty—with the pick of the royal armoury and cabinet of Natural History[540]. It is almost as difficult to make out how Joseph, already unequal in numbers to his enemy, dared to deprive himself of Maucune’s division of the Army of Portugal, as to discover why Wellington left the 6th Division at Medina de Pomar. It does not seem that the morale of the unit had been shaken by its rude experience at San Millan on the 18th, for it fought excellently in subsequent operations: nor had it suffered any disabling losses in that fight. A more obvious escort might have been found in Casapalacios’ Spanish auxiliaries, who had already been utilized for similar purposes between Madrid and Vittoria, or in the scraps of the Army of the North which had lately joined the retreating host. But they remained for the battle, while Maucune marched north, with the cannon sounding behind him all day.

When Jourdan and Joseph first arrayed their host for the expected battle, it would seem, from the line which they took up, that they imagined that Wellington would attack them only from the direction of the Bayas, and paid no attention to Graham’s flanking movement, though afterwards they wrote dispatches to prove that they had not ignored it. For they drew up the Army of the South on a short front, from the exit of the defile of Puebla on the south to the bridge of Villodas on the north, a front of three miles, with D’Erlon’s two divisions in second line on each side of the village of Gomecha, two miles farther back, and the Army of Portugal and the King’s Guards as a third line in reserve about Zuazo, not far in front of Vittoria, along with the bulk of the cavalry. This order of battle, as a glance at the map shows, presupposed a frontal attack from the line of the Bayas, where Wellington was known to be. It was ill-suited to face an attack from the north-west on the line of the Zadorra above Villodas, and still more so an attack from the due north by the roads from Orduña and Murguia. On the morning of the 20th cavalry reconnaissances went out to look for the Allied Army—they reported that the camps along the Bayas above Subijana Morillos did not seem very large, and that on the Murguia road they had fallen in with and pushed back Longa’s irregulars, obviously a Spanish demonstration[541]. ‘No indication being available of the details of a projected attack, and further information being unprocurable, only conjectures could be made[542].’

It is interesting to know from the narrative of Jourdan himself what these conjectures were. ‘Wellington,’ he writes, ‘had shown himself since the start of the campaign more disposed to manœuvre his opponents out of their positions, by constantly turning their right wing, than to attack them frontally and force on a battle. It was thought probable that, pursuing this system, he would march on Bilbao by Orduña, and from thence on Durango, so as to force them to fall back promptly on Mondragon[543], in order to retain their communications with France. He might even hope to force them to evacuate Spain by this move, because it would be impossible to feed a great army on that section of the Pyrenees. The King, knowing that Clausel was on the move, had little fear of the results of a march on Bilbao, for on receiving Clausel’s corps he would be strong enough to take the offensive himself, and would strike at Wellington’s communications. It did not escape him that if the enemy, instead of wasting more time on flank movements, should attack him before the arrival of Clausel, he was in a perilous position. For there was little chance of getting the better of an adversary who had about double numbers, and a lost battle would cut off the army from the road to France, and force it to retire on Pampeluna by a road difficult, if not impracticable, for the train and artillery of a great host. To avoid the risk of an instant attack from Wellington, ought we to fall back and take up the position above the pass of Salinas?[544] But to do this was to sacrifice the junction with Clausel, who was expected on the 21st at latest. And how could the army have been fed in the passes? The greater part of the cavalry and the artillery horses would have had to be sent back to France at once—famine would have forced the infantry to follow. Then the King would have been accused of cowardice, for evacuating Spain without trying the fortune of battle. To justify such a retreat we should have had to be certain that we were to be attacked before the 22nd, and we considered that, if Wellington did decide to fight, it would be unlikely that he could do so before the 22nd, because of the difficulty of the roads which he had taken. After mature consideration of the circumstance the King resolved to stand fast at Vittoria.’

Putting aside the gross over-estimate of Wellington’s strength—he fought with a superiority of 75,000[545] to 57,000, not with two to one—the main point to note in this curious and interesting argument is its defective psychology. Because Wellington had hitherto avoided frontal attacks, when flank movements suited him better, was it safe to conclude that he would do so ad infinitum? That he was capable of a sudden onslaught was obvious to every one who remembered the battle of Salamanca. Why, if he were about to repeat his previous encircling policy, should he go by Orduña, Bilbao, and Durango, rather than by the shorter turn Osma-Murguia-Vittoria? Apparently the French staff underrated the possibilities of that road, and took the presence of Longa upon it as a sign that it was only to be used for a Spanish demonstration[546]. Should not the speed with which Wellington had traversed the detestable country paths between the Arlanzon and the Ebro have served as a warning that, if he chose to push hard, he could cover at a very rapid rate the rather less formidable tracks north of the Zadorra? In short, the old marshal committed the not uncommon fault of making false deductions from an imperfect set of premises. It is much more difficult to say what should have been his actual course under the existing circumstances of June 20. Napier holds that he might still have adopted Reille’s old plan of June 12 and June 18, i.e. that he should have thrown up the line of communication with France by the high road, have made ready to retreat on Pampeluna instead of on Bayonne, and have looked forward to making Saragossa his base. After having picked up first Clausel and then so much of the Army of Aragon as could be collected, he might have got 100,000 men together and have started an offensive campaign[547]. This overlooks the impossibility of getting the convoys and train safely along the bad road from Vittoria to Pampeluna, and the difficulty of making Saragossa, where there were no great accumulations of stores and munitions, the base of an army of the size projected. All communication with France would have been thrown on the hopelessly long and circuitous route from Saragossa to Perpignan, for the pass by Jaca was impracticable for wheeled traffic. Certainly Joseph would have had to destroy, as a preliminary measure to a retreat via Salvatierra or Pampeluna, the greater part of his train. And what would have become of his wretched horde of refugees?

Another school of critics—among them Belmas—urge that while it was perfectly correct to cling as a primary necessity to the great road to France, Vittoria was not the right point at which to defend it, but the pass of Salinas. Jourdan’s objection that the cavalry would be useless in the mountains is declared to have little weight, and his dread of famine to be groundless. For Wellington could not have remained for many days in front of the passes—he must have attacked at once a very formidable position, or Foy and the other troops in Biscay would have had time to join the King; and with 15,000 extra bayonets the French would have been hard to dislodge. The danger to Clausel would have been not very great, since Wellington would not have dared to detach a force sufficient to crush him, while the main French army was in his front, intact and ready to resume the offensive. And on the other flank Biscay, no doubt, would have been exposed to an invasion by Giron’s Galicians, when Foy had withdrawn its garrisons to join the main army. But it is improbable that this movement would have been backed by any large section of the Anglo-Portuguese force; for Wellington, as his previous action showed, was intending to keep all his own old divisions in one body. He would not have risked any of his own troops between the Pyrenees and the sea, by trying to thrust them in on the back of the French position, to Durango or Mondragon. And if Giron alone went to Bilbao and Durango, his presence in that direction, and any threats which he might make on the King’s rear, would be tiresome rather than dangerous.

Be this as it may, whatever the general policy of Jourdan and Joseph should have been, their particular dispositions for occupying the Vittoria position were very faulty. It was as well known to every practical soldier then as it is now, that a normal river-position cannot be held by a continuous line of troops placed at the water’s edge. For there will be loops and bends at which the ground on one’s own side is commanded and enfiladed by higher ground on the enemy’s side. If troops are pushed forward into such bends, they will be crushed by artillery fire, or run danger of being cut off by attacks on the neck of the loop in their rear[548]. Unless the general who has to defend a river front is favoured with a stream in front of him absolutely straight, and with all the commanding ground on his own side (an unusual chance), he must rather look to arranging his army in such a fashion as to hold as strong points all the favourable sections of the front, while the unfavourable ones must be watched from suitable positions drawn back from the water’s edge. By judicious disposition of artillery, the occupation and preparation of villages, woods, or other cover, and (if necessary) the throwing up of trenches, the enemy, though he cannot be prevented from crossing the river at certain points, can be kept from debouching out of the sections of the hither bank which he has mastered. And if he loads up the captured ground with heavy masses of troops which cannot get forward, he will suffer terribly from artillery fire, while if he does not hold them strongly, he will be liable to counter-attacks, which will throw the troops who have crossed back into the river. The most elementary precaution for the general on the defensive to take is, of course, to blow up all bridges, and to place artillery to command all fords, also to have local reserves ready at a proper distance behind every section where a passage is likely to be tried[549].

We may excuse Joseph and Jourdan for not entrenching all the weak sections of their front—hasty field works were little used in the Peninsular War; indeed the trenches which Wellington threw up on the second day of Fuentes de Oñoro were an almost unique instance of such an expedient. But the other precautions to be taken were commonplaces of contemporary tactics. And they were entirely neglected. The front liable to attack was very long for the size of the defending army: whole sections of it were neglected. Bridges and fords were numerous on the Zadorra: incredible as it may seem, not one of eleven bridges between Durana to the north and Nanclares to the south was blown up. The numerous fords seem not to have been known accurately to either the attacking or the defending generals, but some of the most obvious of them were ignored in Joseph’s original disposition of his troops. Several alike of bridges and fords were lightly watched by cavalry only, with no further precaution taken. What is most astonishing is to find that bridges which were actually used by French exploring parties on June 20th, so that their existence was thoroughly realized, were found intact and in some cases unguarded on the 21st[550]. The fact would seem to be that the King’s head-quarters staff was dominated by a false idea: that Wellington’s attack would be delivered on the south part of the river front, from the defile of Puebla to the bridge of Villodas; and that the troops discovered on the Murguia road were Longa’s irregulars only, bound on a demonstration. An acute British observer remarked that the French position had two main defects—the more important one was that it faced the wrong way[551]: this was quite true.

The final arrangement, as taken up on the morning of June 20 was that the Army of the South arrayed itself so as to block the debouches from the defile of La Puebla and the bridges immediately up-stream from it—those of Nanclares and Villodas. Gazan did not occupy the entrance of the defile of La Puebla—to do so he must have stretched his line farther south and east than his numbers permitted. But he held its exits, with some voltigeur companies from Maransin’s brigade, perched high up on the culminating ground immediately above the river.

From this lofty point on the heights of Puebla his first line stretched north-eastward along a line of low hills, past the villages of Subijana (low down and not far from the Puebla heights) and Ariñez (on the high road, at the spot where it crosses the position), a dominating point on the sky-line. The right wing nearly reached to the Zadorra at the spot where it makes the ‘hairpin bend’ alluded to above. But the solid occupation by formed troops did not extend so far: there were only a cavalry regiment and three guns watching the bridge of Mendoza[552], and a single company of voltigeurs watching that of Villodas. The disposition of the units was, counting from the French left, first Maransin’s brigade occupying Subijana, next Conroux’s division in a single line on the slopes to the north of the village of Zumelzu, with a battalion holding a wood in front on lower ground. Then came Daricau’s division, one brigade in front line across the high road, the other brigade (St. Pol’s) in reserve north of the road, and in rear of Leval’s division, which was deployed on the prominent height in front of the village of Ariñez, which formed the end of the main position. Between Leval and the Zadorra there was only Avy’s few squadrons of light horse, watching the bridge of Mendoza. Nearly a mile to the rear of the main line Villatte’s division stood in reserve, on the heights on the other side of Ariñez, and with it Pierre Soult’s cavalry. The position was heavily gunned, as artillery support went in those days. Each of the three front-line divisions had its battery with it—a fourth belonging to Pierre Soult’s cavalry was placed on a knoll in front of the position, from which it could sweep the approaches from the bridge of Nanclares. In reserve behind Ariñez was not only Villatte’s battery, but two others drawn from the general artillery park, and during the early stage of the battle another pair of batteries, belonging to the Army of Portugal, were sent to join Leval’s divisional guns on the north end of the position. Gazan had therefore some 54 pieces in hand, without counting the half-battery of horse artillery belonging to Digeon’s dragoons, which was absent far to his extreme right, by the banks of the upper Zadorra.

Three-quarters of a mile behind Gazan’s reserves, the whole Army of the Centre was deployed on each side of the high road, Darmagnac’s division north of it in front of Zuazo, Cassagne’s division south of it, level with Gomecha. Treillard’s dragoons were behind Cassagne; Avy’s chasseurs (as has been mentioned above) were watching the Zadorra on the right.

In the original order of battle of the 20th the Army of Portugal had been in third line, a mile behind the Army of the Centre, on a level with the villages of Ali and Armentia. But when Digeon’s dragoons reported in the afternoon that they had discovered Longa’s column on the Murguia road, it was decided that a flank guard must be thrown out in that direction, to cover Vittoria and the high road to France from possible raids. Wherefore Reille was told that it would be his duty to provide against this danger. He took out Menne’s brigade of Sarrut’s division from the line, pushed it over the Zadorra, and established it in a position level with Aranguiz on the Murguia road, a mile and more beyond the river. Late at night, apparently on a report from a deserter that there were British troops behind Longa[553]—(indeed the man said that Wellington himself was on the Bilbao road)—Reille took off the other brigade of Sarrut’s division in the same direction, and sent it with Curto’s regiments of light horse to join Menne. There remained in front of Vittoria of infantry only Lamartinière’s division, and the King’s Guards; but there was a very large body of cavalry in reserve—Tilly’s and Digeon’s dragoon divisions of the Army of the South, the King’s two Guard regiments of lancers, and the bulk of the horse of the Army of Portugal, Boyer’s dragoons and Mermet’s chasseurs: there must have been 5,000 sabres or more in hand.

