CHAPTER III.
1813. In war it is not so much the positive strength, as the relative situations of the hostile parties, which gives the victory. Joseph’s position, thus judged, was one of great weakness, principally because he was incapable of combining the materials at his disposal, or of wielding them when combined by others. France had been suddenly thrown by her failure in Russia, into a new and embarrassing attitude, more embarrassing even than it appeared to her enemies, or than her robust warlike proportions, nourished by twelve years of victory, indicated. Napoleon, the most indefatigable and active of mankind, turned his enemy’s ignorance on this head to profit; for scarcely was it known that he had reached Paris by that wise, that rapid journey, from Smorghoni, which, baffling all his enemies’ hopes, left them only the power of foolish abuse; scarcely I say, was his arrival at Paris known to the world, than a new and enormous army, the constituent parts of which he had with his usual foresight created while yet in the midst of victory, was in march from all parts to unite in the heart of Germany.
On this magical rapidity he rested his hopes to support the tottering fabric of his empire; but well aware of the critical state of his affairs, his design was, while presenting a menacing front on every side, so to conduct his operations that if he failed in his first stroke, he might still contract his system gradually and without any violent concussion. And good reason for hope he had. His military power was rather broken and divided than lessened, for it is certain that the number of men employed in 1813 was infinitely greater than in 1812; in the latter four hundred thousand, but in the former more than seven hundred thousand men, and twelve hundred field-pieces were engaged on different points, exclusive of the armies in Spain. Then on the Vistula, on the Oder, on the Elbe, he had powerful fortresses, and numerous garrisons, or rather armies, of strength and goodness to re-establish his ascendancy in Europe, if he could reunite them in one system by placing a new host victoriously in the centre of Germany. And thus also he could renew the adhesive qualities of those allies, who still clung to him though evidently feeling the attraction of his enemies’ success.
But this was a gigantic contest, for his enemies, by deceiving their subjects with false promises of liberty, had brought whole nations against him. More than eight hundred thousand men were in arms in Germany alone; secret societies were in full activity all over the continent; and in France a conspiracy was commenced by men who desired rather to see their country a prey to foreigners and degraded with a Bourbon king, than have it independent and glorious under Napoleon. Wherefore that great monarch had now to make application, on an immense scale, of the maxim which prescribes a skilful offensive as the best defence, and he had to sustain two systems of operation not always compatible; the one depending upon moral force to hold the vast fabric of his former policy together, the other to meet the actual exigencies of the war. The first was infinitely more important than the last, and as Germany and France were the proper theatres for its display, the Spanish contest sunk at once from a principal into an accessary war. Yet this delicate conjuncture of affairs made it of vital importance, that Napoleon should have constant and rapid intelligence from Spain, because the ascendancy, which he yet maintained over the world by his astounding genius, might have been broken down in a moment if Wellington, overstepping the ordinary rules of military art, had suddenly abandoned the Peninsula, and thrown his army, or a part of it into France. For then would have been deranged all the emperor’s calculations; then would the defection of all his allies have ensued; then would he have been obliged to concentrate both his new forces and his Spanish troops for the defence of his own country, abandoning all his fortresses and his still vast though scattered veteran armies in Germany and Poland, to the unrestrained efforts of his enemies beyond the Rhine. Nothing could have been more destructive to Napoleon’s moral power, than to have an insult offered and commotions raised on his own threshold at the moment when he was assuming the front of a conqueror in Germany.
To obviate this danger or to meet it, alike required that the armies in the Peninsula should adopt a new and vigorous system, under which, relinquishing all real permanent offensive movements, they should yet appear to be daring and enterprising, even while they prepared to abandon their former conquests. But the emperor wanted old officers and non-commissioned officers, and experienced soldiers, to give consistency to the young levies with which he was preparing to take the field, and he could only supply this want by drawing from the veterans of the Peninsula; wherefore he resolved to recal the division of the young guard, and with it many thousand men and officers of the line most remarkable for courage and conduct. In lieu he sent the reserve at Bayonne into Spain, replacing it with another, which was again to be replaced in May by further levies; and besides this succour, twenty thousand conscripts were appropriated for the Peninsula.
