Surprise of Almaraz. (May, 1812.)
So many obstacles, military and political, were to be overcome before Andalusia could be invaded, 1812, that Lord Wellington finally resigned that project and meditated instead, operations against Marmont’s army. To obtain success it was essential to isolate him as much as possible, and in that view various combinations were matured; but the most important stroke was to destroy the bridge and forts at Almaraz on the Tagus. Strong in works, that place was also a great depôt for stores and boats, and not only facilitated the passage of the Tagus for reinforcements coming from Soult, but was sufficient to serve as a base and place of arms for an army to operate on the rear and flank of the British, if they engaged with Marmont in Castile. General Hill, who remained with a force in the Alemtejo, was charged with this great and dangerous enterprise, for a clear understanding of which the nature of the country must be described.
The left bank of the Tagus, from Toledo to Almaraz, is lined with rugged mountains, difficult for small bodies, impracticable for an army. From Almaraz to the frontier of Portugal the banks are more open, yet still difficult, and the Tagus was only to be crossed at certain points, to which bad roads led. From Almaraz to Alcantara the bridges, both those included, were ruined, and those of Arzobispo and Talavera above Almaraz were of little value because of the rugged mountains. Soult’s pontoon equipage had been captured in Badajos, and the French could only cross the Tagus between Toledo and the frontier of Portugal by Marmont’s boat bridge at Almaraz, to secure which he had constructed three strong forts and a bridge-head.
The first, called Ragusa, contained stores and provisions, and was, though not finished, exceedingly strong; it had a loopholed stone tower twenty-five feet high within, and was flanked without by a field-work near the bridge. This was on the north bank. On the south bank the bridge had a fortified head of masonry, which was again flanked by a redoubt called Fort Napoleon, placed on a height a little in advance; imperfectly constructed, however, inasmuch as a wide berm in the middle of the scarp furnished a landing-place for troops escalading. It was yet strong, because it contained a second interior defence or retrenchment, with a loopholed stone tower, a ditch, drawbridge, and palisades.
These forts and the bridge-head were armed with eighteen guns and garrisoned with eleven hundred men, which insured command of the river; but the mountains on the left bank precluded the passage of an army towards Lower Estremadura, save by the royal road to Truxillo, which, five miles from the Tagus, went over the lofty rugged Mirabete ridge: to secure the summit of this, the French had drawn a line of works across the throat of the pass; that is to say, a large fortified house was connected by smaller posts with the ancient watch-tower of Mirabete, which contained eight guns and was surrounded by a rampart twelve feet high.
If all these works, and a road, which Marmont, following the traces of an ancient Roman way, was now opening across the Gredos mountains had been finished, the communication of the French, though circuitous, would have been very good and secure. Wellington feared that accomplishment and designed to surprise Almaraz previous to the siege of Badajos, when the redoubts were far from complete; but the Portuguese government then baffled him by neglecting to furnish the means of transporting the artillery from Lisbon. Hill now marched to attempt it with a force of six thousand men, including four hundred cavalry, two field brigades of artillery, a pontoon equipage, and a battering-train of six iron twenty-four-pound howitzers. The enterprise was become more difficult. For when the army was round Badajos, only the resistance of the forts was to be looked to; now Foy’s division of Marmont’s army was in the valley of the Tagus, and troops from the king’s army occupied Talavera. Drouet was also with eight or nine thousand men near Medellin, and closer to Merida than Hill was to Almaraz; he might therefore intercept the latter’s retreat—and the king’s orders were imperative that he should hang on the English force in Estremadura. Hill had therefore to steer, going and coming, through all these forces with an unwieldy convoy, and as it were, blot out the strong place without a battle; but Wellington took many precautions to divert the French attention to other points, and to furnish support without indicating the true object.
Hill, though dangerously delayed by the difficulty of restoring the bridge of Merida, which he had himself destroyed during the siege of Badajos, crossed the Guadiana with six thousand men, twelve field-pieces, pontoons, battering-train and fifty country carts, conveying material and ammunition. On the 15th he reached Truxillo, and during his march the guerillas of the Guadalupe mountains made demonstrations at different points, between Almaraz and Arzobispo, as if seeking a place to cast a bridge that he might join Wellington. Foy was deceived by these feints, for his spies at Truxillo, while reporting the passage of the Guadiana, said Hill had fifteen thousand men, and that two brigades of cavalry were following: one report even stated that thirty thousand men had entered Truxillo, whereas there were less than six thousand of all arms.
