A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 1, 1807-1809

by Charles Oman

Last of all the great Spanish chains is that which lies close along the Mediterranean Sea, forming the southern edge of the fertile Andalusian plain. It is the Sierra Nevada, which, though neither the longest nor the broadest of the ranges of the south, contains the loftiest peaks in Spain, Mulhaçen and La Veleta. This chain runs from behind Gibraltar along the shore, till it joins the mountains of Murcia, leaving only a very narrow coast-strip between its foot and the southern sea. Three roads cut it in its western half, which, starting from Granada, Ronda, and Antequera all come down to the shore at, or in the neighbourhood of, the great port of Malaga. The parts of the coast-line that are far from that city are only accessible by following difficult roads that run close to the water’s edge.

We have still to deal with two corners of the Iberian Peninsula, which do not fall into any of the great valleys that we have described—Galicia and Northern Portugal in the north-west, and Catalonia in the north-east. The geographical conditions of the former region depend on the Cantabrian Mountains, the western continuation of the Pyrenees. This chain, after running for many miles as a single ridge, forks in the neighbourhood of the town of Leon. One branch keeps on in its original direction, and runs by the coast till it reaches the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre. The other turns south-west and divides Spain from Portugal as far as the sea. The angle between these forking ranges is drained by a considerable river, the Minho. The basins of this stream and its tributary the Sil, form the greater part of the province of Galicia. Their valleys are lofty, much cut up by cross-spurs, and generally barren. The access to them from Central Spain is by two openings. The main one is the high road from Madrid to Corunna by Astorga; it does not follow the course of either the Sil or the Minho, but charges cross-ridge after cross-ridge of the spurs of the Galician hills, till at last it comes down to the water, and forks into two routes leading the one to Corunna, the other to the still more important arsenal of Ferrol. The other gate of Galicia is a little to the south of Astorga, where a pass above the town of Puebla de Sanabria gives access to a steep and winding road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, which finally gets into the valley of the Minho, and turns down to reach the port of Vigo. It will be remembered that Sir John Moore, in his famous retreat, hesitated for some time at Astorga between the Vigo and Corunna roads, and finally chose the latter. His judgement was undoubtedly correct, but the best alternative was bad, for in winter even the Madrid-Corunna road, the main artery of this part of Spain, is distressing enough to an army. It does not follow any well-marked valley, but cuts across four separate ranges, every one of which in January was a nursery of torrents in its lower slopes, and an abode of snow in its upper levels. Besides the roads with which we have already dealt there is a third important line of communication in Galicia, that by the narrow coast-plain of the Atlantic, from Corunna by Santiago to Vigo, and thence into Portugal as far as Oporto. This would be a good road but for the innumerable river-mouths, small and great, which it has to cross: the road passes each stream just where it ceases to be tidal, and at each is fronted at right angles by a defensible position, which, if held by a competent enemy, is difficult to force from the front, and still more difficult to turn by a detour up-stream. Nevertheless it was by this route that Soult successfully invaded Northern Portugal in the spring of 1809. It must be remembered that he was only opposed by bands of peasants not even organized into the loosest form of militia.

The geography of Catalonia, the last Iberian region with which we have to deal, is more simple than that of Galicia. The land is formed by a broad mountain belt running out from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, parallel to the Mediterranean. From this chain the slopes run down and form on the eastern side a coast-plain, generally rather narrow, on the western a series of parallel valleys drained by tributaries of the Segre, the most important affluent of the Ebro. They all unite near Lerida, an important town and a great centre of roads. But two considerable rivers, the Ter and the Llobregat, have small basins of their own in the heart of the central mountain mass, which open down into the coast-plain by defiles, the one blocked by the peak of Montserrat, the other by the town of Gerona. During the greater part of the Peninsular War the French held the larger share of the shoreland, dominating it from the great fortress of Barcelona, which they had seized by treachery ere hostilities began. In 1811 they captured Tarragona also, the second capital of the sea coast. But they never succeeded in holding down all the small upland plains, and the minor passes that lead from one to the other. Hunted out of one the Spanish army took refuge in the next, and, though it dwindled down ultimately to a mass of guerilla bands, was never caught en masse and exterminated. There were too many bolt-holes among the network of hills, and the invaders never succeeded in stopping them all, so that down to the end of the war the patriots always maintained a precarious existence inland, descending occasionally to the shore to get ammunition and stores from the English squadrons which haunted the coast. They were supplied and reinforced from the Balearic Isles, which Napoleon could never hope to touch, for his power (like that of the witches of old) vanished when it came to running water. The survival of the Catalan resistance after the French had drawn a complete cordon around the hill-country, holding the whole coast-plain on the one hand, and Lerida and the Segre valley on the other, is one of the incidents of the war most creditable to Spanish constancy.