The armies thus weakened in numbers, and considerably so during the transit of the troops, were also in quality greatly deteriorated, and at a very critical time, for not only was Wellington being powerfully reinforced, but the audacity, the spirit, the organization, the discipline, and the numbers of the Partidas, were greatly increased by English supplies, liberally, and now usefully dealt out. And the guerilla operations in the northern parts, being combined with the British naval squadrons, had, during the absence of the French armies, employed to drive the allies back to Portugal, aroused anew the spirit of insurrection in Navarre and Biscay; a spirit exacerbated by some recent gross abuses of military authority perpetrated by some of the French local commanders.
The position of the invading armies was indeed become more complicated than ever. They had only been relieved from the crushing pressure of lord Wellington’s grand operations to struggle in the meshes of the Guerilla and insurrectional warfare of the Spaniards. Nor was the importance of these now to be measured by former efforts. The Partida chiefs had become more experienced and more docile to the suggestions of the British chief; they had free communication with, and were constantly supplied with arms, ammunition, and money from the squadrons on the coast; they possessed several fortified posts and harbours, their bandsDuke of Feltre’s official correspondence, MSS. were swelling to the size of armies, and their military knowledge of the country and of the French system of invasion was more matured; their own dépôts were better hidden, and they could, and at times did, bear the shock of battle on nearly equal terms. Finally, new and large bands of another and far more respectable and influential nature, were formed or forming both in Navarre and Biscay, where insurrectional juntas were organized, and where men of the best families had enrolled numerous volunteers from the villages and towns.
These volunteers were well and willingly supplied by the country, and of course not obnoxious, like the Partidas, from their rapine and violence. In Biscay alone several battalions of this description, each mustering a thousand men, were in the field, and the communication with France was so completely interrupted, that the French minister of war only heard that Joseph had received his dispatches of the 4th of January, on the 18th of March, and then through the medium of Suchet! The contributions could no longer be collected, the magazines could not be filled, the fortresses were endangered, the armies had no base of operations, the insurrection was spreading to Aragon, and the bands of the interior were also increasing in numbers and activity. The French armies, sorely pressed for provisions, were widely disseminated, and every where occupied, and each general was averse either to concentrate his own forces or to aid his neighbour. In fine the problem of the operations was become extremely complicated, and Napoleon only seems to have seized the true solution.
When informed by Caffarelli of the state of affairs in the north, he thus wrote to the king, “Hold Madrid only as a point of observation; fix your quarters not as monarch, but as general of the French forces at Valladolid; concentrate the armies of the south, of the centre, and of Portugal around you; the allies will not and indeed cannot make any serious offensive movement for several months; wherefore it is your business to profit from their forced inactivity, to put down the insurrection in the northern provinces, to free the communication with France, and to re-establish a good base of operations before the commencement of another campaign, that the French army may be in condition to fight the allies if the latter advance towards France.” Very important indeed did Napoleon deem this object, and so earnest was he to have constant and rapid intelligence from his armies in the Peninsula, that the couriers and their escorts were directed to be dispatched twice a week, travelling day and night at the rate of a league an hour. He commanded also that the army of the north should be reinforced even by the whole army of Portugal, if it was necessary to effect the immediate pacification of Biscay and Navarre; and while this pacification was in progress, Joseph was to hold the rest of his forces in a position offensive towards Portugal, making Wellington feel that his whole power was required on the frontier, and that neither his main body nor even any considerable detachment could safely embark to disturb France. In short that he must cover Lisbon strongly, and on the frontier, or expect to see the French army menacing that capital. These instructions well understood, and vigorously executed, would certainly have put down the insurrection in the rear of the king’s position, and the spring would have seen that monarch at the head of ninety thousand men, having their retreat upon France clear of all impediments, and consequently free to fight the allies on the Tormes, the Duero, the Pisuerga, and the Ebro; and with several supporting fortresses in a good state.
