The troops engaged had been the 5th Dragoon Guards, the 3rd, 11th, 14th, and 16th Light Cavalry Regiments, and the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 23rd, 24th, 27th, 30th, 32nd, 34th, 36th, 38th, 40th, 43rd, 44th, 45th, 48th, 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 58th, 60th, 61st, 68th, 74th, 79th, 83rd, 88th, 94th, and Rifle Brigade. The result of the operations so far was, that Marmont, with 42,000 men and 74 guns, had, in twelve days, marched 200 miles, fought three combats and one general action, and had lost 1 marshal, 7 generals, and 12,500 men, with 2 eagles, several colours, and 12 guns.
Battle of SALAMANCA 22nd July 1812
Pursuing Clauset’s rearguard through Valladolid, which fell back on Burgos, to be watched by Clinton, the victorious general entered Madrid in triumph, and there his temporary success suffered a check. There was the usual complaint; want of supplies and want of cash. The “troops are now five months in arrears,” he writes, “and we are in debt in all parts of the country.” Clauset, reorganised, had reoccupied Valladolid, and Wellington decided on turning against him, and, if possible, capturing Burgos. But the preparations were notoriously meagre, the defence bold; so that after five assaults the attempt was abandoned, and Wellington was compelled to once more retreat to Portugal. The army had become greatly demoralised by the failure of the Burgos siege. While the assaults had failed, all the sorties had been more or less successful. There were skirmishes in the retreat, but the conduct of the troops was, with the general exception of the Guards and the Light Division, bad. As in Moore’s retreat, drunkenness prevailed. At Torquemada 12,000 men were for a time useless. Doubtless the hardships were severe. “Sometimes divisions were moved too soon, more frequently too late, and kept standing on wet ground, in the rain, for two hours, perishing with cold, waiting the order to move. Their clothes were seldom dry for six hours together, and during the latter part of the retreat continually wet; sometimes they were bivouacked in a swamp when better ground was near, they lay down upon the wet ground, fell asleep from mere exhaustion, were roused to receive their meat, and had then no means of dressing it. The camp kettles had been sent on, or by some error were some miles in the rear, or the mules which carried them had foundered on the way, and no fire could be kindled on wet ground, with wet materials, and under a heavy rain.”[42]
Meanwhile, the French were concentrating in superior numbers; and, with more and more indiscipline and suffering, the army, with a loss of 9000 men and much baggage, finally encamped exhausted under the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo.
The first serious attempt to reconquer Spain had failed, save for the moral effect of the occupation of Madrid, the defeat of the French at Salamanca, and the restriction of the French armies now to the northern part of Spain. It was, none the less, the beginning of the end.
That end, the “deliverance of Spain,” dawned in the early days of 1813, when all the Allied armies were reorganised, and had recovered their tone.
Napoleon, too, was no longer in a position to help the armies whose opponents were bleeding his empire to death. Russia first, and then united Europe, were keeping his hands far too full to attend to a danger almost nearer home. The last French campaign in the Peninsula was like that in Central Europe in the same year, 1813, a campaign of despair. The numbers on both sides were more equal than they had ever been. The Allies had learned in the bitter school of dreadful experience, and were better organised and somewhat more homogeneous and concentrated than their opponents.
The general plan of Wellington’s last campaign here was to directly threaten the French communications with France. It will be remembered that there were but two real lines of invasion from that country, one at the east, the other at the west of the Pyrenees. So, threatening the French right, the strong line of the Douro, behind which the French army lay, was turned at Toro. They fell back behind Burgos, therefore, and then behind the line of the Ebro. This, again, was turned at its upper reaches by a most difficult march. “Neither,” says Napier, “the winter gullies, nor the ravines, nor the precipitate passes amongst the rocks retarded even the march of the artillery—where horses could not draw, men hauled; when the wheels would not roll, the guns were let down or lifted up with ropes—six days they toiled unceasingly, and on the seventh (that is, 20th June), they burst like raging streams from every defile, and went foaming into the basin of Vittoria.”
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