Having dealt with the physical geography of Spain, it is necessary for us to point out the way in which the natural difficulties of the country had influenced its main lines of communication. Roads always take the ‘line of least resistance’ in early days, and seek for easy passes, not for short cuts. The idea that ‘time is money,’ and that instead of going round two sides of a triangle it may be worth while to cut a new path across its base, in spite of all engineering difficulties, was one very unfamiliar to the Spaniard. Nothing shows more clearly the state of mediaeval isolation in which the kingdom still lay in 1808 than the condition of its roads. Wherever the country presented any serious obstacles, little or no attempt had been made to grapple with them since the days of the Romans. The energetic Charles III, alone among the kings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had done something to improve the system of intercommunication. He had, for example, superseded the old break-neck road from the plains of Leon into Galicia, by building the fine new chaussée from Astorga to Villafranca by Manzanal; but among the line of Hapsburg and Bourbon sovereigns Charles was a rare exception. Under the imbecile rule of his son (or rather of Godoy) improvements ceased, and internal communications were as much neglected as any other branch of state management. What roads there were, when the war of 1808 broke out, were in a state of dreadful neglect. The Spaniard was still too prone to go round an intolerable distance rather than attempt a serious piece of engineering work. Let us take, for example, the northern coast of Spain: the Cantabrian range is no doubt a most serious obstacle to intercourse between Castile and Leon, on the one side, and the maritime provinces of Asturias and Biscay on the other. But who would have conceived it possible that in a length of 300 miles of mountain, there should be no more than five roads practicable for wheeled traffic and artillery? Yet this was so: to get down from the central plateau to the coast there are only available these five routes—one from Leon to Oviedo, one from Burgos to Santander, one from Burgos to Bilbao, one from Vittoria to Bilbao, and one from Vittoria to San Sebastian and Irun. There were many other points at which a division travelling in light order without guns or baggage could cross the watershed—as was shown in Blake’s flight from Reynosa and Ney’s invasion of the Asturias. But for an army travelling with all its impedimenta such bypaths were impracticable.

Let us take another part of the Peninsula—its eastern side. The ancient separation between Aragon and Castile is fully reflected by the utter isolation of the two for intercommunication. To get from Madrid to the east coast there are only three roads suitable for wheeled traffic: one goes by the main gap in the hills by Chinchilla to Murcia, another by Requeña to Valencia. The third passes by Calatayud to Saragossa and ultimately to Barcelona. Between it and the Valencia road there is a gap of no less than 120 miles unpierced by any good practicable line of communication[69]. This being so, we begin to understand how it was that the operations on the eastern side of Spain, during the whole of the struggle, were a sort of independent episode that never exercised any great influence on the main theatre of the war, or, on the other hand, was much affected by the progress of the strife in Castile or Portugal. Soult’s conquest of Andalusia did not help Suchet to conquer Valencia. On the other hand, when the latter did, in January, 1812, succeed in his attempt to subdue the eastern coast-line, it did not much affect him that Wellington was storming Ciudad Rodrigo and pressing back the French in the west. He was able to hold on to Valencia till the allies, in 1813, got possession of the upper valley of the Ebro and the great road from Madrid to Saragossa and Lerida, after the battle of Vittoria. It was only then that his flank was really turned, and that he was compelled to retreat and to abandon his southern conquests.

Summing up the general characteristics of the road-system of Spain, we note first that the main routes are rather at right angles to the great rivers than parallel to them. The sole exception is to be found in the valley of the Ebro, where the only good cross-road of Northern Spain does follow the river-bank from Logroño and Tudela on to Saragossa and Lerida.