One further precaution was taken—lest the enemy might be moving against the high road to France from points even more to the north than Murguia, a trifling force was sent to cover the exit of the chaussée from the pass of Salinas; this was the Spanish ‘division’ of Casapalacios belonging to the Army of the Centre, strengthened by some scraps of the French troops of the Army of the North, which had come in from minor garrisons during the recent retreat. Casapalacios’ Afrancesados, nominally three regiments strong, were under 2,000 bayonets—they had with them five weak squadrons of their own nation, a half-battery, also Spanish, and an uncertain (but small) French auxiliary force, which included a battalion of the 3rd Line, part of the 15th Chasseurs, and a section of guns equipped from the artillery dépôt of the Army of the North, which had long been established at Vittoria and had not been sent to the rear[554]. Casapalacios took post at Durana, covering the bridge of that village, the most northerly one on the Zadorra: the French battalion was at Gamarra Menor on the other side of the water.

Wellington spent the 20th in arranging for the general attack, which he had determined to deliver if Joseph stood his ground. The plan was ambitious, for the battlefield was far larger than any on which the Anglo-Portuguese Army had ever fought before, and the numbers available were 30,000 more than they had been at Salamanca or Bussaco, and more than double those of Fuentes de Oñoro. Moreover, he intended to operate with a great detached turning force against the enemy’s flank and rear, a thing that he had only once done before—at Salamanca—and then only with a single division. The battle plan was essentially a time-problem: he had to arrange for the simultaneous appearance of four separate masses in front of the French position. All started from parallel points in the valley of the Bayas, but the obstacles in front of them were of very varying difficulty, and the distances to be covered were very different.

(1) Hill, with the large 2nd Division (four brigades), Silveira’s Portuguese division, Morillo’s Spaniards, and V. Alten’s and Fane’s light dragoons, 20,000 sabres and bayonets in all, was to cross the Zadorra completely outside the extreme French left wing, to storm the heights of Puebla, which formed the end of Gazan’s line, and then, advancing from the defile, to strike at Subijana de Alava with his main body, while continuing to thrust his flank along the heights above, which dominated the whole region, and extended far behind the enemy’s left wing.

(2) Two parallel columns were to march from the camps on the Bayas; one consisting of the 4th and Light Divisions, R. Hill’s, Grant’s, and Ponsonby’s cavalry brigades, and D’Urban’s Portuguese horse, was to advance by the country road from Subijana-Morillas to the two bridges of Nanclares. Opposite those passages and the neighbouring ones it was to deploy, and to attack the French centre, when Hill should have got a footing on the Puebla heights and in the plain by Subijana. The second column, consisting of the 3rd and 7th Divisions, was to move from Zuazo and Anda on the Bayas across the high mountain called Monte Arrato by a country track, and to descend into the valley of the Zadorra at Las Guetas, opposite the bridge of Mendoza, up-stream from the ‘hairpin bend’. In this position it would be almost in the rear of Gazan’s right wing above Villodas: it was to attack at once on reaching its ground, if the progress of Hill on the south was seen to be satisfactory. ‘The movement to be regulated from the right: although these columns are to make such movements in advance as may be evidently necessary to favour the progress of the two columns on their right, they are not to descend into the low ground toward Vittoria or the great road.’ The total strength of the four divisions and cavalry of this section of the army was about 30,000 sabres and bayonets.

(3) Graham’s column-head was at Olano, three miles in front of Murguia, and six from the Zadorra. He had in front Longa’s Spanish infantry, with whom Anson’s light dragoons were to join up when operations should begin. Behind were the 1st and 5th Divisions, Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese brigades, and Bock’s heavy dragoons. The total force was about 20,000 men of all nations. As an afterthought on the 20th Wellington directed Giron, who was to reach Orduña that day, to come down to the upper Bayas in Graham’s rear, where he would act as a support if necessary. The object of this order is not quite obvious. Giron came down too late for the battle, arriving at Murguia only in the afternoon. It is known from his own dispatches that Wellington over-estimated Reille’s force, which Graham had to fight, not knowing of Maucune’s departure[555], and Giron may have been intended to add weight to the attack in this quarter. His troops would, apparently, have been more usefully placed if they had been sent from Murguia to attack the unguarded upper fords of the Zadorra.

The orders issued to Graham gave him a rather perplexing choice of action. He was (like the 3rd and 7th Divisions) to guide himself by what was going on upon his right: he must get in touch at once with the centre columns; he might attack if it was obviously profitable to the main advance, but he was to avoid letting his whole corps be drawn into close action in front of Vittoria, for his main object must be to turn the enemy’s position, by getting round its right wing and cutting the great road to France. The lack of precise direction in this order is, no doubt, a testimony to Wellington’s confidence in Graham’s judgement. But it cast a grave responsibility on him: if he had been told simply that he was to turn the French right and seize the great chaussée, matters would have been simple. But he is given leave to attack frontally if circumstances farther down the line seem to make such a policy desirable: yet he must not attack so heavily as to make his great turning movement impossible. It must be confessed that the difficult problem was not well solved that day by the gallant old general.

The whole day of the 20th was spent in getting the columns into order, and the arrangements for the attacks synchronized. Wellington took a survey of all the routes in person, as his wont was. It was not till late in the afternoon that he became certain from the dispositions of the enemy that an eleventh hour retreat was not contemplated by the King[556]. The timing was that Hill, who had a few miles to march, should attack at eight in the morning, that both Graham and the column consisting of the 3rd and 7th Divisions should get into position by the same hour, and make ready to attack, when it was clear that the flank movement of Hill had already begun and was making good progress. Meanwhile the other central column, the Light and 4th Divisions, should cross when Hill had won the defile of Puebla and room to debouch beyond it, but not before. The rather late hour fixed, in a month when dawn comes at 4 a.m., was dictated by the fact that Hill had a river to cross, and the 3rd and 7th Divisions mountain tracks to follow, which neither could have negotiated in the dark. Some hours of daylight were needed to get them into position. Even so the brigades of the left-centre column were several hours late at their rendezvous.

The French commanders, as we have seen, made no move on the 20th, save to hurry off convoys and to throw back Reille on the north-west flank of Vittoria, to protect the royal chaussée and the two Bilbao roads. Jourdan wrote to Clarke that evening a perfectly sensible dispatch as to the difficulties of the situation, but one which showed that he was wholly unaware that he might be forced to a general action within the next twelve hours. All depended, he said, on Clausel’s prompt arrival: if he should come up on the 21st there was no danger: if he delayed, the army might have to choose between two tiresome alternatives—a retreat on the pass of Salinas and one on Pampeluna. If Wellington, as he suspected, was making a great turning movement by Orduña and Durango, the army would be forced to take the wretched road Salvatierra-Pampeluna. ‘The King does not yet know what decision he will have to make: if General Clausel delays his junction much longer, he will be forced to choose the retreat into Navarre.’ Of any idea that Wellington was about to attack next morning the dispatch shows no sign.

Jourdan had been indisposed all that day—he was laid up in bed with a feverish attack. This caused the postponement of a general reconnaissance of the position, which he and his King had intended to carry out together. They rode forth, however, at 6 a.m. on the 21st. ‘No intelligence had come to hand,’ writes Jourdan in his memoirs, ‘which could cause us to foresee an instant attack. We arrived at the position by Zuazo, from which Count Reille had been recently moved, and stopped to examine it. Its left rested on the mountain-chain in the direction of Berostigueta, its right came down to the Zadorra behind La Hermandad and Crispijana. It is dominating, yet not over steep, and has all along it good artillery emplacement for many batteries. It connected itself much better than does the Ariñez position with the ground about Aranguiz now occupied by Reille, which might be heavily attacked. Struck with the advantages of this position, the King appeared inclined to bring back the Army of the South to occupy it, and to place the Army of the Centre between it and the Army of Portugal. The three armies would have been closer together, and more able to give each other rapid assistance; and the eye of the Commander-in-Chief could have swept around the whole of this more concentrated field in one glance. This change of dispositions would probably have been carried out on the 20th if Marshal Jourdan had not been indisposed, and might perhaps have prevented the catastrophe that was to come. But the officer sent to call General Gazan to confer with the King came back to say that the general could not leave his troops, as an attack on him was developing. It was judged too late to change position. Riding to the front of Ariñez, to a long hill occupied by Leval’s division, on the right of the Army of the South, the King saw that in fact the enemy was on the move. About eight o’clock the posts on the mountain reported that the Allies had passed the Zadorra above La Puebla: a strong column was coming up the high road and the defile, a smaller one had diverged to its right and was climbing the mountain itself. General Avy, sent on reconnaissance beyond the Zadorra on the side of Mendoza, reported at the same time that a large corps was coming in on Tres Puentes behind the rear of General Leval. And he could see signs in the woods opposite, which seemed to indicate the march of other troops in the direction of the bridge of Nanclares. No news had yet come in from Reille, but we prepared ourselves to hear ere long that he, too, was attacked[557]’.

It is unnecessary to comment on the character of a Head-quarters where a passing indisposition of the Chief of the Staff causes all movements to be postponed for eighteen hours, at a moment when a general action is obviously possible. But it is necessary to point out that the existing dislocation of the troops left three miles of the Zadorra front between Reille’s left and Gazan’s right unguarded when the battle began, and that this had been the case throughout the preceding day. And during that day who was responsible for the fact that not a single one of the eleven bridges between the defile of La Puebla and Durana had been ruined and only three obstructed[558]? Gazan must take a good deal of responsibility, no less than Jourdan.

At eight o’clock on the morning of the 21st the action commenced, on a most beautiful clear day, contrasting wonderfully with the heavy rain of the 19th and intermittent showers on the 20th. Every hill-crest road and village for twenty miles was visible with surprising sharpness, so much so that incidents occurring at a great distance were easily to be followed by the naked eye, still more easily by the staff officer’s telescope.

The clash began, as Wellington had intended, on the extreme right. Here Hill’s columns crossed the Zadorra, where it broadened out below the defile of La Puebla, far outside the French line. The 2nd Division led up the high road, with Cadogan’s brigade heading the column; but before they entered the narrows, Morillo’s Spaniards were pushed forward on their right, through a wood which covered the lower slopes, to seize the spur of the Puebla heights immediately above the road. Till this was cleared, it would be impossible to move the 2nd Division forward. Eye-witnesses describe the deploying of the Spanish column as clearly visible from the high ground on the Monte Arrato heights: the first brigade appeared emerging from the woods below, then came stiffer ground, ‘so steep that while moving up it they looked as if they were lying on their faces or crawling[559]’ Then the smoke of the French skirmishing fire began to be visible on the crest, while Morillo’s second brigade, deployed behind the first, went up the heights in support. The enemy, who was not in great strength at first, gave way, and the Estremadurans won the sky-line, formed there, and began to drive up from the first summit to the next above it. This also they won, but then came to stand—Gazan had pushed up first one and then the other of the two regiments of Maransin’s brigade from his left, on the main position, to support the voltigeur companies which had been the only troops originally placed on this lofty ground. Hill, seeing the advance on the mountain stop, sent up, to help Morillo, Colonel Cadogan, with his own regiment the 71st, and all the light companies of Cadogan’s and Byng’s brigades. This turned the fight, and after a stiff struggle for the second summit, in which Morillo was severely wounded, Maransin’s brigade was turned back and flung down hill: it halted and re-formed low down on the slope, losing the crest completely.

Having his flank now reasonably safe, Hill turned off the other two battalions of Cadogan’s brigade to follow the 71st, and then pushed his second British brigade (O’Callaghan’s) up the defile of La Puebla, and deployed it on the open ground opposite the village of Subijana de Alava, which lay near the high road, and was the first obstacle to be carried if the whole corps was to issue forth and attack the French left. One battery moved up with the brigade, and got into action on a slope to its right. The rest of the 2nd Division and Silveira’s Portuguese issued from the defile, ready to act as reserve either to Morillo on the heights or O’Callaghan in the open ground. Meanwhile the enemy could be seen dispatching troops from his reserves, to attack the spurs of the mountain which had been won by Morillo and Cadogan. For the heights of Puebla commanded all the left flank of the main French position, and, if Allied troops pushed along them any further, Gazan’s line would be completely turned. Jourdan says that his orders were that Maransin’s brigade should have attacked, with a whole division in support, but that Gazan took upon him the responsibility of sending in Maransin alone, and only later, when the latter had been beaten down from the crest, first Rey’s brigade of Conroux’s division and then St. Pol’s reserve brigade of Daricau’s division, from the hill on the right behind Leval. It would seem that Daricau’s two regiments took post on the slopes behind Subijana, where there was a gap in the line, owing to Maransin’s departure, while Rey and his brigade went up the Puebla heights, to try to head off Morillo’s and Cadogan’s attack.