Joseph was quite unable to view the matter in this common-sense point of view. He could not make his kingly notions subservient to military science, nor his military movements subservient to an enlarged policy. Neither did he perceive that his beneficent notions of government were misplaced amidst the din of arms. Napoleon’s orders were imperative, but the principle of them, Joseph could not previously conceive himself nor execute the details after his brother’s conception. He was not even acquainted with the true state of the northern provinces, norKing’s correspondence, MSS. would he at first credit it when told to him. Hence while his thoughts were intent upon his Spanish political projects, and the secret negociations with Del Parque’s army, the northern partidas and insurgents became masters of all his lines of communication in the north; the Emperor’s orders dispatched early in January, and reiterated week after week, only reached the king in the end of February; their execution did not take place until the end of March, and then imperfectly. The time thus lost was irreparable; and yet as the emperor reproachfully observed, the bulletin which revealed the extent of his disasters in Russia might alone have taught the king what to do.
Joseph was nearly as immoveable in his resolutions as his brother, the firmness of the one being however founded upon extraordinary sagacity, and of the other upon the want of that quality. Regarding opposition to his views as the result of a disloyal malevolence, he judged the refractory generals to be enemies to the emperor, as well as to himself. Reille, Caffarelli, Suchet, alike incurred his displeasure, and the duke of Feltre French minister of war also, because of a letter in which, evidently by the orders of the emperor, he rebuked the king for having removed Souham from the command of the army of Portugal.
Feltre’s style, addressed to a monarch was very offensive, and Joseph attributed it to the influence of Soult, for his hatred of the latter was violent and implacable even to absurdity. “The duke ofKing’s correspondence, MSS. Dalmatia or himself,” he wrote to the Emperor, “must quit Spain. At Valencia he had forgotten his own injuries, he had suppressed his just indignation, and instead of sending marshal Soult to France had given him the direction of the operations against the allies, but it was in the hope that shame for the past combined with his avidity for glory, would urge him to extraordinary exertions; nothing of the kind had happened; Soult was a man not to be trusted. Restless, intriguing, ambitious, he would sacrifice every thing to his own advancement, and possessed just that sort of talent which would lead him to mount a scaffold when he thought he was ascending the steps of a throne, because he would want the courage to strike when the crisis arrived.” He acquitted him, he said, with a coarse sarcasm, “of treachery at the passage of the Tormes, because there fear alone operated to prevent him from bringing the allies to a decisive action, but he was nevertheless treacherous to the emperor, and his proceedings in Spain were probably connected with the conspiracy of Malet at Paris.”
Such was the language with which Joseph in his anger assailed one of the greatest commanders and most faithful servants of his brother; and such the greetings which awaited Napoleon on his arrival at Paris after the disasters of Russia. In the most calm and prosperous state of affairs, coming from this source, the charges might well have excited the jealous wrath of the strongest mind; but in the actual crisis, when the emperor had just lost his great army, and found the smoking embers of a suppressed conspiracy at his very palace-gates, when his friends were failing, and his enemies accumulating, it seemed scarcely possible that these accusations should not have proved the ruin of Soult. Yet they did not even ruffle the temper of Napoleon. Magnanimous as he was sagacious, he smiled at the weakness of Joseph, and though he removed Soult from Spain, because the feud between him and the king would not permit them to serve beneficially together, it was only to make him the commander of the imperial guard; and that no mark of his confidence might be wanting, he afterwards chose him, from amongst all his generals, to retrieve the affairs of the Peninsula when Joseph was driven from that country, an event the immediate causes of which were now being laid.
It has been already shown, that when Wellington took his winter-quarters, the French armies occupied a line stretching from the sea-coast at Valencia to the foot of the Gallician mountains. In these positions Suchet on the extreme left was opposed by the allies at Alicant. Soult, commanding the centre, had his head-quarters at Toledo, with one detachment at the foot of the Sierra Morena to watch the army of Del Parque, and two others in the valley of the Tagus. Of these last one was at Talavera and one on the Tietar. The first observed Morillo and Penne Villemur, who from Estremadura were constantly advancing towards the bridges on the Tagus, and menacing the rear of the French detachment which was on the Tietar in observation of general Hill then at Coria. Soult’s advanced post in the valley of the Tagus communicated by the Gredos mountains with Avila, where Foy’s division of the army of Portugal was posted partly for the sake of food, partly to watch Bejar and the Upper Tormes, because the allies, possessing the pass of Bejar, might have suddenly united north of the mountains, and breaking the French line have fallen on Madrid.