Just because the roads do not cling to the valleys, but strike across them at right angles, they are always crossing watersheds by means of difficult passes. And so there is hardly a route in the whole Peninsula where it is possible to find fifty miles without a good defensive position drawn across the path. Moreover, the continual passes make the question of supplies very difficult: in crossing a plain an army can live, more or less, on the supplies of the country-side; but among mountains and defiles there is no population, and therefore no food to be had. Hence an army on the move must take with it all that it consumes, by means of a heavy wagon train, or an enormous convoy of pack-mules. But only the best roads are suitable for wheeled traffic, and so the lines practicable for a large host are very restricted in number. The student is often tempted to consider the movements of the rival generals very slow. The explanation is simply that to transfer an army from one river-basin to another was a serious matter. It was necessary to spend weeks in collecting at the base food and transport sufficient to support the whole force till it reached its goal. In 1811 or 1812 the French and English were continually moving up and down the Portuguese frontier parallel to each other, the one from Salamanca to Badajoz, the other from Almeida or Guarda to Elvas. But to prepare for one of these flittings was such a serious matter that by the time that the army was able to move, the enemy had usually got wind of the plan, and was able to follow the movement on his own side of the frontier. There were months of preparation required before a few weeks of active operations, and when the concentration was over and the forces massed, they could only keep together as long as the food held out, and then had to disperse again in order to live. This was what was meant by the old epigram, that ‘in Spain large armies starve, and small armies get beaten.’

Half the strategy of the campaigns of 1811-12-13 consisted in one of the combatants secretly collecting stores, concentrating his whole army, and then dashing at some important part of his adversary’s line, before the other could mass his forces in a corresponding way. If prompt, the assailant might gain a fortnight, in which he might either try to demolish the enemy in detail before he could concentrate, or else to take from him some important position or town. In 1811 Marmont and Dorsenne played this trick on Wellington, during the short campaign of El Bodon and Aldea da Ponte. They relieved Ciudad Rodrigo, and nearly caught some divisions of the English army before the rest could join. But missing the instant blow, and allowing Wellington time to draw in his outlying troops, they failed and went home. In 1812, on the other hand, the British general successfully played off this device on the French. He first concentrated in the north, and captured Ciudad Rodrigo in eleven days, before Marmont could mass his scattered divisions; then going hastily south he took Badajoz in exactly the same way, storming it after only nineteen days of siege. Soult drew his army together at the news of Wellington’s move, but had to bring troops from such distances, and to collect so much food, that he arrived within three marches of Badajoz only to hear that the place had just fallen.

In dealing with the main geographical facts of the war it is fair to recollect that an invasion of Spain from France is one of the most difficult of undertakings, because the whole river and mountain system of the Peninsula lies across the main line of advance from Bayonne to Cadiz, which the invader must adopt. While the French conquest must be pushed from north to south, both the streams and the Sierras of Spain all run at right angles to this direction, i.e. from east to west. In advancing from the Pyrenees to Madrid, and again from Madrid to Seville and Cadiz, the invader has to cross every main river—Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir—and to force the passes of every main range. Moreover, as he advances southward, he has to keep his flanks safe against disturbance from the two mountainous regions, Catalonia and Portugal, which lie along the eastern and western coasts of the Peninsula. Unless the whole breadth of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, be occupied step by step as the invader moves on towards the Straits of Gibraltar, he can always be molested and have his lines of communication with France threatened. In the end it may be said that Napoleon’s whole scheme of conquest was shipwrecked upon the blunder of attacking Andalusia and Cadiz while Portugal was still unsubdued. Wellington’s constant sallies out of that country upon the French flank, in Leon and Estremadura, detained such large forces to protect the valleys of the Central Douro and Tagus that enough men were never found to finish the conquest of the south and east. And finally one crushing victory at Salamanca, in the plains of Leon, so threatened the invader’s line of touch with France, that he had to abandon the whole south of Spain in order to concentrate an army large enough to force Wellington back from Burgos and the great northern road.

On the other hand, one tremendous advantage possessed by the French in the central years of the war must be remembered. It is manifest that Madrid is the only really important road-centre in Spain, and that its undisturbed possession by the French in 1809-11 gave them the advantage of being able to operate from a single point, against enemies who lay in a vast semicircle around, with no good cross-roads to join them and enable them to work together. The small ‘Army of the Centre,’ which was always kept in and around Madrid, could be used as a reserve for any other of the French armies, and transferred to join it in a few marches, while it was infinitely more difficult to unite the various forces lying on an outer circle at Astorga, Almeida, Abrantes, and Cadiz, which the Spaniards and the British kept in the field. In short, in estimating the difficulties of the two parties, the advantage of the central position must be weighed against the disadvantage of long and exposed lines of communication.