Early on the 16th the armament reached Jaraicejo, formed three columns, and made a night march, intending to surprise at the same moment, the tower of Mirabete, the fortified house in the pass, and the forts at the bridge of Almaraz. The left column, directed against the tower, was commanded by General Chowne. The centre, with the dragoons and artillery, moved by the royal road under General Long. The right, composed of the 50th, 71st, and 92nd Regiments, under Hill in person, was to penetrate by the narrow and difficult way of Roman Gordo against the forts of the bridge; but day broke before any column reached its destination, and all hopes of a surprise were extinguished. This was an untoward beginning, unavoidable with the right and centre column because of the bad roads, but Chowne was negligent, for the Mirabete tower might have been assaulted before daylight.
Hill now saw that to reduce the Mirabete works in the pass he must incur more loss than was justifiable, and be in such plight that he could not finally carry the forts below; yet it was only through the pass the artillery could move against the bridge. In this dilemma, after losing the 17th and part of the 18th, in fruitless attempts to discover some opening through which to reach Almaraz with his guns, he resolved to leave them on the Sierra with the centre column, make a false attack on the tower with Chowne’s troops, and in person, with the right column, secretly penetrate by the scarcely practicable line of Roman Gordo to the bridge, intent, with infantry alone, to storm works which were defended by eighteen pieces of artillery and powerful garrisons!
This resolution was even more hardy than it appears, without a reference to the general state of affairs. His march had been one of secrecy, amidst various divisions of the enemy; he was four days’ journey from Merida, his first point of retreat; he expected Drouet to be reinforced and advance, and hence, whether defeated or victorious at Almaraz, his retreat would be very dangerous; exceedingly so if defeated, because his fine British troops could not be repulsed with a small loss, and he would have to fall back through a difficult country, with his best soldiers dispirited by failure and burthened by numbers of wounded men. Then, harassed on one side by Drouet, pursued by Foy and D’Armagnac on the other, he would have been exposed to the greatest misfortunes, every slanderous tongue would have been let loose on the rashness of attacking impregnable forts, and a military career, hitherto so glorious, might have terminated in shame. Devoid of interested ambition, he was unshaken by such fears, and remained concealed until the evening of the 18th, when he commenced the descent, with design to escalade the Fort Napoleon before daylight. The march was less than six miles, but the head of the troops only reached the fort a little before daylight, the rear was distant, and it was doubtful if the scaling ladders, cut in halves to thread the short narrow turns in the precipitous descent, would serve for an assault. Some small hills concealed the head of the column, and at that moment Chowne commenced his false attack at Mirabete. Pillars of white smoke rose on the lofty brow of the Sierra, the heavy sound of artillery came rolling over the valley, and the garrison of Fort Napoleon, crowding on the ramparts, were gazing at those portentous signs of war, when, quick and loud, a British shout broke on their ears, and the 50th Regiment with a wing of the 71st, came bounding over the low hills.
Surprised the French were to see an enemy so close while the Mirabete was still defended, yet they were not unprepared; a patrol of English cavalry had been seen from the fort on the 17th, and in the evening of the 18th a woman had given exact information of Hill’s numbers and designs. This intelligence had caused the commandant, Aubert, to march in the night with reinforcements to Fort Napoleon, which was therefore defended by six companies ready to fight, and when the first shout was heard they smote with musketry and artillery on the British front, while the guns of Fort Ragusa took them in flank. A rise of ground, twenty yards from the ramparts, soon covered the assailants from the front fire, and General Howard, leading the foremost into the ditch, commenced the escalade. The breadth of the berm kept off the ends of the shortened ladders from the parapet, but the first men jumped on to the berm itself and drawing up the ladders planted them there; then with a second escalade they won the rampart and, closely fighting, all went together into the retrenchment round the stone tower. Aubert was wounded and taken, and the garrison fled towards the bridge-head, but the victorious troops would not be shaken off, they entered that work also in one confused mass with the fugitives, who continued their flight over the bridge itself. Still the British soldiers pushed their headlong charge, slaying the hindmost, and would have passed the river if some of the boats had not been destroyed by stray shots from the forts, which were now sharply cannonading each other, for the artillery men had turned the guns of Napoleon on Fort Ragusa.
Many French, leaping into the water, were drowned, but the greatest part were made prisoners, and to the amazement of the conquerors the panic pervaded the other side of the river, where the garrison of Ragusa, though perfectly safe, fled with the others! Some grenadiers of the 92nd, then swimming over, brought back boats, with which the bridge was restored and the towers and works of Ragusa were destroyed, and the stores, ammunition, provisions and boats, burned. In the night the troops returned to the Mirabete ridge with the colours of the foreign regiment, and two hundred and fifty prisoners, including a commandant and sixteen other officers, their own loss being a hundred and eighty men. One officer of artillery was killed by his own mine, placed for the destruction of the tower, but the only officer slain in the assault was Captain Candler, of the 50th, a brave man, who fell leading the grenadiers of that regiment on to the rampart of Fort Napoleon.