In this it was wholly unsuccessful: after a severe struggle on the crest, in which Cadogan was mortally wounded[560], the French reinforcements were checked and routed: the Allied troops began to push forward again on the heights, and were getting right round the flank of Gazan’s left wing, while Maransin’s troops on the lower slopes were being contained by the 92nd and 50th, the rear regiments of Cadogan’s brigade, and Daricau’s were hotly engaged with O’Callaghan’s three battalions, which occupied Subijana and then attacked the hillside above it, but failed for some time to secure a lodgement there.

Jourdan was by this time growing anxious, and not without reason, at the rapid progress of the Allies on the Puebla heights. He ordered Gazan to send up at once his only remaining reserve, Villatte’s division from the height behind Ariñez, to gain the crest at a point farther east than any that the enemy could reach, and to attack in mass along it. In order that he might not be forestalled on the summit, Villatte was told to march by a long détour, through the village of Esquivel far to the east, where there was a country road debouching from the chaussée. Indeed so perturbed was the Marshal by the threat to his left, that he suspected further turning movements in this quarter, and sent orders for Tilly’s dragoons, from the cavalry reserve, to ride out by Berostigueta to the Trevino road, to see if there were no British columns pressing in from that quarter. He also directed D’Erlon to move one of his two infantry divisions, Cassagne’s, in the same direction, to support Tilly if necessary. Gazan, if we may credit his long and contentious report on the battle, suggested to Jourdan that it was dangerous to disgarnish his centre, and to push so many troops to his left, while it was still uncertain whether Wellington’s column-heads, visible on the other side of the Zadorra, were not about to move. Might not Hill’s attack be a feint, intended to draw off the French reserves in an eccentric direction? The Marshal, says Gazan, then declared in a loud voice, so that all around could hear ‘that the enemy’s movements opposite our right are mere demonstrations, to which no attention should be paid, and that if the battle were lost it would be because the heights oi the left of Subijana remained in the enemy’s power[561].’ Then lay the real danger.

Orders were given that when Villatte should have got on the crest of the mountain, and should be delivering his attack, a simultaneous move forward was to be made by Conroux, and the brigades of Maransin and St. Pol, to cast the enemy out of Subijana, as well as off the heights of Puebla. It is interesting to note that Hill had as yet only engaged two British brigades, and one small Spanish division, and had succeeded in attracting against himself a much larger force—the whole of Conroux’s and Villatte’s divisions, and the two brigades of Maransin and St. Pol. In the French centre and right there remained now only Leval’s division and the remaining brigade of Daricau’s, and in reserve there was only one of D’Erlon’s divisions, since the other had gone off on a wild goose chase toward the Trevino road. Wellington could have wished for nothing better.

But by the time that the French counter-attack on Hill’s corps was developing, matters were beginning to look lively all along the line of the Zadorra, and the combat on the heights was growing into a general action. It was now about eleven o’clock, and Wellington had been for some time established on a high bank above the river, facing the centre of the French position, to the left of the village and bridges of Nanclares, from which he could sweep with his glass the whole landscape from the heights of La Puebla to the bridge of Mendoza. To his left and right the Light and 4th Divisions lay in two masses, a mile or more back from the river, and hidden very carefully in folds of the Monte Arrato, the battalions in contiguous close column lying down in hollow roads or behind outcrops of rock, and showing as little as possible. The great mass of cavalry in reserve, four brigades, had not been brought over the sky-line yet, and lay some distance to the rear. Only Grant’s hussars were near the Light Division, dismounted and standing to their horses in covered ground. The French lines were perfectly visible, ‘unmasked, without a bush to prevent the sweeping of their artillery, the charging of their cavalry, or the fire of their musketry acting with full effect on those who should attempt to cross the bridges in their front, which it was necessary to carry before we could begin the attack on their centre[562],’ King Joseph and his staff were conspicuous on the round hill before Ariñez.

Hill’s advance having begun, and made good progress, Wellington was watching for the two other movements which ought to have coincided with the attempt to cross the river at Nanclares for the frontal attack. They had neither of them developed as yet: at least nothing was to be seen of the 3rd and 7th Divisions on the down-slope of the lofty Monte Arrato, and there had not yet been any heavy burst of cannonading from the upper Zadorra (which was not visible from the spot where the Commander-in-Chief had placed himself), to tell that Graham was engaged.

The reason for the comparative silence in this quarter was undoubtedly the wording of Wellington’s orders to Graham, which left so much to the judgement of the commander of the great turning column. He had been placed, almost from the start of his march, in the presence of a secondary problem. Reille, as we have seen, had been given on the 20th the charge of the upper Zadorra and the great road to France. Hoping that he had only Longa’s Spaniards in front of him, and judging that it would be well to keep them as far from the road and the river as possible, the commander of the Army of Portugal had placed Sarrut’s division and a brigade of Mermet’s light horse in an advanced position a mile and more in front of the river, on a ridge flanking the main Bilbao road, above the village of Aranguiz. Lamartinière’s division and Boyer’s and Digeon’s dragoons had been left on the nearer bank. When therefore Graham, marching down from Olano, neared Aranguiz, he found a considerable French force blocking the way. Remembering his orders to look to the right, to adapt his movements to those of the troops in that direction, and not to be drawn into unnecessary fighting, he halted for some time, to see how matters were going on the critical wing, and meanwhile deployed alongside of Longa’s men in his front, Pack’s Portuguese brigade and Anson’s light dragoons, with the 5th Division in support, before Sarrut’s position. He also detached Bradford’s Portuguese to his right, with the idea of getting in touch with the troops in that direction. Reille, who was present in person with his advanced guard, saw with dismay the depth of the column descending upon him, and recognized that he must fall back and hold the line of the Zadorra, the only possible front on which he could oppose such an enemy. About midday or a little later Graham ‘thought himself justified in advancing, in order to draw the enemy’s attention to his right, and so assist the progress of the army from the side of Miranda (i. e. Hill’s column), where the enemy seemed to be making an obstinate resistance in the successive strong positions which the country afforded[563].’ The very moment that Graham sent forth Longa and Pack to advance, the French retired by order, not without some skirmishing, in which the 4th Caçadores stormed the hill just above Aranguiz. But neither side had any appreciable losses.

Graham could now advance to within a mile of the Zadorra, and was in command of the plain-ground as far as the villages of Abechuco, and Gamarra Mayor and Menor. All three are on the northern or right bank of the river, and Reille had determined to hold them as têtes de pont covering the bridges. They had been hastily barricaded, and the artillery of the Army of Portugal had been placed on the opposite bank in a line of batteries, ready to sweep the open ground over which an assault on the villages must be launched. Graham had therefore to deploy for a formal attack on the new position. He sent Longa up-stream and over the hills, to attack Gamarra Menor and Durana, placed Oswald and the 5th Division, with a section of Lawson’s battery, over against Gamarra Mayor, and drew out the 1st Division and the two Portuguese brigades opposite Abechuco, which would have to be taken before the bridge of Arriaga could be attacked. Keeping in mind Wellington’s main purpose, indicated in his orders, of cutting the great road to France, he told Longa and Oswald on the flank that they might push hard, while he seems to have acted in a much more leisurely way in front of Abechuco, where no attack was launched till actual orders had been received from head-quarters bidding him press harder. But meanwhile Longa took Gamarra Menor from the French battalion of the 3rd Line, and then, pushing on, came into collision at Durana bridge with his renegade compatriots the Franco-Spanish division of Casapalacios. As the great road to Bayonne actually passes through Durana, and was now under fire from Longa’s skirmishers, it may be said to have been blocked for all practical purposes at this early stage of the battle. It was not till the afternoon, however, that Longa succeeded in storming the bridge and occupying the village, thus formally breaking the enemy’s main line of communication with France—to save which King Joseph had risked his all. Apparently he was hampered by having no artillery, while the Franco-Spaniards had some four or five guns with them, bearing on the bridge.

Meanwhile Robinson’s brigade of the 5th Division had stormed Gamarra Mayor, defended by the French 118th and 119th—Gauthier’s brigade of Lamartinière’s division. This was a brilliant and costly affair—it being no light matter to attack in column of battalions the barricaded streets of a compact village. The British, however, burst in—Colonel Brooke with the 1/4th being the first to force an entrance: the French abandoned three guns which had been placed in the barricades, and fell back in disorder across the bridge. General Robinson endeavoured to improve the success by instant pursuit, but the French had guns bearing on the bridge, which swept away the first platoons that tried to cross it. Very few men reached the other side, and they were shot down before they could establish a lodgement on the farther bank. It was necessary to halt, re-form, and bring up more artillery before the attack could be repeated.

It was now past two o’clock, and the noise of Graham’s attack was sufficiently audible all down the British line, and was carrying dismay to French head-quarters. But what of the other column, that of the 3rd and 7th Divisions, which was to appear on the middle Zadorra opposite Gazan’s almost unguarded flank, in the direction of the bridge of Mendoza? It was overdue, now that both the large flanking corps were seriously engaged, and the attention of the enemy attracted toward them. But before the missing column came into action, there had been an unexpected modification of the position in the right centre. At 11.30 Wellington appeared before the Light Division, and told Alten to move it more to the left, so as to be over and above the bridge of Villodas, which it would have to attack at the moment of general advance, leaving the two bridges by Nanclares to the 4th Division and the cavalry. So rough and wooded was the ground that the division, moving in a hollow way, was established less than 300 yards from the brink of the Zadorra and the French line, without attracting the notice of the enemy. An officer of the 43rd writes: ‘I felt anxious to obtain a view, and walking leisurely between the trees found myself at the edge of the wood, in clear sight of the enemy’s cannon, planted with lighted matches and ready to apply them[564]. Had our attack begun here, the French could never have stood to their guns, so near were they to the thicket—our Riflemen would have annihilated them.’ The British bank of the Zadorra here completely commanded the bridge and the French bank, which accounts for the fact that the enemy’s artillery did not detect the approach of such a large body of troops as the Light Division. But after a time a bickering fire across the river between skirmishers on both sides broke out at several points, and some voltigeurs even pressed across Villodas bridge, and had to be cast back again by the skirmishers of the 2/95th.

There was to be, however, no attempt to pass this bridge as yet by the British. While Wellington was still with the Light Division, a peasant came up to him with the astounding intelligence that the bridge of Tres Puentes, the one at the extreme point of the ‘hairpin-bend’ of the Zadorra, was not only unoccupied but unwatched by the enemy: he offered to guide any troops sent to it. The Commander-in-Chief made up his mind at once to seize this crossing, which would outflank the French position at Villodas, and told the peasant to lead Kempt’s brigade of the Light Division to the unwatched point, about a mile and a half to the left. ‘The brigade moved off by threes at a rapid pace, along a very uneven and circuitous path, concealed from the observation of the French by high rocks, and reached the narrow bridge, which crossed the river to the hamlet of Yruna (part of the scattered village of Tres Puentes). The 1st Rifles led the way, and the whole brigade following passed at a run, with firelocks and rifles ready cocked, and ascended a steep road of fifty yards, at the top of which was an old chapel. We had no sooner cleared it than we observed a heavy column of the French on the principal hill, and commanding a bird’s eye view of us. However, fortunately, a convex bank formed a sort of tête de pont, behind which the regiments formed at full speed, without any word of command. Two round shots now came among us: the second severed the head from the body of our bold guide, the Spanish peasant. The brigade was so well covered that the enemy soon ceased firing. Our post was extraordinary—we were in the elbow of the French position, and isolated from the rest of the army, within 100 yards of the enemy[565] and absolutely occupying part of his position, without any attempt having been made to dislodge us.... Sir James Kempt expressed much wonder at our critical position, without being molested, and sent his aide-de-camp at speed across the river for the 15th Hussars, who came up singly and at a gallop along the steep path, and dismounted in rear of our centre. Some French dragoons, coolly and at a slow pace, came up to within 50 yards of us, to examine, if possible, our strength, but a few shots from the Rifles caused them to decamp. We could see three bridges within a quarter of a mile of each other, in the elbow of the enemy’s position. We had crossed the centre one (Tres Puentes), while the other two, right and left (Villodas and Mendoza), were still covered by French artillery[566].’

Expecting to be instantly attacked, and to have to fight hard for the chapel-knoll on which they had aligned themselves, Kempt’s brigade spent ‘half an hour of awkward suspense.’ The immunity with which they had been allowed to hold their position was suddenly explained by a movement which they had not been able to observe. The missing column of Wellington’s army had at last come up, and was plunging with headlong speed into the rear of the troops which were facing Kempt, so that the French had no attention to spare for the side-issue in the hairpin-bend of the Zadorra. Instead of being attacked the brigade was about to become at once an attacking force.