On the right of Foy, the remainder of the army of Portugal occupied Salamanca, Ledesma, and Alba on the Lower Tormes; Valladolid, Toro, and Tordesillas on the Duero; Benevente, Leon, and other points on the Esla, Astorga being, as I have before observed, dismantled by the Spaniards. Behind the right of this great line, the army of the north had retaken its old positions, and the army of the centre was fixed as before in and around Madrid, its operations being bounded on the right bank of the Tagus by the mountains which invest that capital, and on the left bank of the Tagus by the districts of Aranjuez, Tarancon, and Cuenca.
Joseph while disposing his troops in this manner, issued a royal regulation marking the extent of country which each army was to forage, requiring at the same time a certain and considerable revenue to be collected by his Spanish civil authorities for the support of his court. The subsistence of the French armies was thus made secondary to the revenue of the crown, and he would have had the soldiers in a time of war, of insurrectional war, yield to the authority of the Spanish civilians; an absurdity heightened by the peculiarly active, vigorous, and prompt military method of the French, as contrasted with the dilatory improvident promise-breaking and visionary system of the Spaniards. Hence scarcely was the royal regulationKing’s correspondence, MSS. issued when the generals broke through it in a variety of ways, and the king was, as usual, involved in the most acrimonious disputes with all the emperor’s lieutenants. If he ordered one commander to detach troops to the assistance of another commander, he was told that he should rather send additional troops to the first. If he reprimanded a general for raising contributions contrary to the regulations, he was answered that the soldiers were starving and must be fed. At all times also the authority of the prefects and intendants was disregarded by all the generals; and this was in pursuance of Napoleon’s order; for that monarch continually reminded his brother, that as the war was carried on by the French armies their interests were paramount; that the king of Spain could have no authority over them, and must never use his military authority as lieutenant of the empire, in aid of his kingly views, for with those the French soldiers could have nothing to do; their welfare could not be confided to Spanish ministers whose capacity was by no means apparent and of whose fidelity the emperor had no security.
Nothing could be clearer or wiser than these instructions, but Joseph would not see this distinction between his military and his monarchical duties, and continually defended his conduct by reference to what he owed his subjects as king of Spain. His sentiments, explained with great force of feeling, and great beneficence of design, were worthy of all praise if viewed abstractedly, but totally inapplicable to the real state of affairs, because the Spaniards were not his faithful and attached subjects, they were his inveterate enemies; and it was quite impossible to unite the vigour of a war of conquest with the soft and benevolent government of a paternal monarch. Thus one constant error vitiated all the king’s political proceedings, an error apparently arising from an inability to view his situation as a whole instead of by parts, for his military operations were vitiated in the same manner.
As a man of state and of war he seems to have been acute, courageous, and industrious, with respect to any single feature presented for his consideration, but always unable to look steadily on the whole and consequently always working in the dark. Men of his character being conscious of the merit of labour and good intentions, are commonly obstinate; and those qualities, which render them so useful under the direction of an able chief, lead only to mischief when they become chiefs themselves. For in matters of great moment, and in war especially, it is not the actual importance but the comparative importance of the operations which should determine the choice of measures; and when all are very important this choice demands judgment of the highest kind, judgment which no man ever possessed more largely than Napoleon, and which Joseph did not possess at all.
He was never able to comprehend the instructions of his brother, and never would accept the advice of those commanders whose capacity approached in some degree to that of the emperor. When he found that every general complained of insufficient means, instead of combining their forces so as to press with the principal mass against the most important point, he disputed with each, and turned to demand from the emperor additional succours for all; at the same time unwisely repeating and urging his own schemes upon a man so infinitely his superior in intellect. The insurrection in the northern provinces he treated not as a military but a political question, attributing it to the anger of the people at seeing the ancient supreme council of Navarre unceremoniously dismissed and some of the members imprisoned by a French general, a cause very inadequate to the effect. Neither was his judgment truer with respect to the fitness of time. He proposed, if a continuation of the Russian war should prevent the emperor from sending more men to Spain, to make Burgos the royal residence, to transport there the archives, and all that constituted a capital; then to have all the provinces behind the Ebro, Catalonia excepted, governed by himself through the medium of his Spanish ministers and as a country at peace, while those beyond the Ebro should be given up to the generals as a country at war.
