‘We should not have been dissatisfied with our allies, malgré their appearance and their rags, if we had felt any reason to confide in them. The men might be “capable of all that men dare,” but the appearance of their officers at once bespoke their not being fit to lead them in the attempt. They not only did not look like soldiers, but even not like gentlemen, and it was difficult from their mean and abject appearance, particularly among the infantry, to guess what class of society they could have been taken from. Few troops will behave well if those to whom they should look up are undeserving respect. Besides their general inefficiency we found their moral feeling different from what we expected. Far from evincing devotion or even common courage in their country’s cause, they were very often guilty, individually and collectively, of disgraceful cowardice. We hourly regretted that the revolution had not occasioned a more complete bouleversement of society, so as to bring forward fresh and vigorous talent from all classes. Very few of the regular military showed themselves worthy of command. Indeed, with the exception of a few self-made soldiers among the Guerillas, who had risen from among the farmers and peasantry, it would be hard to point out a Spanish officer whose opinion on the most trivial military subject was worth being asked. We saw old besotted generals whose armies were formed on obsolete principles of the ancien régime of a decrepit government. To this was added blind pride and vanity. No proofs of inferiority could open their eyes, and they rushed from one error and misfortune to another, benefiting by no experience, and disdaining to seek aid and improvement’ [pp. 194-5].
A voice from the ranks, Sergeant Surtees of the Rifle Brigade, gives the same idea in different words.
‘Most of the Spanish officers appeared to be utterly unfit and unable to command their men. They had all the pride, arrogance, and self-sufficiency of the best officers in the world, with the very least of all pretension to have a high opinion of themselves. It is true they were not all alike, but the majority were the most haughty, and at the same time the most contemptible creatures in the shape of officers that ever I beheld’ [p. 109].
As a matter of fact the class of officers in Spain was filled up in three different ways. One-third of them were, by custom, drawn from the ranks. In an army raised by conscription from all strata of society excellent officers can be procured in this way. But in one mainly consisting of the least admirable part of the surplus population, forced by want or hatred of work into enlisting, it was hard to get even good sergeants. And the sergeants made still worse sub-lieutenants, when the colonel was forced to promote some of them. No wonder that the English observer thought that there were ‘Spanish officers who did not look like gentlemen.’ This class were seldom or never allowed to rise above the grade of captain. The remaining two-thirds of the officers received their commissions from the war office: in the cavalry they were supposed to show proofs of noble descent, but this was not required in the infantry. There was a large sprinkling, however, of men of family, and for them the best places and the higher ranks were generally reserved—a thing feasible because all promotion was arbitrary, neither seniority nor merit being necessarily considered. The rest were drawn from all classes of society: for the last fifteen years any toady of Godoy could beg or buy as many commissions for his protégés as he pleased. But a large, and not the worst, part of the body of officers was composed of the descendants of soldiers of fortune—Irishmen were most numerous, but there were also French and Italians—who had always been seen in great numbers in the Spanish army. They held most of the upper-middle grades in the regiments, for the promoted sergeants were kept down to the rank of captain, while the nobles got rapid promotion and soon rose to be colonels and generals. On the whole we cannot doubt that there was a mass of bad officers in the Spanish army: the ignorant fellows who had risen from the ranks, the too-rapidly promoted scions of the noblesse, and the nominees of Godoy’s hangers-on, were none of them very promising material with which to conduct a war à outrance for the existence of the realm.
In 1808 there was but one small military college for the training of infantry and cavalry officers. Five existed in 1790, but Godoy cut them down to one at Zamora, and only allowed sixty cadets there at a time, so that five-sixths of the young men who got commissions went straight to their battalions, there to pick up (if they chose) the rudiments of their military education. From want of some common teaching the drill and organization of the regiments were in a condition of chaos. Every colonel did what he chose in the way of manual exercise and manœuvres. A French officer says that in 1807 he saw a Spanish brigade at a review, in which, when the brigadier gave the order ‘Ready, present, fire!’ the different battalions carried it out in three different times and with wholly distinct details of execution.
Not only was the Spanish army indifferently officered, but even of such officers as it possessed there were not enough. In the old line regiments there should have been seventy to each corps, i.e. 2,450 to the 105 battalions of that arm. But Godoy had allowed the numbers to sink to 1,520. When the insurrection broke out, the vacant places had to be filled, and many regiments received at the same moment twenty or thirty subalterns taken from civil life and completely destitute of military training. Similarly the militia ought to have had 1,800 officers, and only possessed 1,200 when the war began. The vacancies were filled, but with raw and often indifferent material.
Such were the officers with whom the British army had to co-operate. There is no disguising the fact that from the first the allies could not get on together. In the earlier years of the war there were some incidents that happened while the troops of the two nations lay together, which our countrymen could never forgive or forget. We need only mention the midnight panic in Cuesta’s army on the eve of Talavera, when 10,000 men ran away without having had a shot fired at them, and the cowardly behaviour of La Peña in 1811, when he refused to aid Graham at the bloody little battle of Barossa.
The strictures of Wellington, Napier, and the rest were undoubtedly well deserved; and yet it is easy to be too hard on the Spaniards. It chanced that our countrymen did not get a fair opportunity of observing their allies under favourable conditions; of the old regular army that fought at Baylen or Zornoza they never got a glimpse. It had been practically destroyed before we came upon the field. La Romana’s starving hordes, and Cuesta’s evasive and demoralized battalions were the samples from which the whole Spanish army was judged. In the Talavera campaign, the first in which English and Spanish troops stood side by side, there can be no doubt that the latter (with few exceptions) behaved in their very worst style. They often did much better; but few Englishmen had the chance of watching a defence like that of Saragossa or Gerona. Very few observers from our side saw anything of the heroically obstinate resistance of the Catalonian miqueletes and somatenes. Chance threw in our way Cuesta and La Peña and Imaz as types of Peninsular generals, and from them the rest were judged. No one supposes that the Spaniards as a nation are destitute of all military qualities. They made good soldiers enough in the past, and may do so in the future: but when, after centuries of intellectual and political torpor, they were called upon to fight for their national existence, they were just emerging from subjection to one of the most worthless adventurers and one of the most idiotic kings whom history has known. Charles IV and Godoy account for an extraordinary amount of the decrepitude of the monarchy and the demoralization of its army.
It is more just to admire the constancy with which a nation so handicapped persisted in the hopeless struggle, than to condemn it for the incapacity of its generals, the ignorance of its officers, the unsteadiness of its raw levies. If Spain had been a first-rate military power, there would have been comparatively little merit in the six years’ struggle which she waged against Bonaparte. When we consider her weakness and her disorganization, we find ourselves more inclined to wonder at her persistence than to sneer at her mishaps.