A word is necessary as to the leading of this column. It had been placed by Wellington under Lord Dalhousie, now commanding the 7th Division. This was an extraordinary choice, as this officer had been only a few months in the Peninsula, and had no experience of the higher responsibilities—though he had commanded a brigade in the Walcheren expedition[567]. But being as Lieutenant-General slightly senior to Picton (though they had been gazetted major-generals on the same day in 1808), he was entitled to take the command over the head of the war-worn and experienced leader of the 3rd Division. The latter had been directing one of the great marching columns during the early stages of the advance, and was not unnaturally sulky at being displaced. Common report in the army held that he was in disfavour at Head-Quarters, for intemperate letters complaining of the starving of his division during the recent march beyond the Ebro[568]. Be this as it may, Picton was during the forenoon hours of June 21st in one of his not infrequent rages. For though his column had started early, and the 3rd Division had reached Las Guetas, the villages on the south side of the Monte Arrato, which were to be its starting-point for the attack on the line of the Zadorra, Lord Dalhousie refused to advance farther than the edge of the hills, using apparently his discretion in interpreting the orders given him ‘to regulate his action from what was going on to his right and only to move when it should be ‘evidently necessary’ to favour the progress of the columns in that direction. He was obviously worried by the fact that the two rear brigades of his own division, Barnes’s and Le Cor’s, had been hindered by an artillery breakdown in the steep road behind, and were not yet up, though Cairnes’s battery, which had delayed them, ultimately overtook the leading brigade[569]. Hence he used his discretion to wait for formal orders from Head-Quarters, and to do nothing. Picton, who could note the advance of Hill’s column, and could see that the French were utterly unprepared for an attack on the middle Zadorra, chafed bitterly at the delay.

We have an interesting picture of him on that morning from eye-witnesses. He was a strange figure—suffering from inflammation of the eyes, he had put on not his cocked hat but a broad-brimmed and tall civilian top-hat—the same that may be seen to-day in the United Service Museum. ‘During the struggle on the right the centre was inactive. General Picton was impatient, he inquired of every aide-de-camp whether they had any orders for him. As the day wore on, and the fight waxed louder on the right, he became furious, and observed to the communicator of these particulars, ‘D—n it! Lord Wellington must have forgotten us.’ It was near noon, and the men were getting discontented. Picton’s blood was boiling, his stick was beating with rapid strokes upon the mane of his cob. He rode backward and forward looking in every direction for the arrival of an aide-de-camp, until at last one galloped up from Lord Wellington. He was looking for Lord Dalhousie—the 7th Division had not yet arrived, having to move over difficult ground. The aide-de-camp checked his horse and asked the general whether he had seen Lord Dalhousie. Picton was disappointed; he had expected that he might at least move now, and in a voice which did not gain softness from his feelings, answered in a sharp tone, ‘No, Sir: I have not seen his Lordship, but have you any orders for me.’ ‘None,’ replied the aide-de-camp. ‘Then, pray Sir, what are the orders that you do bring?’ ‘Why,’ answered the officer, ‘that as soon as Lord D. shall commence an attack on that bridge,’ pointing to the one on the left (Mendoza), ‘the 4th and Light are to support him.’ Picton could not understand the idea of any other division fighting in his front, and drawing himself up to his full height said to the astonished aide-de-camp, ‘You may tell Lord Wellington from me, Sir, that the 3rd Division, under my command, shall in less than ten minutes attack that bridge and carry it, and the 4th and Light may support if they choose.’ Having thus expressed his intention, he turned from the aide-de-camp and put himself at the head of his men, who were quickly in motion toward the bridge, encouraging them with the bland appellation of ‘Come on, ye rascals! Come on, ye fighting villains[570].’

Ten minutes as the time required to plunge down from the hillside to a bridge two miles away seems a short estimate. But there is no doubt that the advance of the 3rd Division was fast and furious—an eye-witness describes it as shooting like a meteor across the front of the still-halted column-head of the 7th Division. The military purist may opine that Picton should have waited till he got formal orders via Lord Dalhousie to advance. But the moments were precious—Kempt was across the Zadorra close by, in an obviously dangerous state of isolation: the French in a few minutes might be sending infantry to block the bridge of Mendoza, which they had so strangely neglected. The 7th Division was short of two brigades, and not ready to attack. Wellington’s orders were known, and the situation on the right was now such as to justify the permissible advance which they authorized. Neither Wellington nor Dalhousie in their dispatches give any hint that Picton’s action was disapproved—complete success justified it.

Picton had directed Brisbane’s brigade of the 3rd Division straight upon the bridge of Mendoza, Colville’s upon a ford 300 yards farther up-stream. Both crossed safely and almost unopposed. The only French troops watching the stream here were Avy’s weak brigade of cavalry—under 500 sabres—and their three horse-artillery guns commanding the bridge. But the latter hardly got into action, for on Picton’s rapid approach becoming visible, General Kempt threw out some companies of the 1/95th under Andrew Barnard, from his point of vantage on the knoll of Yruna, who opened such a biting fire upon the half battery that the officer in command limbered up and galloped off. Avy’s chasseurs hovered about in an undecided way—but were not capable either of defending a bridge or of attacking a brigade in position upon a steep hill. Wherefore Picton got across with small loss, and formed his two British brigades on the south side of the river. Power’s Portuguese rapidly followed Brisbane, as did a little later Grant’s brigade of the 7th Division—Lord Dalhousie’s other two brigades (as we have already noted) were not yet on the ground. On seeing Picton safely established on the left bank Kempt advanced from his knoll, and formed on the right-rear of the 3rd Division. The trifling French detachment at the bridge of Villodas—only a voltigeur company—wisely absconded at full speed on seeing Kempt on the move. The passage there was left completely free for Vandeleur’s brigade of the Light Division, who had long been waiting on the opposite steep bank.

The British were across the Zadorra in force, and the critical stage of the action was about to commence: the hour being between 2 and 3 in the afternoon.

SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER VIII

BATTLE OF VITTORIA. ROUT OF THE FRENCH

When Picton and the 3rd Division, followed by the one available brigade of the 7th Division, came pouring across the Zadorra on the side of Mendoza, while Kempt debouched from the knoll of Yruna, and Vandeleur crossed the bridge of Villodas, the position of Leval’s division became desperate. It was about to be attacked in flank by four brigades and in front by two more, and being one of the weaker divisions of the Army of the South, only 4,500 bayonets, was outnumbered threefold. Its original reserve (half Daricau’s division) had gone off to the Puebla heights hours before: the general army-reserve (Villatte’s division) had been sent away in the same direction by Jourdan’s last orders. The nearest disposable and intact French troops were Darmagnac’s division of the Army of the Centre—two miles to the rear, in position by Zuazo: the other divisions of that army had (as we have seen) gone off on a wholly unnecessary excursion to watch the Trevino road. The left wing and centre of the Army of the South was absorbed in the task of keeping back Hill, and had just begun the counter-attack upon him which Jourdan had ordered an hour before.

The sudden change in the situation, caused by the very rapid advance of Picton and the brigades that helped him, was all too evident to King Joseph and his chief of the staff, as they stood on the hill of Ariñez. The whole force of the 3rd division struck diagonally across the short space between the river and Leval’s position—Brisbane’s brigade and Power’s Portuguese making for the French flank, while Colville, higher up the stream, made for the rear of the hill, in the direction of the village of Margarita. Kempt followed Brisbane in second line, Grant’s brigade of the 7th Division, when it crossed at Mendoza, came on behind Colville. So did Vandeleur, from Villodas, after he had pulled down the obstructions and got his men over the narrow bridge. Nor was this all—the 4th Division, so long halted on the scrubby hillside opposite the left-hand of the two Nanclares bridges, suddenly started to descend the slope at the double-quick, Stubbs’s Portuguese brigade leading.

Jourdan had to make a ‘lightning change’ in all his dispositions. Leval, obviously doomed if he did not retire quickly, was told to evacuate his hill and fall back past Ariñez, into which he threw a regiment to cover his retreat, on to the heights behind it. The two brigades of Daricau and Conroux, which had stood on the other side of the high road from Leval, were to make a parallel movement back to the same line of heights. The other brigades of Daricau and Conroux, with Maransin—now deeply engaged some with O’Callaghan and others with the 50th and 92nd—were to abandon the attack which they had just begun, and which had somewhat pushed back the British advance. They too must go back to the slopes behind Ariñez. It would take longer to recall Villatte, who was now far up on the crest of the mountain to the left, engaged with Morillo’s Spaniards and the 71st. But this attack also must be broken off. Lastly, to fill the gap between Leval’s new position and the Zadorra, the Army of the Centre must come forward and hold Margarita, or if that was impossible, the hill and village of La Hermandad behind it. But only Darmagnac’s division was immediately available for this task, Cassagne’s having to be brought back from the eccentric counter-march toward the Trevino road, to which it had been committed an hour before. In this way a new line of battle would be formed, reaching from the Zadorra near Margarita across the high road at Gomecha, to the heights above Zumelzu on the left. It was at best a hazardous business to order a fighting-line more than two miles long, and bitterly engaged with the enemy at several points, to withdraw to an unsurveyed position a mile in its rear, where there was practically no reserve waiting to receive it. For on the slopes above Ariñez there was at that moment nothing but Pierre Soult’s light horse, and Treillard’s dragoons, with two batteries of artillery[571]. The new front had to be constructed from troops falling back in haste and closely pursued by the enemy, combining with other troops coming in from various directions, viz. the two divisions of the Army of the Centre. And when the line should be re-formed, what was to prevent its left from being turned once more by the Allied troops on the Puebla heights, or its right by columns crossing the middle Zadorra behind it[572]. For there would still be a gap of two miles between Margarita village and the nearest troops of the Army of Portugal, who were now engaged with Graham at Abechuco and Arriaga.

To speak plainly, the second French line was never properly formed, especially on its left; but a better front was made, and a stronger stand, than might perhaps have been expected, though the confusion caused by hasty and imperfect alignment was destined in the end to be fatal.

On the extreme left Villatte had been caught by the order of recall at the moment when he was delivering his attack on Morillo and the British 71st. He had reached the crest as ordered, had formed up across it, and then had marched on a narrow front against the Allies. Both British and Spanish were in some disorder when he came in upon them—they had now been fighting for four hours, and in successive engagements had driven first Maransin’s and then St. Pol’s brigades for two miles over very steep and rocky ground. At the moment when Villatte came upon the scene, the Allied advance had just reached a broad dip in the crest, which it would have to cross if its progress were to be continued. The Spaniards were on the right and the 71st and light companies on the left, or northern, part of the ridge. It would have been a suitable moment to halt, and re-form the line before continuing to press forward over dangerous ground. But the officer who had succeeded Cadogan in command[573] was set on ‘keeping the French upon the run,’ and recklessly ordered the tired troops to plunge down the steep side of the declivity and carry the opposite slope. He was apparently ignorant that fresh French troops were just coming to the front—several eye-witnesses say that a column in light-coloured overcoats with white shako-covers, which had been noticed on the right, was taken for a Spanish detachment[574]. At any rate, the 71st crossed the dip—four companies in its centre, the remainder at its upper end—and was suddenly met not only by a charging column in front, but by an attack in flank and almost in rear. The first volley brought down 200 men—the shattered battalion recoiled, and remounted its own slope in utter disorder, leaving some forty prisoners in the hands of the enemy. These were the only British soldiers who fell into the hands of the French that day[575]. Fortunately the 50th, coming up from the rear, was just in time to form up along the edge of the dip and cover the retreat, and was joined soon after by the 92nd, who had been facing another separate French unit lower down the slopes and to the left flank. Seeing their opponents move off for no visible reason (they had received no doubt the general order to retire), the Highland regiment had pushed up on to the crest and joined the 50th and the Spaniards.

Villatte, still ignorant that the whole French army was falling back, tried to improve his success over the 71st into a general repulse of the Allied force upon the crest, and ordered his leading regiment to cross the dip and attack the troops upon the opposite sky-line. They suffered the same fate as the 71st and from the same cause: the climb was steep among stones and furze, they were received with two devastating volleys when they neared the top of the declivity, and then charged by the 50th and 92nd—the column broke, rolled down hill, and went to the rear. A second but less vigorous attack was made by another French regiment, and repulsed with the same ease—the wrecks of the 71st joining in the defence this time. Villatte then brought up a third regiment, but this was only a feint—the attack never developed, and while it was hanging fire the whole division swung round to the rear and went off—Jourdan’s general order to retreat had at last been received, and Villatte was falling back to the new line[576]. Cameron of the 92nd, now in command on the heights, followed him up, as did the Spaniards. But there was to be no more serious fighting upon the Puebla mountain: the French gave way whenever they were pressed[577].

