The accepted view of the present generation is (though most men are entirely unacquainted with the fact) strongly coloured by the circumstance that William Napier, whose eloquent history has superseded all other narratives of the Peninsular War, was a violent enemy of the Tory ministry and a personal admirer of Moore. Ninety years and more have now passed since the great retreat, and we can look upon the campaign with impartial eyes. It is easy to point out mistakes made by the home government, such as the tardy dispatch of Baird’s cavalry, and the inadequate provision of money, both for the division which started from Lisbon and for that which started from Corunna. But these are not the most important causes of the misfortunes of the campaign. Nor can it be pleaded that the ministry did not support Moore loyally, or that they tied his hands by contradictory or over-explicit orders. A glance at Castlereagh’s dispatches is sufficient to show that he and his colleagues left everything that was possible to be settled by the General, and that they approved each of his determinations as it reached them without any cavilling or criticism[738].
Moore must take the main responsibility for all that happened. On the whole, the impression left after a study of his campaign is very favourable to him. His main conception when he marched from Salamanca—that of gaining time for the rallying of the Spanish armies, by directing a sudden raid upon the Emperor’s communications in Castile—was as sound as it was enterprising. The French critics who have charged him with rashness have never read his dispatches, nor realized the care with which he had thought out the retreat, which he knew would be inevitable when his movement became known at Madrid. He was never for a moment in any serious danger of being surrounded by the Emperor, because he was proceeding (as he himself wrote) ‘bridle in hand,’ and with a full knowledge that he must ‘have a run for it’ on the first receipt of news that Napoleon was upon the march. His plan of making a diversion was a complete success: he drew the Emperor, with the 70,000 men who would otherwise have marched on Lisbon, up into the north-west of the Peninsula, quite out of the main centre of operations. Napoleon himself halted at Astorga, but 45,000 men marched on after the British, and were engulfed in the mountains of Galicia, where they were useless for the main operations of the war. Spain, in short, gained three months of respite, because the main disposable field-army of her invaders had been drawn off into a corner by the unexpected march of the British on Sahagun. ‘As a diversion the movement has answered completely,’ wrote Moore to Castlereagh from Astorga[739], and with justice. That the subsequent retreat to Corunna was also advisable we must concede, though the arguments in favour of attempting a defence of Galicia were more weighty than has generally been allowed[740].
But when we turn to the weeks that preceded the advance from Salamanca, and that followed the departure from Astorga, it is only a very blind admirer of Moore who will contend that everything was arranged and ordered for the best. That the army, which began to arrive at Salamanca on November 13, did not make a forward move till December 12 is a fact which admits of explanation, but not of excuse. The main governing fact of its inactivity was not, as Moore was always urging, the disasters of the Spaniards, but the misdirection of the British cavalry and artillery on the roundabout route by Elvas, Talavera, and the Escurial. For this the British general was personally responsible: we have already shown that he had good reasons for distrusting the erroneous reports on the roads of Portugal which were sent in to him, and that he should not have believed them[741]. He ought to have marched on Almeida, with his troops distributed between the three available roads, and should have had a compact force of all arms concentrated at Salamanca by November 15. Even without Baird he could then have exercised some influence on the course of events. As it was, he condemned himself—by the unmilitary act of separating himself from his guns and his horsemen—to a month of futile waiting, while the fate of the campaign was being settled a hundred and fifty miles away.
The chance that Napoleon turned his whole army upon Madrid, and did not send a single corps in search of the British, gave Moore the grand opportunity for striking at the French communications, which he turned to such good account in the middle of December. But, though he so splendidly vindicated his reputation by this blow, we cannot forget the long hesitation at Salamanca by which it was preceded, nor the unhappy project for instant retreat on Portugal, which was so nearly put into execution. If it had been carried out, Moore’s name would have been relegated to a very low place in the list of British commanders, for he would undoubtedly have evacuated Lisbon, just as he had prepared to evacuate Corunna on the day before he was slain. We have his own words to that effect. On November 25 he put on paper his opinion as to the defence of Portugal. ‘Its frontier,’ he wrote, ‘is not defensible against a superior force. It is an open frontier, all equally rugged, but all equally to be penetrated. If the French succeed in Spain, it will be vain to attempt to resist them in Portugal. The British must in that event immediately take steps to evacuate the country[742].’ It is fortunate that Sir Arthur Wellesley was not of this opinion, or the course of the Peninsular War, and of the whole struggle between Bonaparte and Britain, might have been modified in a very unhappy fashion.