In this state his civil administration would he said remedy the evils inflicted by the armies, would conciliate the people by keeping all the Spanish families and authorities in safety and comfort, would draw all those who favoured his cause from all parts of Spain, and would encourage the display of that attachment to his person which he believed so many Spaniards to entertain. And while he declared the violence and injustice of the French armies to be the sole cause of the protracted resistance of the Spaniards, a declaration false in fact, that violence being only one of many causes, he was continually urging the propriety of beating the English first and then pacifying the people by just and benevolent measures. As if it were possible, off-hand, to beat Wellington and his veterans, embedded as they were in the strong country of Portugal, and having British fleets with troops and succours of all kinds, hovering on the flanks of the French, and feeding and sustaining the insurrection of the Spaniards in their rear.
Napoleon was quite as willing and anxious as Joseph could be to drive the English from the Peninsula, and to tranquillize the people by a regular government; but with a more profound knowledge of war, of politics and of human nature, he judged that the first could only be done by a methodical combination, in unison with that rule of art which prescribes the establishment and security of the base of operations, security which could not be obtained if the benevolent but weak and visionary schemes of the king, were to supersede military vigour in the field. The emperor laughed in scorn when his brother assured him that the Peninsulars with all their fiery passions, their fanaticism and their ignorance, would receive an equable government as a benefit from the hands of an intrusive monarch before they had lost all hope of resistance by arms.
Yet it is not to be concluded that Joseph was totally devoid of grounds for his opinions; he was surrounded by difficulties and deeply affected by the misery which he witnessed, his Spanish ministers were earnest and importunate, and many of the French generals gave him but too much reason to complain of their violence. The length and mutations of the war had certainly created a large party willing enough to obtain tranquillity at the price of submission, while others were, as we have seen, not indisposed, if he would hold the crown on their terms, to accept his dynasty, as one essentially springing from democracy, in preference to the despotic, base, and superstitious family which the nation was called upon to uphold. It was not unnatural therefore for Joseph to desire to retain his capital while the negociations with Del Parque’s army were still in existence, it was not strange that he should be displeased with Soult after reading that marshal’s honest but offensive letter, and certainly it was highly creditable to his character as a man and as a king that he would not silently suffer his subjects to be oppressed by the generals.
“I am in distress for money,” he often exclaimed to Napoleon, “such distress as no king ever endured before, my plate is sold, and on state occasions the appearance of magnificence is supported by false metal. My ministers and household are actually starving, misery is on every face, and men, otherwise willing, are thus deterred from joining a king so little able to support them. My revenue is seized by the generals for the supply of their troops, and I cannot as a king of Spain without dishonour partake of the resources thus torn by rapine from my subjects whom I have sworn to protect; I cannot in fine be at once king of Spain and general of the French; let me resign both and live peaceably in France. Your majesty does not know what scenes are enacted, you will shudder to hear that men formerly rich and devoted to our cause have been driven out of Zaragoza and denied even a ration of food. The marquis Cavallero, a councillor of state, minister of justice, and known personally to your majesty, has been thus used. He has been seen actually begging for a piece of bread!”
If this Caballero was the old minister to Charles the IVth, no misery was too great a punishment for his tyrannical rule under that monarch, yet it was not from the hands of the French it should have come; and Joseph’s distress for money must certainly have been great, since that brave and honest man Jourdan, a marshal of France, major-general of the armies, and a personal favourite of the king’s, complained that the non-payment of hisJourdan’s Official correspondence, MSS. appointments had reduced him to absolute penury, and after borrowing until his credit was exhausted he could with difficulty procure subsistence. It is now time to describe the secondary operations of the war, but as these were spread over two-thirds of Spain, and were simultaneous, to avoid complexity it will be necessary to class them under two great heads, namely those which took place north and those which took place south of the Tagus.