Long before Villatte’s fight on the high ground had come to an end, the engagement at the other end of the French line had taken an unfavourable turn. The battle in this direction fell into three separate sections. Close to the Zadorra, Colville, with the left-hand brigade of the 3rd Division, was pushing up towards Margarita, while Darmagnac, from the heights of Zuazo, was making for it from the other side. It had taken some time to file Colville’s battalions across the ford, and deploy them for the advance, and the French brigade of Darmagnac’s division got into the village first, and made a strong defence there, while the German brigade occupied La Hermandad in its rear. Colville was held in check, suffered heavily, and could not get forward. But after half an hour’s deadly fighting the enemy gave way, not only because of the frontal pressure, but because the troops on his left (Leval’s division of the Army of the South) had been defeated by Picton and were retiring, thereby exposing the flank of Darmagnac’s line. D’Erlon drew back Chassé’s much thinned brigade half a mile, to the better defensive ground formed by the village of La Hermandad and the height above it, where his German brigade was already in position: this was an integral part of the new line on which Jourdan had determined to fight, while Margarita was on low ground, and too far to the front. Colville’s brigade, like its adversaries much maltreated[578], was replaced by Grant’s brigade of the 7th Division in front line[579], while Vandeleur’s of the Light Division followed in support. They had now in front of them not only Darmagnac’s but Cassagne’s division, which had come back from its fruitless excursion to the Trevino road, and had joined the other section of the Army of the Centre[580], taking up ground in second line.

Meanwhile the really decisive blow of the whole battle was being delivered by Picton, a thousand yards farther to the south, in and above Ariñez. The striking force here consisted of Power’s Portuguese brigade on the left, and of Brisbane’s British brigade on the right, opposite the village. Kempt’s half of the Light Division had followed Picton faithfully in his diagonal movement across the slopes, and was close behind Brisbane. Farther to the right the new front of attack of Wellington’s army was only beginning to form itself—the 4th Division had deployed after crossing the upper bridge of Nanclares, and was now coming on in an échelon of brigades—Stubbs’s Portuguese in the front échelon, then W. Anson, last Skerrett. They extended from the high road southwards, and were getting into touch with Hill’s column, which after the French evacuated the height behind Subijana had also deployed for the advance—the 2nd division having now thrown forward Byng’s brigade on its left, with O’Callaghan’s next it, and Ashworth’s Portuguese in second line. Silveira’s division remained in reserve. The cavalry of the centre column had crossed after the infantry—R. Hill, Ponsonby, Victor Alten, and Grant by the upper bridge of Nanclares, D’Urban’s Portuguese by the lower. They deployed on each side of the high road east of the river, behind the 4th Division, ground suitable for horsemen being nowhere else visible. On the heights of Puebla there still remained Cadogan’s brigade (now under Cameron of the 92nd) and Morillo’s Spaniards. This detached force, which was hard in pursuit of Villatte’s retreating column, was decidedly ahead of the rest of the army, and well placed for striking at the new French flank, but it was tired and had fought hard already for many hours.

When the 4th Division had passed the upper bridge of Nanclares, and before the cavalry began to cross the Zadorra, Colonel Dickson had by Wellington’s orders commenced to bring forward the reserve artillery. Very few British batteries had yet come into action, the broken nature of the ground preventing them from keeping close to their divisions. Hence it came to pass that there was by this time an accumulation of guns in the centre: during the rest of the battle it was employed in mass, many divisional batteries joining the artillery reserve, and a formidable line of guns being presently developed along the heights which had been the original position of Gazan’s centre and right. Some of them were to the north of the high road, on Leval’s hill: some to the south, where Daricau’s front brigade had stood when the action commenced. As soon as they had come up, they began to pound the French infantry on the opposite hill. Here General Tirlet had a still more powerful artillery force in action—all the guns of the front line had got back in safety save one belonging to the horse artillery battery which had been placed opposite the bridge of Nanclares[581], and three batteries from the reserve were already in position. The cannonade on both sides was fierce—but it was the infantry which had to settle the matter, and the disadvantage to the French was that their troops, much hustled and disarranged while retreating into the new position, never properly settled down into it—especially Conroux’s and Daricau’s divisions, which had been divided into separate brigades by the way in which Gazan had dealt with them at the commencement of the action, never got into regular divisional order again, and fought piecemeal by regiments.

The decisive point was on the ground at and above Ariñez, which was held by Leval’s division, with one regiment of Daricau’s (103rd Line) on their left. The village, low down on the slope, was held by Mocquery’s brigade—Morgan’s was in support with the guns, higher up and more to the right. Picton attacked with Power’s Portuguese on his left, Brisbane’s brigade on his right, and Kempt’s brigade of the Light Division in support, except that some companies of the 1/95th had been thrown out in front of Brisbane’s line, and led the whole attack. The Riflemen rushed at the village, penetrated into it, and were evicted after a fierce tussle, by a French battalion charging in mass down the street. But immediately behind came the 88th and 74th. The former, attacking to their right of the village[582], completely smashed the French regiment which came down to meet them in a close-fire combat, and drove them in disorder up the hill, while the latter carried Ariñez itself and swept onward through it. The 45th, farther to the right, attacked and drove off the regiment of Daricau’s division which was flanking Leval. Power’s Portuguese would seem to have got engaged with Morgan’s brigade, on the left of the village; it gave way before them, when the 74th had stormed Ariñez and the Connaught Rangers had broken the neighbouring column. Leval’s routed troops appear to have swept to the rear rather in a southerly direction, and to their left of the high road, so as to leave the beginnings of a gap between them and Cassagne’s division of the Army of the Centre, which was coming up to occupy the ridge north of Gomecha, in the new position.

The complete breach in the French centre made by Picton’s capture of Ariñez, and the driving of Leval out of his position above it, had the immediate effect of compelling Darmagnac’s division to conform to the retreat, by falling back from Margarita on to La Hermandad and the hills behind it on the one wing, while the confused line of Daricau’s, Conroux’s, and Maransin’s troops, on the other hand, had to retire to the level of Gomecha, though the 4th and 2nd Divisions were not yet far enough forward to be able to press them. Nearly all the French guns appear to have been carried back to the new position, which may roughly be described as extending from Hermandad on the Zadorra by Zuazo and Gomecha to the hills in front of Esquivel. It was quite as good as the Margarita-Ariñez-Zumelzu line which had just been forced by Picton’s central attack.

It took some little time for Wellington to organize his next advance; the troops which had forced the Ariñez position had to be re-formed, and it was necessary to allow the 4th and 2nd Divisions to come up level with them, and to bring forward Dickson’s mass of artillery to a more advanced line, to batter the enemy before the next infantry assault was let loose. The only point where close fighting seems to have continued during this interval was on the extreme left, where Lord Dalhousie, after the French had left Margarita, was pressing forward Grant’s brigade of his own division, supported by Vandeleur’s brigade of the Light Division, against D’Erlon’s new position, where Neuenstein’s brigade of five German battalions lay in and about La Hermandad, with Chassé’s dilapidated regiments in reserve behind. There was a very bitter struggle at this point, rendered costly to the advancing British by the superiority of the French artillery—D’Erlon had now at least two batteries in action—Dalhousie only his own six divisional guns, those of Cairnes. Grant’s brigade, after advancing some 300 yards under a very heavy fire, came to a stand, and took cover in a deep broad ditch only 200 yards from the French front. According to an eye-witness Dalhousie hesitated for a moment as to whether a further advance was possible[583], and had the matter settled for him by the sudden charge of Vandeleur’s brigade, which came up at full speed, carried the 7th Division battalions in the ditch along with it in its impetus, and stormed La Hermandad in ten minutes. The German defenders—Baden, Nassau, and Frankfurt battalions—reeled back in disorder, and retreated to the crest of the heights behind, where Cassagne’s division, hitherto not engaged, picked them up. D’Erlon succeeded in forming some sort of a new line from Crispijana near the Zadorra to Zuazo, where his left should have joined the right of the Army of the South. It is curious to note that while Grant’s brigade lost heavily in this combat (330 casualties), Vandeleur’s, which carried on the attack to success, suffered hardly at all (38 casualties). Their German opponents were very badly punished, having lost 620 men, including 250 prisoners, in defending La Hermandad against the two British brigades[584].

While Wellington, after the first breaking of the French line, was preparing under cover of the cannonade of Dickson’s guns for the assault on their new position in front of Zuazo and Gomecha, General Graham was developing his attack on the Army of Portugal and the French line of retreat, but not with the energy that might have been expected from the victor of Barrosa.

He had, as it will be remembered, sent Oswald and the 5th Division against the bridge of Gamarra Mayor, and Longa’s Spaniards against that of Durana, while he himself remained with the 1st Division, Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese, and the bulk of his cavalry on the high road, facing the bridge of Arriaga and its outlying bulwark the village of Abechuco. We should have expected that the main attack would be delivered at this point, but nothing of the sort took place. When the noise of Oswald’s heavy fighting at Gamarra Mayor had begun to grow loud, Graham directed the two Light Battalions of the German Legion (under Colonel Halkett) to clear the French out of Abechuco. This they did with trifling loss—1 officer and 51 men, capturing several guns in the village[585]. But Graham made no subsequent attempt to improve his success by forcing the bridge behind—as is sufficiently witnessed by the fact that of his remaining battalions the Guards’ Brigade had no casualties that day, and the three Line battalions of the K.G.L. one killed and one wounded. Before drawing up in front of Arriaga he had sent Bradford’s Portuguese, for a short time, to demonstrate to his right, toward the bridge of Yurre; but he called them back after a space, and placed them to the right of Abechuco, continuing the general line of the First Division. Bradford’s battalions lost precisely 4 men killed and 9 wounded. It is clear, therefore, that Graham never attacked the Arriaga position at all. Why he massed 4,000 British and 4,000 Portuguese infantry on this front—not to speak of two brigades of cavalry—and then never used them, it is hard to make out.

We know, it is true, that not only Graham but Wellington himself over-estimated the strength of Reille’s force. They did not know that Maucune had gone away in the dark, in charge of the great convoy, and thought that Foy’s and Taupin’s divisions were the only troops of the Army of Portugal which had not rejoined. Arguing that he had four infantry divisions in front of him (though they were really only two), Graham no doubt did well to be cautious—but he was much more than that. It was at least his duty to detain and engage as many of the enemy’s troops as was possible—and he certainly did not do so.

There was opposite him at Arriaga one single infantry division—Sarrut’s, and he did so little to employ it that Reille dared—after observing the British movements for some time—to take away Sarrut’s second brigade (that of Fririon) for use as a central reserve, which he posted at Betonio a mile back from the river, leaving Menne’s brigade alone—not much over 2,000 bayonets—opposed to the whole 1st Division, Bradford, and Pack. It is true that Menne had heavy cavalry supports—Digeon’s dragoons and Curto’s brigade of Mermet’s light horse—on one flank, and Boyer’s dragoons not far away on the other. But cavalry in 1813 were not troops which could defend a bridge or the line of a river. There was also a good deal of French artillery present—a more important fact under the existing circumstances. For Reille had still twenty guns ranged along the river[586], beside those which were detached on the flank with Casapalacios’ Spaniards. But Graham had almost as many—the three batteries of Lawson, Ramsay, and Dubourdieu—and of these the two last, ranged opposite Arriaga bridge, and pounding the village behind it, quite held their own against the opposing guns.

It can only be supposed that Graham, in refraining from any serious attack along the high road, was obeying in too literal a fashion Wellington’s orders not to commit himself to close fighting in the low ground, and to regulate his movements by those of the columns on his right (Picton’s and Dalhousie’s divisions). When these had worked their way up the Zadorra to his neighbourhood he did advance. But it was then so late that the enemy in front of him was able to get away, without any very disastrous losses.

While Graham kept quiet on the high road, Oswald was engaged in a very different style at Gamarra Mayor, where after his first capture of the village, he made at least three desperate attempts to force the bridge, held most obstinately by Lamartinière’s division. The passage was taken and retaken, but no lodgement on the southern bank could be made. After Robinson’s brigade had exhausted itself, Oswald put in the 3/1st from Hay’s brigade and some of his Portuguese[587]. But no success was obtained, though both sides suffered heavily. The casualty rolls of the 5th Division show a loss of 38 officers and 515 men—those of their French opponents 38 officers and 558 men. Practically all on both sides fell in the murderous fighting up and down Gamarra bridge. The forces were so equally balanced—each about 6,000 bayonets and one divisional battery—that on such a narrow front decision was impossible when both fought their best. The only way of attacking the bridge was by pushing straight down the narrow street of the village from the British side, and across an open field from the French. Both parties had guns trained upon its ends, which blew to pieces any column-head that debouched. There were no fords anywhere near, and the banks for some distance up-stream and down-stream were lined by the skirmishers of both sides, taking what cover they could find, and doing their best to keep down each other’s fire. ‘It plainly appeared this day that the enemy had formed a sort of determination not to be beat: we never saw them stand so vigorous before,’ writes a diarist from the ranks, in Robinson’s brigade[588].