Rapidity was an essential cause of this success. Foy had ordered D’Armagnac to reinforce the forts with a battalion, which might have entered Fort Ragusa early in the morning of the 19th; but instead of marching before day-break, it did not move until eleven o’clock, and meeting the fugitives on the road caught the panic.
Hill was about to reduce the works at Mirabete, when Sir W. Erskine, confused by the French movements, gave a false alarm, which caused a retreat on Merida; Wellington, in reference to this error of Erskine, told the ministers, that his generals, stout in action as the poorest soldiers, were overwhelmed with fear of responsibility when left to themselves: the slightest movement of an enemy deprived them of judgment. Erskine was a miserable officer; but all officers knew, that without powerful interest future prospects and past services would wither under the blight of a disaster; that a selfish government would instantly offer them as victims to a misjudging public and a ribald press, with which success is the only criterion of merit. English generals are, and must be, prodigal of their blood to gain reputation; but they are timid in command, because a single failure without a fault consigns them to shame and abuse.
Having resumed his former position, Hill engaged in a series of marches and countermarches against Drouet, yet no action occurred, save one between General Slade and General Lallemande, with two regiments of dragoons on each side. Slade, contrary to orders, drove back the French horsemen for eight miles, and through the defile of Maquilla followed in disorder; but in the plain beyond stood Lallemande’s reserves, with which he broke the disorderly mass, killed or wounded fifty, pursued for six miles and took a hundred prisoners. Two days after, the Austrian Strenowitz, having but fifty men of Slade’s dragoons, recovered all the wounded prisoners, defeated eighty French, killed many and took twenty-six: such is the difference between mere dash and military skill.
In the summer of 1812 Lord Wellington resolved to fight Marmont. There were many reasons for this, but the principal one was, that Napoleon was in the heart of Russia, that his own army was stronger, especially in cavalry, than it had yet been or was likely to be, and if he did not then strike no better opportunity could be expected. He had ninety thousand men, British and Portuguese, but six thousand were in Cadiz, and the Walcheren expedition was still to be atoned for; the regiments which had served there were so sickly that only thirty-two thousand British were in line; yet to these he could join twenty-five thousand Portuguese, making fifty-seven thousand sabres and bayonets, which he judged sufficient. Of this force Hill had seventeen thousand, two thousand being cavalry with twenty-four guns. General D’Urban was with twelve hundred Portuguese horsemen in the Tras Os Montes, and was to coöperate with Wellington, who had therefore nearly forty thousand of all arms, three thousand five hundred being cavalry, with fifty-four guns.
Almaraz bridge had been destroyed to lengthen the French lateral line of communication, Alcantara was now repaired to shorten the British line; and though the break in that stupendous structure was ninety feet wide and one hundred and fifty above the water, the genius of Colonel Sturgeon overcame the difficulty. Hill’s army was thus brought a fortnight nearer to Wellington than Drouet was to Marmont, if both marched with artillery; and as the army of the centre was, by the king’s misrule, in a state of great disorder, Marmont was for a time isolated from all the other armies save that of the north, now under General Caffarelli, who was however occupied by maritime expeditions from Coruña.
Marmont was a man to be feared. He was quick of apprehension, morally and physically brave, scientific, used to war, strong of body, in the prime of life, eager for glory; and though neither a great nor a fortunate commander, such a one as could bear the test of fire. He had strongly fortified three convents at Salamanca, and having about twenty-five thousand men in hand, demanded aid from the king, from Soult, and from the army of the north. His design was to dispute the Tormes and Duero in succession, the first by his forts, the second with an army, which he could augment to forty-six thousand without extraneous aid by calling Bonet’s division from the Asturias.
On the 13th of June Wellington advanced to the Tormes. The bridge of Salamanca was barred by the French forts, all the others had been destroyed save that of Alba de Tormes, the castle of which was garrisoned; the allies however passed the river above and below Salamanca by the fords of Santa Marta and Los Cantos, and General Clinton invested the forts with the sixth division. Marmont, who had two divisions and some cavalry, retired by the road of Toro. Salamanca then became a scene of rejoicing. The houses were illuminated, the people, shouting, singing and weeping for joy, gave Wellington their welcome while his army took a position on the hill of San Christoval five miles in advance.