SECTION II: CHAPTER III
THE FRENCH ARMY IN SPAIN
§ 1. The Army of 1808: its Character and Organization.
In dealing with the history of the imperial armies in the Peninsula, it is our first duty to point out the enormous difference between the troops who entered Spain in 1807 and 1808, under Dupont, Moncey, and Murat, and the later arrivals who came under Bonaparte’s personal guidance when the first disastrous stage of the war was over.
Nothing can show more clearly the contempt which the Emperor entertained, not only for the Spanish government but for the Spanish nation, than the character of the hosts which he first sent forth to occupy the Peninsula. After Tilsit he was the master of half a million of the best troops in the world; but he did not consider the subjugation of Spain and Portugal a sufficiently formidable task to make it necessary to move southward any appreciable fraction of the Grand Army. The victors of Jena and Friedland were left in their cantonments on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder, while a new force, mainly composed of elements of inferior fighting value, was sent across the Pyrenees.
This second host was at Napoleon’s disposition mainly owing to the fact that during the late war he had been anticipating the conscription. In the winter of 1806-7 he had called out, a year too soon, the men who were due to serve in 1808. In the late autumn of 1807, while his designs in Spain were already in progress, he had summoned forth the conscription of 1809. He had thus under arms two years’ contingents of recruits raised before their proper time. The dépôts were gorged, and, even after the corps which had been depleted in Prussia and Poland had been made up to full strength, there was an enormous surplus of men in hand.
To utilize this mass of conscripts the Emperor found several ways. Of the men raised in the winter of 1806-7 some thousands had been thrown into temporary organizations, called ‘legions of reserve,’ and used to do garrison duty on the Atlantic coast, in order to guard against possible English descents. There were five of these ‘legions’ and two ‘supplementary legions’ in the army sent into Spain: they showed a strength of 16,000 men. None of them had been more than a year under arms, but they were at any rate organized units complete in themselves. They formed the greater part of the infantry in the corps of Dupont.
A shade worse in composition were twenty ‘provisional regiments’ which the Emperor put together for Spain. Each regimental dépôt in the south of France was told to form four companies from its superabundant mass of conscripts. These bodies, of about 560 men each, were united in fours, and each group was called a ‘provisional regiment.’ The men of each battalion knew nothing of those of the others, since they were all drawn from separate regiments: there was not a single veteran soldier in the ranks: the officers were almost all either half-pay men called back to service, or young sub-lieutenants who had just received their commissions. These bodies, equally destitute of esprit de corps and of instruction, made up nearly 30,000 men of the army of Spain. They constituted nearly the whole of the divisions under Bessières and Moncey, which lay in Northern Spain at the moment of the outbreak of the war.
But there were military units even less trustworthy than the ‘provisional regiments’ which Napoleon transferred to Spain in the spring of 1808. These were the five or six régiments de marche, which were to be found in some of the brigades which crossed the Pyrenees when the state of affairs was already growing dangerous. They were formed of companies, or even smaller bodies, hastily drawn together from such southern dépôts, as were found to be still in possession of superfluous conscripts even after contributing to the ‘provisional regiments.’ They were to be absorbed into the old corps when the pressing need for instant reinforcements for the Peninsula should come to an end. In addition to all these temporary units, Bonaparte was at the same moment making a vast addition to his permanent regular army. Down to the war of 1806-7 the French regiments of infantry had consisted of three battalions for the field and a fourth at the dépôt, which kept drafting its men to the front in order to fill up the gaps in the other three. Napoleon had now resolved to raise the establishment to five battalions per regiment, four for field service, while the newly created fifth became the dépôt battalion. When the Peninsular War broke out, a good many regiments had already completed their fourth field-battalion, and several of these new corps are to be found in the rolls of the armies which had entered Spain. The multiplication of battalions had been accompanied by a reduction of their individual strength: down to February, 1808, there were nine companies to each unit, and Junot’s corps had battalions of a strength of 1,100 or 1,200 bayonets. But those which came later were six-company battalions, with a strength of 840 bayonets when at their full establishment.
All the troops of which we have hitherto spoken were native Frenchmen. But they did not compose by any means the whole of the infantry which the Emperor dispatched into Spain between October, 1807, and May, 1808. According to his usual custom he employed great numbers of auxiliaries from his vassal kingdoms: we note intercalated among the French units seven battalions of Swiss, four of Italians, two each of Neapolitans and Portuguese[76], and one each of Prussians, Westphalians, Hanoverians, and Irish. Altogether there were no less than 14,000 men of foreign infantry dispersed among the troops of Junot, Dupont, Bessières, Moncey, and Duhesme. They were not massed, but scattered broadcast in single battalions, save the Italians and Neapolitans, who formed a complete division under Lecchi in the army of Catalonia.