There was an absolute deadlock at Gamarra Mayor till nearly five o’clock in the afternoon. At Durana things went otherwise: Longa, though hampered by his lack of guns, ended by pushing the Franco-Spanish brigade across the bridge, and then for some way down the south side of the Zadorra. The retreating party then made a stand behind a ravine and brook some half-mile farther on, where they were flanked by a brigade of Mermet’s light cavalry, as well as by their own five squadrons, and supported by the French battalion of the 3rd Line which had been in their quarter of the field from the first. Longa was unable to push them farther—probably for fear of lending his flank to cavalry charges, and gained no further ground till the general retreat of the French army began. But he had effectively cut King Joseph’s communication with France by seizing Durana—and this was the governing factor of the whole fight, since the enemy had now only the Pampeluna road by which he could retreat. If Joseph had owned some infantry reserves, he could (no doubt) have driven Longa away; but he had not a man to spare in any part of the field, and things were going so badly with the Army of the South that he had no attention to spare for the Army of Portugal.

It must have been about four o’clock before Wellington, having rearranged his line and brought up his artillery, determined to renew the general attack on the French right and centre. Joseph had brought up to the new position (extending from Crispijana on the left by Zuazo to the heights in front of Esquivel) the whole of the infantry of the Armies of the South and Centre, which now formed one rather irregular line. The only infantry reserve was the six weak battalions of the Royal Guard—perhaps 2,500 bayonets[589], placed on the high road in front of Vittoria—there was also a mass of cavalry in reserve, but this was of as little use for the defence of a hill-position as was Wellington’s for the assault on it. There were now in line Tilly’s division of dragoons which had been brought back from its useless excursion on the Logroño road, and Pierre Soult’s light horse, both of Gazan’s army, with Treillard’s dragoons, Avy’s Chasseurs, and the two cavalry regiments of the Royal Guard, all from the Army of the Centre—in all some 4,500 sabres.

The artillery, however, was very strong, and—deployed in a long line on both sides of the high road—was already sweeping all the slopes in front. There were present 46 guns of the Army of the South (all that it owned save one piece lost at Ariñez and three absent with Digeon’s dragoons), twelve guns of the Army of the Centre, and 18 from the reserve of the Army of Portugal—76 in all[590]. Dickson would appear to have brought up against them very nearly the same number: 54 British, 18 Portuguese, and 3 Spanish guns, when the last of the reserve batteries had got across the Zadorra and come forward into line—a total of 75 pieces[591]. The cannonade was the fiercest ever known in the Peninsula—each side was mainly trying to pound the enemy’s infantry—a task more easy for the French than the Allied gunners, since the assailant had to come up the open hillside, and the assailed was partly screened by woods (especially in front of Gomecha) and dips in the rough ground which he was holding.

The French line was now formed by Cassagne’s division on the extreme right, with one regiment (the 16th Léger) in Crispijana, and the others extending to meet Darmagnac’s much depleted battalions which were in and about Zuazo. Leval ought to have been in touch with Darmagnac, but obviously was not, the ground on each side of the high road being held by guns only, with cavalry in support some way behind. For after losing Ariñez Leval’s infantry had inclined much to their left. But on the other flank Villatte had, as it seems, inclined somewhat to the right, for having lost the heights of La Puebla, he could not prevent Cameron and Morillo from pressing along their crest and getting behind his new position: they were edging past his flank all through this period of the action.

The long front of the British advance started with Colville’s brigade—now once more in front line—opposite Crispijana, and was continued southward by those of Grant, Power, Brisbane, Stubbs, Byng, and O’Callaghan, while Vandeleur, Kempt, W. Anson, Skerrett, and Ashworth were formed in support, with Silveira’s division and the cavalry in third line. The missing brigades of the 7th Division were not yet on the field, possibly not even across the Zadorra, for neither of them lost a man that day. The advance of the line was a splendid spectacle, recorded with notes of admiration by many who witnessed it from the hill of Ariñez or the heights of La Puebla.

The French artillery fire was heavy, and in some sections of the line very murderous—Power’s and Stubbs’s Portuguese brigades were special sufferers. But the infantry defence was not resolute: on many parts of the front it was obviously very weak. The enemy was already a beaten army, he had been turned out of two positions, the news had got round that the road to France had been cut, and that Reille’s small force was in grave danger of losing the line of the Zadorra—in which case the whole army would find itself attacked in the rear. It is clear from the French narratives that the infantry did not support the guns in front line as they should. The reports of the Army of the Centre speak of being turned on their right by a column which kept near the river and took Crispijana—obviously Colville’s brigade. As the 16th Léger in that village only suffered a loss that day of one officer and 26 men, its resistance cannot have been very serious. But D’Erlon’s divisions were also outflanked on their left—by clouds of skirmishers drifting in by the wood and broken ground about Gomecha, who turned on the line of artillery, and began shooting down the gunners from flank and rear[592]. Obviously there was a gap along the high road, by which these light troops must have penetrated, and as obviously it was caused by Leval having sheered off to the south. For the artillery report of Gazan’s army also speaks of being turned on its right wing—‘enveloped by skirmishers who had got into Gomecha and were in rear of the position, which was being also attacked frontally.’ Nor is this all, ‘the mass on the mountain (Cameron and Morillo) descended on the left flank and rear of the Army of the South before it had time to form again: the artillery found itself without support.’ If so, where were the four and a half divisions of infantry which should have been protecting it?

The only possible deduction from all our narratives is that Gazan’s army made no real stand on the Gomecha-Esquivel position, and retired the moment that the attack drew near. And the person mainly responsible for the retreat was the Army-Commander himself, whose very unconvincing account of this phase of the action is that ‘the right flank of the line was continually being outflanked: I received no further orders about the taking up of the position of which the King had spoken; the enemy was getting near the gates of Vittoria (!), and so I had to continue my movement toward that town, after having taken up a position by Zuazo, with the intention of covering with my right-hand division and my guns the retreat of the rest of the army, which without this help would have been hopelessly compromised. At this time I had only lost four guns, abandoned on the extreme left of the line: the artillery was intact, and the army had suffered no greater loss than it had inflicted on the enemy.’

Reading this artful narrative, we note that (1) Gazan evacuated on his own responsibility a position that the King had definitely ordered him to take up—because he had ‘no further orders’; (2) the continued ‘turning of his right’ could only have resulted from the defeat of his own troops on and about the high road—which was in his sector, not in D’Erlon’s, Leval was across it when the last phase of the battle began; (3) D’Erlon held Zuazo and complained that there was nothing on his left, which was completely turned on the side where Leval ought to have been but was not; (4) Gazan retreated without any serious loss having compelled him to do so. This is obviously the fact. Villatte’s whole division had less than 300 casualties, Leval’s under 800, Daricau’s under 850: the only troops hard hit were Maransin’s brigade, Rey’s brigade of Conroux’s division, and the 103rd Line in Daricau’s. Moreover, the 4th and 2nd British Divisions, the troops immediately opposed to Gazan’s main line, had insignificant losses in this part of the action, Byng’s brigade under 150, Ashworth’s just 23, Anson’s 90, Skerrett’s 22; the only appreciable loss had been that of Stubbs’s Portuguese—about 240. For the heavy casualty lists of O’Callaghan’s, Cadogan’s, and Brisbane’s battalions had all been suffered in the earlier phases of the fight[593].

The fact is that Gazan went off without orders, and left the King and D’Erlon in the lurch. Jourdan is telling the exact truth when he says that ‘General Gazan, instead of conducting his divisions to the position indicated, swerved strongly to the right, marching in retreat, so as to link up with Villatte; he continued to draw away, following the foot-hills of the mountain [of Puebla], leaving the high road and Vittoria far to his left, and a vast gap between himself and Count D’Erlon’[594].

No doubt the breach made in the French centre when Picton stormed the heights behind Ariñez had been irreparable from the first; and no doubt also the flanking movement of Morillo and Cameron on the mountain must have dislodged the Army of the South, if it had waited to come into frontal action with Cole and Hill. But Gazan showed complete disregard of all interests save his own, and went off in comparatively good condition, without orders, leaving the King, D’Erlon, and Reille to get out of the mess as best they might.

Some of the British narratives tend to show that many parts of Gazan’s line had never properly settled down into the Gomecha-Esquivel position, having reached it in such bad order that they would have required more time than was granted them to re-form. An officer present with the skirmishing line of the 4th Division writes in his absolutely contemporary diary: ‘From the time when our guns began to open, and to throw shells almost into the rear of the enemy’s height, we saw him begin to fall back in haste from his position. We [4th Division] marched on at a great pace in column. From that moment the affair became a mere hunt. Our rapid advance almost cut off four or five French battalions—they made some resistance at first, but soon dissolved and ran pell-mell, like a swarm of bees, up the steep hill, from which they began to fire down on us. We disregarded their fire, and kept on advancing—in order to carry out our main object: broken troops are easy game. When we found the enemy in this second position there was heavy artillery fire. Since his left wing was somewhat refused, we advanced in échelon from the right. When we got within musketry range, we found he had gone off out of sight. After that we drove him out of one position after another till at last we were near the gates of Vittoria[595].’ Several other 4th Division and 2nd Division narratives agree in stating that after the storming of Ariñez the French never made anything like a solid stand on the Gomecha-Esquivel heights. But (as has been said above) the best proof of it is the British casualty list, which shows that the reserve line was hardly under fire, and that the front line had very moderate losses, except at one or two points.

D’Erlon made a more creditable resistance on the French right, but he was obviously doomed if he should linger long after Gazan had gone off. After losing Crispijana and Zuazo he made a last stand on the slopes a mile in front of Vittoria, between Ali and Armentia, to which the whole of his own artillery and that of the reserve, and perhaps also some guns of the Army of the South, retired in time to take up a final position[596]. For some short space they maintained a furious fire on the 3rd Division troops which were following them up, so as to allow their infantry to re-form. But it was but for a few minutes—the column near the Zadorra (Grant, Colville, and Vandeleur) got round the flank of the village of Ali, and the line of guns was obviously in danger if it remained any longer in action. Just at this moment D’Erlon received the King’s orders for a general retreat by the route of Salvatierra. The high road to France had ceased to be available since Longa got across it in the earlier afternoon. Any attempt to force it open would obviously have taken much time, and might well have failed, since the French were everywhere closely pressed by the pursuing British. Jourdan judged the idea of reopening the passage to be hopelessly impracticable, and ordered the retreat on Pampeluna as the only possible policy, though (as his report owns) he was aware of the badness of the Salvatierra road, and doubted his power to carry off his guns, transport, and convoy of refugees by such a second-rate track. But it was the only one open, and there was no choice.

The orders issued were that the Train and Park should get off at once, that the Army of the South should retreat by the country paths south of Vittoria, the Army of the Centre by those north of it. The Army of Portugal was to hang on to its position till D’Erlon’s troops had passed its rear, and then follow them as best it could. All the cross-tracks indicated to the three armies ended by converging on the Salvatierra road east of Vittoria, so that a hopeless confusion was assured for the moment when three separate streams of retreating troops should meet, and struggle for the use of one narrow and inadequate thoroughfare. But as a matter of fact the chaos began long before that time was reached, for the road was blocked or ever the three armies got near it. The order for the retreat of the Park and convoys had been issued far too late—Gazan says that he had advised Jourdan to give it two hours before, when the first positions had been abandoned. But the Marshal had apparently high confidence in his power to hold the Hermandad-Gomecha-Esquivel line; at any rate, he had given no such command. The noise of battle rolling ever closer to Vittoria had warned the mixed multitude of civil and military hangers-on of the army who were waiting by their carriages, carts, pack-mules, and fourgons, in the open fields east of Vittoria, that the French army was being driven in. Many of those who were not under military discipline had begun to push ahead on the Salvatierra road, the moment that the alarming news flew around that the great chaussée leading to France had been blocked. The Park, however—which all day long had been sending up reserve ammunition to the front, and even one or two improvised sections of guns—had naturally remained waiting for orders. So had the immense accumulation of divisional and regimental baggage, the convoy of treasure which had arrived from Bayonne on the 19th, and the heavy carriages of the King’s personal caravan, stuffed with the plate and pictures of the palace at Madrid. And of the miscellaneous French and Spanish hangers-on of the Court—ministers, courtiers, clerks, commissaries, contractors, and the ladies who in legitimate or illegitimate capacities followed them—few had dared to go off unescorted on an early start. There was a vast accumulation of distracted womenfolk—nous étions un bordel ambulant, said one French eye-witness—some crammed together in travelling coaches with children and servants, others riding the spare horses or mules of the men to whom they belonged. When the orders for general retreat were shouted around, among the fields where the multitude had been waiting, three thousand vehicles of one sort and another tried simultaneously to get into one or another of the five field-paths which go east from Vittoria, all of which ultimately debouch into the single narrow Salvatierra road. A dozen blocks and upsets had occurred before the first ten minutes were over, and chaos supervened. Many carriages and waggons never got off on a road at all. Into the rear of this confusion there came charging, a few minutes later, batteries of artillery going at high speed, and strings of caissons, which had been horsed up and had started away early from the Park. Of course they could not get through—but the thrust which they delivered, before they came to an enforced stop, jammed the crowd of vehicles in front of them into a still more hopeless block. Dozens of carriages broke down—whereupon light-fingered fugitives began to help themselves to all that was spilt. Of course camp followers began the game, but Jourdan says that a large proportion of the French prisoners that day were soldiers who s’amusaient à piller in and about Vittoria; one of the official reports from the Army of Portugal remarks that the retreating cavalry joined in the ‘general pillage of the valuables of the army,’ and other narrators mention that the treasure-fourgons had already been broken into long before the English came upon the scene[597]. Be this as it may, there was no long delay before the terrors of the stampede culminated with the arrival of several squadrons of Grant’s hussars, who had penetrated by the gap between D’Erlon’s and Gazan’s lines of retreat, and had made a short cut through the suburbs of the town. Of the chaos that followed the firing of the first pistol shots which heralded the charge of the British light cavalry, we must not speak till we have dealt with the last fight of the Army of Portugal, on the extreme French right.