So much must be said of Moore’s earlier faults. Of his later ones, committed after his departure from Astorga, almost as much might be made. His long hesitation, as to whether he should march on Vigo or on Corunna, was inexcusable: at Astorga his mind should have been made up, and the Vigo road (a bad cross-route on which he had not a single magazine) should have been left out of consideration. By failing to make up his mind, and taking useless half-measures, Moore deprived himself of the services of Robert Crawfurd and 3,500 of the best soldiers of his army. But, as we have shown elsewhere, the hesitation was in its origin the result of the groundless hypothesis which Moore had formed—one knows not from what premises—that the French would not be able to pursue him beyond Villafranca.
Still more open to criticism is the headlong pace at which Moore conducted the last stages of the retreat. Napier has tried to represent that the marches were not unreasonable: ‘in eleven days,’ he wrote, ‘a small army passed over a hundred and fifty miles of good road[743].’ But we have to deduct three days of rest, leaving an average of about seventeen miles a day; and this for January marching, in a rugged snow-clad country, is no trifle. For though the road was ‘good,’ in the sense that it was well engineered, it was conducted over ridge after ridge of one of the most mountainous lands in Europe. The desperate uphill gradients between Astorga and Manzanal, and between Villafranca and Cerezal, cannot be measured in mere miles when their difficulty is being estimated. The marching should be calculated by hours, and not by miles. Moreover, Moore repeatedly gave his men night-marches, and even two night-marches on end. Half the horrors of the dreadful stage between Lugo and Betanzos came from the fact that the army started at midnight on January 8-9, only rested a few hours by day, and then marched again at seven on the evening of the ninth, and through the whole of the dark hours between the ninth and tenth. Flesh and blood cannot endure such a trial even in good weather, and these were nights of hurricane and downpour. Who can wonder that even well-disposed and willing men lagged behind, sank down, and died by hundreds under such stress?
All this hurry was unnecessary: whenever the rearguard turned to face the French, Soult was forced to wait for many hours before he could even begin an attempt to evict it. For his infantry was always many miles to the rear, and he could not effect anything with the horsemen of his advanced guard against Paget’s steady battalions—as Cacabellos sufficiently showed. Napier urges that any position that the British took up could be turned by side-roads: this is true, but the flanking movement would always take an inordinate time, and by the moment that the French had started upon it, the British rearguard could have got off in safety, after having delayed the enemy for the best part of a day. If, instead of offering resistance only at Cacabellos, Constantino, and Lugo, Moore had shown fight at three or four other places—e.g. at the narrow pass of Piedrafita, the passage of the Ladra, and the defile of Monte Falqueiro—he need not have hurried his main body beyond their strength, and left the road strewn with so many exhausted stragglers. French and English eye-witnesses alike repeatedly express their surprise that such positions were left undefended. While not disguising the fact that a great proportion of the British losses were due to mere want of discipline and sullen discontent on the part of the rank and file, we cannot fail to see that this was not the sole cause of the disasters of the retreat. The General drove his men beyond their strength, when he might, at the cost of a few rearguard skirmishes, have given them four or five days more in which to accomplish their retreat. Moore arrived at Corunna on January 11: it was January 16 before Soult had so far collected his army that he could venture to attack. At any other point, the result of offering battle would have been much the same. No excuse for Moore can be made on the ground of insufficient supplies: at Villafranca, Lugo, and Betanzos he destroyed enormous quantities of food, and often so imperfectly that the French succeeded in living for several days on what they could save from the flames.
In making these criticisms we are not in the least wishing to impugn Moore’s reputation as a capable officer and a good general. He was both, but his fault was an excessive sense of responsibility. He could never forget that he had in his charge, as was said, ‘not a British army, but the British army’—the one efficient force that the United Kingdom could put into the field. He was loth to risk it, though ultimately he did so in his admirably conceived march on Sahagun. He had also to think of his own career: among his numerous friends and admirers he had a reputation for military infallibility which he was loth to hazard. Acting under a strong sense of duty he did so, but all the while he was anxiously asking himself ‘What will they say at home?’ It was this self-consciousness that was Moore’s weak point. Fortunately he was a man of courage and honour, and at the critical moment recovered the confidence and decision which was sometimes wanting in the hours of doubt and waiting.
Few men have been better loved by those who knew them best. To have served in the regiments which Moore had trained at Shorncliffe in 1803-5, was to be his devoted friend and admirer for life and death. Handsome, courteous, just, and benevolent, unsparing to himself, considerate to his subordinates, he won all hearts. ‘He was a very king of men,’ wrote Charles Napier; and Charles’s more eloquent brother has left him a panegyric such as few generals have merited and fewer still obtained[744].