Till Grant’s and Colville’s brigades broke into Crispijana and Ali, the line of Reille’s gallant defence along the Zadorra had remained intact. Only artillery fire was going on opposite the bridge of Arriaga, where the 1st Division and the two Portuguese brigades had halted by Graham’s orders at some distance from the river, and had never advanced. The two cavalry brigades were behind them. At Gamarra Mayor the 5th Division had failed to force a passage, though it had inflicted on Lamartinière’s troops as heavy a loss as it suffered. Longa was held up half a mile beyond Durana, though he had successfully cut the Bayonne chaussée. There was considerable cannonade and skirmishing fire going on, upon a front of three miles, but no further progress reported. The whole scene, however, was changed from the moment when Grant’s and Colville’s brigades, turning the flank of D’Erlon’s line close to the Zadorra, came sweeping over the hills by Ali into the very rear of Reille’s line. The Army of Portugal had been directed to hold the bridges and keep back Graham, until the rest of the French host had got off. But the danger now came not from the front but from the rear. In half an hour more the advancing British columns would be level with the bridge of Arriaga and surrounding the infantry that held it. Reille determined on instant retreat, the only course open to him: so far as was possible it was covered by the very ample provision of cavalry which he had in hand. Digeon, who has left a good account of the crisis, made several desperate charges, to hold back the advancing British while Menne’s brigade was escaping from Arriaga. One was against infantry, which formed square and beat off the dragoons with no difficulty[598]—the other against hussars, apparently two squadrons of the 15th, which had turned northward from the suburbs of Vittoria and tried to ride in and cut off the retreat of Menne’s battalions[599]. They were beaten back, and the infantry scrambled off, leaving behind them Sarrut, their divisional general, mortally wounded as the retreat began. Moreover, all the guns in and about Arriaga had to be abandoned in the fields, where they could make no rapid progress. The gunners unhitched the horses, and escaped as best they could.

Reille had drawn up in front of Betonio the small infantry reserve (Fririon’s brigade) which he had wisely provided for himself, flanked by Boyer’s dragoons and Curto’s brigade of light cavalry. The object of this stand was not only to give Menne’s and Digeon’s troops a nucleus on which they could rally, but to gain time for Lamartinière to draw off from in front of Gamarra Mayor bridge, where he was still hotly engaged with Oswald’s division. This infantry got away in better order than most French troops on that day, and even brought off its divisional battery, though that of the cavalry which had been co-operating with it had to be left behind not far from the river-bank, having got into a marshy bottom where it stuck fast. The Franco-Spaniards of Casapalacios and their attendant cavalry escaped over the hills east of Durana, pursued by Longa, who took many prisoners from them.

When Lamartinière’s division had come in, Reille made a rapid retreat to the woods of Zurbano, a mile and a half behind Betonio, which promised good cover. He was now being pursued by the whole of Graham’s corps, which had crossed the Zadorra when the bridges were abandoned. Pack’s brigade, followed by the 1st Division and Bradford, advanced on Arriaga; they were somewhat late owing to slow filing over the bridge. At Gamarra Oswald sent in the pursuit of Lamartinière two squadrons of light dragoons[600] which had been attached to his column; these were followed by the rest of their brigade, which Graham sent up from the main road to join them, and also by Bock’s German dragoons. The object of using the smaller and more remote bridge was that cavalry crossing by it had a better chance of getting into Reille’s rear than they would have secured by passing at Arriaga. The much exhausted 5th Division followed the cavalry.

Having reached the edge of the woods, Reille ordered the bulk of his troops to push on hard, by the two parallel roads which traverse them, keeping Fririon’s brigade in hand as a fighting rearguard. The rather disordered columns were emerging on the east side of the woods, and streaming into and past the village of Zurbano, when the leading squadrons of the 12th and 16th Light Dragoons came in upon them. These squadrons had avoided entangling themselves in the trees till the French rearguard had passed on, but prepared to charge the moment they got into open ground, though the main body of the brigade had not come up. They found opposed to them a regiment of Boyer’s dragoons, supported by another of hussars, which they charged but did not break[601]. But on the coming up of the rear squadrons, the attack was renewed with success. The French cavalry gave way, but only to clear the front of the 36th Line of Fririon’s brigade, which was in square outside Zurbano. The British light dragoons swept down on the square, but were completely repulsed by its steady fire. This gained time for the rest of Reille’s troops to make off, and the pursuit slackened. But the bulk of the French went off in such haste that they abandoned four guns of Lamartinière’s artillery, and took away with them only the remaining two—the sole pieces that escaped that day of the immense train of Joseph’s three armies. Some hundreds of stragglers were taken, but no single unit of the retiring force was cut off or captured whole. Reille wisely kept his army, so long as was possible, on the side-paths by Arbulo and Oreytia, before debouching into the main Salvatierra road, which was seething over with the wrecks of the other armies and the convoys. Hence he succeeded in escaping the utter confusion into which the rest fell, and, finally, when he turned into the main track, was able to constitute himself a rearguard to the whole. Graham’s pursuit of him seems to have been slow and cautious—no troops indeed ever came near the retreating columns except the two light dragoon regiments, the Caçador battalions of Pack and Bradford, and some of Longa’s skirmishers, who (as Reille mentions) followed him along the hills on his left, shooting down into the retreating masses, but not attempting to break in. The 5th Division appears to have followed not much farther than the open ground beyond the woods of Zurbano, where it halted and encamped after eight o’clock in some bean-fields. Nor does it seem that the 1st Division got more than a league or so beyond the Zadorra[602]. The Caçadores and cavalry, however, did not halt till they reached El Burgo, four or five miles farther on.

The scene was very different on the other side of Vittoria, where D’Erlon’s army was pushing its way, in utter disorder, through the fields and by-paths over which the Parks and convoy were trying in vain to get off, and Gazan’s (farther to the south) was making a dash over ground of the most tiresome sort. For in the rugged tract east of Esquivel and Armentia such paths as there were mostly ran in the wrong direction—north and south instead of east and west—and it was necessary to disregard them and to strike across country. Six successive ravines lay in the way—marshy bottoms in which ran trifling brooks descending toward the Zadorra—and several woods on the ridges between the ravines. Hill’s and Cole’s skirmishers were pressing in the rear, and above, on the heights of Puebla, Morillo’s and Cameron’s troops could be seen hurrying along with the intention of getting ahead of the retreating masses. The confusion growing worse every moment—for companies and battalions each struck out for the easiest line of retreat without regard for their neighbours—Gazan gave orders to abandon all the artillery, which was getting embogged, battery after battery, in the ravines, and gave leave for every unit to shift for itself—general sauve-qui-peut. The horses were unhitched from the guns and caissons, many of the infantry threw off their packs, and the army went off broadcast, some in the direction of Metauco and Arbulo, others by village paths more to the south. The general stream finally flowed into the Salvatierra road, where it was covered by the Army of Portugal, which was making a much more orderly retreat[603]. English eye-witnesses of this part of the battle complain bitterly that no horsemen ever came up to assist the wearied 2nd Division infantry in the pursuit, and maintain that thousands of prisoners might have been taken by a few squadrons[604]. But all the cavalry seems to have been directed on Vittoria by the high road, and save Grant’s hussar brigade none of it came into action. This is sufficiently proved by its casualty lists—in R. Hill’s, Ponsonby’s, Long’s, Victor Alten’s, and Fane’s brigades that day the total losses were one man killed and eleven wounded! Only Anson’s Light Dragoons in Graham’s corps and Grant’s regiments in the centre got into the fighting at all. The rugged ground, it is true, was unfavourable for cavalry action in regular order, but it was almost as unfavourable for disordered infantry escaping over ravines and ditches. Something was wrong here in the general direction of the mounted arm—perhaps it suffered from the want of a responsible cavalry leader—the brigadiers dared not act for themselves, and Bock (the senior cavalry officer) was not only short-sighted in the extreme, but absent from the main battle all day in Graham’s corps. One cannot but suspect that Wellington’s thunderings in previous years, against reckless cavalry action, were always present in the minds of colonels and brigadiers who had a chance before them. And possibly, in the end, there was more gained by the avoidance of mistakes of rashness than lost by the missing of opportunities, if we take the war as a whole. But at Vittoria it would most certainly appear that the great mass of British cavalry might as well have been on the other side of the Ebro for all the good that it accomplished.

It only remains to speak of the chaos in the fields and roads east of Vittoria. When the general débâcle began King Joseph and Jourdan took their post on a low hill half a mile east of the town, and endeavoured to organize the departure of the Park and convoys—a hopeless task, for the roads were blocked, and no one listened to orders. It was in vain that aides-de-camp and orderlies were sent in all directions. Presently a flood of fugitives were driven in upon the staff, by the approach of British cavalry in full career. These were Grant’s 10th and 18th Hussars, who had turned the town on its left, and galloped down on the prey before them. Joseph had only with him the two squadrons of his Lancers of the Guard, which had been acting as head-quarters escort all day. It would appear that the Guard Hussars came up to join them about this time. At any rate, these two small regiments made a valiant attempt to hold off the hussars—they were of course beaten, being hopelessly outnumbered[605]. The King and staff had to fly as best they could, and were much scattered, galloping over fields and marshy ravines, mixed with military and civil fugitives of all sorts. Some of the British hussars followed the throng, taking a good many prisoners by the way: more, it is to be feared, stopped behind to gather the not too creditable first-fruits of victory, by plundering the royal carriages, which lay behind the scene of their charge. The French stragglers had already shown them the way.

Wellington, on reaching Vittoria, set Robert Hill’s brigade of the Household Cavalry to guard the town from plunder, and sent on the rest of the horse, and the infantry as they came up, in pursuit of the enemy. The French, however, had by now a good start, and troops in order cannot keep up with troops in disorder, who have got rid of their impedimenta, and scattered themselves. The country, moreover, was unfavourable for cavalry, as has been said above, and the infantry divisions were tired out. The chase ended five miles beyond Vittoria—the enemy, when last seen, being still on the run, with no formed rearguard except on the side road where the Army of Portugal was retreating.

If the prisoners were fewer than might have been expected, the material captured was such as no European army had ever laid hands on before, since Alexander’s Macedonians plundered the camp of the Persian king after the battle of Issus. The military trophies compared well even with those of Leipzig and Waterloo—151 guns, 415 caissons, 100 artillery waggons. Probably no other army ever left all its artillery save two solitary pieces in the enemy’s hands[606]. There was but one flag captured, and that was only the standard of a battalion of the 100th Line which had been reduced in May, and had not been actually borne in the battle[607]. The baton of Jourdan, as Marshal of the Empire, was an interesting souvenir, which delighted the Prince Regent when it arrived in London[608], but only bore witness to the fact that his personal baggage, like that of his King, had been captured. A few thousand extra prisoners—the total taken was only about 2,000—would have been more acceptable tokens of victory.

But non-military spoil was enormous—almost incredible. It represented the exploitation of Spain for six long years by its conquerors. ‘To the accumulated plunder of Andalusia were added the collections made by the other French armies—the personal baggage of the King—fourgons having inscribed on them in large letters “Domaine extérieur de S.M. l’Empereur”—the military chest containing the millions recently received from France for the payment of the Army, and not yet distributed—jewels, pictures, embroidery, silks, all manner of things costly and portable had been assiduously transported thus far. Removed from their frames and rolled up carefully, were the finest Italian pictures from the royal collections of Madrid: they were found in the “imperials” of Joseph’s own carriages. All this mixed with cannon, overturned coaches, broken-down waggons, forsaken tumbrils, wounded soldiers, French and Spanish civilians, women and children, dead horses and mules, absolutely covered the face of the country, extending over the surface of a flat containing many hundred acres[609].’ The miserable crowd was guessed by an eye-witness to have numbered nearly 20,000 persons. Spanish and French camp-followers and military stragglers had already started plunder—on them supervened English and Portuguese civil and military vultures of the same sort—servants and muleteers by the thousand, bad soldiers by the hundred: for while the good men marched on, the bad ones melted out of the ranks and flew to the spoil, evading the officers who tried to urge them on. In such a chaos evasion was easy. Nor were the commissioned ranks altogether without their unobtrusive seekers after gain—as witness the subjoined narrative by one whom a companion in a contemporary letter describes as a ‘graceless youth.’

‘As L. and I rode out of Vittoria, we came to the camp in less than a mile. On the left-hand side of the road was a heap of ransacked waggons already broken up and dismantled. There arose a shout from a number of persons among the waggons, and we found that they had discovered one yet unopened. We cantered up and found some men using all possible force to break open three iron clasps secured with padlocks. On the side of the fourgon was painted “Le Lieutenant-Général Villatte.” The hasps gave way, and a shout followed. The whole surface of the waggon was packed with church plate, mixed with bags of dollars. A man who thrust his arm down said that the bottom was full of loose dollars and boxes. L. and I were the only ones on horseback, and pushed close to the waggon. He swung out a large chalice, and buckling it to his holster-strap cantered off. As the people were crowding to lay hold of the plate, I noted a mahogany box about eighteen inches by two feet, with brass clasps. I picked out four men, told them that the box was the real thing, and if they would fetch it out we would see what it held. They caught the idea: the box was very heavy. I led the way through the standing corn, six or seven feet high, to a small shed, where we put it down and tried to get it open. After several devices had failed, two men found a large stone, and, lifting it as high as they could, dropped it on the box. It withstood several blows, but at length gave way. Gold doubloons and smaller pieces filled the whole box, in which were mixed some bags with trinkets. Just then an Ordnance store-keeper came up, and said there was no time to count shares: he would go round and give a handfull in turn to each. He first poured a double handfull into my holster. The second round was a smaller handfull. By this time I was reflecting that I was the only officer present, and in rather an awkward position. I said they might have the rest of my share,—there was first a look of surprise, and then a burst of laughter, and I trotted away. I rode eight or ten miles to the bivouack and found the officers in an ancient church—housed à la Cromwell. On the 23rd, before we left our quarters, I and —— went up into the belfry, and counted out the gold—the doubloons alone made nearly £400. I remitted £250 to my father, and purchased another horse with part of the balance[610].’

General Villatte, no doubt, had special facilities in Andalusia—but every fourgon and carriage contained something that had been worth carrying off. The amount of hard cash discovered was almost incredible. Men and officers who had been self-respecting enough to avoid the unseemly rush at the waggons, had wonderful bargains at a sort of impromptu fair or auction which was held among the débris of the convoy that night. Good mules were going for three guineas—horses for ten. Every one wished to get rid of the heavy duros and five-franc pieces, which constituted the greater part of the plunder; six and eight dollars respectively were offered and taken for a gold twenty-franc piece or a guinea. ‘The camp was turned into a fair—it was lighted up, the cars, &c., made into stands, upon which the things taken were exposed for sale. Many soldiers, to add to the absurdity of the scene, dressed themselves up in uniforms found in the chests. All the Portuguese boys belonging to some divisions are dressed in the uniforms of French officers—many of generals[611].’

Wellington had hoped to secure the five million francs of the French subsidy which had just arrived at Vittoria before the battle. His expectations were deceived; only one-twentieth of the sum was recovered, though an inquisitorial search was made a few days later in suspected quarters. One regiment, which had notoriously prospered, was made to stack its knapsacks on the 23rd, and they were gone through in detail by an assistant provost-marshal—but little was found: the men had stowed away their gains in belts and secret pockets; or deposited them with quartermasters and commissaries who were known to be honest and silent.

The only feature in this discreditable scene that gives the historian some satisfaction is to know that there was no mishandling of prisoners—not even of prominent Spanish traitors. The only person recorded to have been killed in the chaos was M. Thiébault, the King’s treasurer, who fought to defend his private strong-box containing 100,000 dollars, and got shot[612]. The women were particularly well treated—the Countess Gazan, wife of the Commander of the Army of the South, was sent by Wellington’s orders in her own carriage to join her husband—a courtesy acknowledged by several French diarists[613]. The same leave was given later to many others, and the Commander-in-Chief wrote to the Spanish Ministry to beg that no vengeance might be taken on the captured afrancesados, and seems to have secured his end in the main.

The French loss in the battle, according to the definitive report made from the head-quarters of the three armies after they had got back into France, was 42 officers and 716 men killed, 226 officers and 4,210 men wounded, and 23 officers and 2,825 prisoners or missing—a total of 8,091. It is known that of the ‘missing’ some hundreds were stragglers who rejoined later, and some other hundreds dead men, who had not got into the list of killed. The total number of prisoners did not really exceed 2,000. But on the other hand the official returns are incomplete, not giving any figures for the artillery or train of the Armies of Portugal and the Centre, or for the Royal Guards (which lost 11 officers and therefore probably 150 to 200 men), or for the General Staff (which had 35 casualties), or for the stray troops of the Army of the North present in the battle. Probably the real total, therefore, was very much about the 8,000 men given by the official return.

The Allied casualties were just over 5,000—of whom 3,672 were British, 921 Portuguese, and 552 Spaniards. A glance at the table in the Appendix will show how unequally they were distributed. Seven-tenths of the whole loss fell on the 2nd and 3rd Divisions, with Grant’s brigade of the 7th, Robinson’s of the 5th, and Stubbs’s Portuguese in the 4th. These troops furnished over 3,500 of the total loss of 5,158. The 1st Division (54 casualties), the British brigades of the 4th Division (125 casualties), Hay’s and Spry’s brigades of the 5th (200 casualties), Barnes’ and Lecor’s of the 7th (no casualties[614]), the Light Division (132 casualties), Silveira’s Division (10 casualties), the cavalry (155 casualties) had no losses of importance. The 266 men marked as missing were all either dead or absent marauding, save 40 of the 71st whom the French took prisoners to Pampeluna. The Spanish loss of 14 officers and 524 men was entirely in Morillo’s and Longa’s Divisions, and much heavier among the Estremadurans, who fought so well on the heights of La Puebla, than among the Cantabrians who skirmished all day at Durana. Giron’s Galicians were never engaged, having only arrived in the rear of Graham’s column just as the fighting north of the Zadorra was over. They encamped round Arriaga at the end of the day.

That the battle of Vittoria was the crowning-point of a very brilliant strategic campaign is obvious. That in tactical detail it was not by any means so brilliant an example of what Wellington and his army could accomplish, is equally obvious. Was the General’s plan to blame? or was a well-framed scheme wrecked by the faults of subordinates? It is always a dangerous matter to criticize Wellington’s arrangements—so much seems clear to the historian that could not possibly have been known to the soldier on the morning of June 21st. It is obvious to us now that there was a fair chance not only of beating the French army, and of cutting off its retreat on Bayonne, but of surrounding and destroying at least a considerable portion of it. Wellington’s orders are always extremely reticent in stating his final aims, and give a list of things to be done by each division, rather than a general appreciation of what he intends the army to accomplish. But reading his directions to Graham, Hill, and Dalhousie, and looking at the way on which they work out on the map, and the allocation of forces in each column, it would seem that in view of the distribution of the French troops on the afternoon of June 20th, he planned a complete encircling scheme, which should not only accomplish what he actually did accomplish, but much more. Graham, with his 20,000 men, must have been intended not only to force the line of the Zadorra and cut the Royal Road, but to fall upon the rear of the whole French army, which on the afternoon of the 20th had been seen to have a most inadequate flank-guard towards the north-east. Hill’s 20,000 men were not, as Jourdan thought, the only main attack, nor as Gazan (equally in error) thought, a mere demonstration. They were intended to make an encircling movement to the south, as strong as Graham’s similar movement to the north. But obviously both the flanking columns, Hill’s far more than Graham’s, were in danger of being repulsed, if the French could turn large unemployed reserves upon them. Wherefore the central attacks, by the 4th and Light Divisions on the Nanclares side, and by the 3rd and 7th Divisions on the Mendoza side, were necessary in order to contain any troops which Jourdan might have sent off to overwhelm Hill or Graham.

And here comes the weak point of the whole scheme—all the movements had to be made through defiles and over rough country: Hill had to debouch from the narrow pass of Puebla, Graham had a long mountain road from Murguia, and, worst of all, Dalhousie, with the 3rd and 7th Divisions, had to cross the watershed of a very considerable mountain by mere peasants’ tracks. Only the column which marched from the Bayas to Nanclares had decent going on a second-rate road. There was, therefore, a considerable danger that some part of the complicated scheme might miscarry. And any failure at one point imperilled the whole, since the Nanclares column was not to act till Hill was well forward, and the Mendoza column was ordered to get into touch with the troops to its right, and regulate its movements by them; while Graham, still farther off, was also to guide himself by what was going on upon his right, to correct himself with the Mendoza column, and only to attack on the Bilbao road when it should be seen that an attack would be obviously useful to the main advance.

Hill discharged his part of the scheme to admiration, as he always did anything committed to him, and took up the attention of the main part of the Army of the South. But the central and left attacks did not proceed as Wellington had desired. Graham got to his destined position within the time allotted to him, but when he had reached it, was slow and unenterprising in his action. He was seeking for Dalhousie’s column, with which he had been directed to co-ordinate his operations: he sent out cavalry scouts and Bradford’s Portuguese to his right, but could find nothing. This, I think, explains but does not wholly excuse his caution at noon. But it neither explains nor excuses at all his tactics after he had received, at two o’clock, Wellington’s orders telling him to press the enemy hard, and make his power felt. With his two British divisions, the Portuguese of Pack and Bradford, and two cavalry brigades, he only made a genuine attack at one point, and did not put into serious action (as the casualty lists show) more than four battalions—those used at Gamarra Mayor. The whole left column was contained by little more than half of its number of French troops. Graham says in his dispatch to Wellington that ‘in face of such force as the enemy showed it was evidently impossible to push a column across the river by Gamarra bridge.’ He does not explain his inactivity at other points, except by mentioning that the enemy had ‘at least two divisions in reserve on strong ground behind the river[615].’ There was really only one brigade in reserve, and so far from being compelled to attack at Gamarra only, Graham had besides Arriaga bridge on the main road, two other bridges open to assault (those of Goveo and Yurre), besides at least one and probably three fords. All these more southern passages were watched by cavalry only, without infantry or guns. It is clear that Graham could have got across the Zadorra somewhere, if he had tried. Very probably his quiescence was due to his failing eyesight, which had been noticed very clearly by those about him during this campaign[616]. The only part of his corps which did really useful work was Longa’s Spanish division, which at least cut the Bayonne road at the proper place and time.

But if Graham’s tactics cannot be praised, Lord Dalhousie was even more responsible for the imperfect consequence of the victory. Why Wellington put this fussy and occasionally disobedient officer in charge of the left-centre column, instead of Picton, passes understanding. The non-arrival of the 7th Division, which was to lead the attack, was due to incompetent work by him or his staff. He says in his dispatch that he was delayed by several accidents to his artillery (Cairnes’s battery). But from his own narrative we see that the guns got up almost as soon as his leading infantry brigade (Grant’s), while his two rear brigades (Barnes and Le Cor) never reached the front in time to fire a shot. What really happened was that for want of staff guidance, for which the divisional commander was responsible, these troops did not take the path assigned to them, and went right over, instead of skirting, the summit of Monte Arrato, making an apparently short (and precipitous) cut, which turned out to be a very long one[617]. So when Dalhousie did arrive, with one brigade and his guns, Picton had long been waiting by Las Guetas in a state of justifiable irritation. Finally, Dalhousie (lacking the greater part of his division) did not attack till he got peremptory orders to do so from the Commander-in-Chief. Hence the extreme delay, which caused grave risk to Hill’s wing, so long engaged without support. It is fair to add that the delay had one good effect—since it led Jourdan to think that his right was not going to be attacked, and therefore to send off Villatte’s and Cassagne’s divisions to the far left. If Dalhousie had advanced an hour earlier, these divisions would have been near enough to support Leval. But this is no justification for the late arrival and long hesitations of the commander of the 7th Division. Undoubtedly a part of the responsibility devolves on Wellington himself, for putting an untried officer in charge of a crucial part of the day’s operations, when he had in Picton an old and experienced tactician ready to hand.

The strategical plan was so good that minor faults of execution could not mar its general success. Yet it must be remembered that, if all had worked out with minute accuracy, the French army would have been destroyed, instead of merely losing its artillery and train. And the fact that 55,000 men escaped to France, even if in sorry condition, made the later campaign of the Pyrenees possible. There would have been no combats of Maya and Roncesvalles, no battles of Sorauren and St. Marcial, if the eight French divisions present at Vittoria had been annihilated, instead of being driven in disorder on to an eccentric line of retreat.