It was only when the capital had been occupied, and the troops of Blake and Belvedere, of Castaños and Palafox were flying devious over half the provinces of Spain, that the difficulties of the Peninsular War began to develop themselves. Napoleon had never before had any experience of the character of guerilla warfare, or the kind of resistance that can be offered by a proud and revengeful nation which has made up its mind never to submit to the conqueror. In his complete ignorance of Spain and the Spaniards, he imagined that he had a very simple campaign to conduct. The subjugation of the Peninsula was to him an ordinary military problem, like the invasion of Lombardy or of Prussia, and he went forth in cheerful confidence to ‘plant the eagles of France on the forts of Lisbon,’ and to ‘drive the Britannic leopard from the soil of the Peninsula, which it defiles by its presence.’ But the last chapter of this story was to be told not at Lisbon but at Toulouse: and ‘the Beneficent Providence which had deigned to strike the British ministry with such blindness that they had been induced to send an army to the Continent[427],’ had other designs than Bonaparte supposed.
SECTION VII: CHAPTER III
THE MISFORTUNES OF JOACHIM BLAKE: ZORNOZA AND ESPINOSA DE LOS MONTEROS
The campaign of November 1808 was fought out upon three separate theatres of war, though every movement of the French armies which engaged in it formed part of a single plan, and was properly linked to the operations which were progressing upon other sections of the front. The working out of Napoleon’s great scheme, therefore, must be dealt with under three heads—the destruction of Blake’s ‘Army of the Left’ in the north-west; the rout of the armies of Andalusia and Aragon upon the banks of the Ebro; and the central advance of the Emperor upon Burgos and Madrid, which completed the plan.
We must first deal with the misfortunes of Blake and his Galician host, both on chronological grounds—it was he who first felt the weight of the French arms—and also because Napoleon rightly attached more importance to the destruction of this, the most formidable of the Spanish armies, than to the other operations which he was carrying out at the same moment.
It will be remembered that after his first abortive expedition against Bilbao, and his retreat before Ney [October 5], Blake had fallen back to Valmaceda. Finding that he was not pursued, he drew up to that point the divisions which he had hitherto kept in the upper valley of the Ebro, and prepared to advance again, this time with his whole army massed for a bold stroke. On October 11 he again marched into Biscay, and drove out of Bilbao the division of General Merlin, which Ney had left behind him to hold the line of the Nervion. On the twelfth this small force fell back on Zornoza and Durango, and halted at the latter place, after having been reinforced from King Joseph’s reserve at Vittoria. Verdier headed the succours, which consisted of three battalions of the Imperial Guard, two battalions of the 118th Regiment, two battalions of Joseph’s own Royal Guards, and the 36th Regiment, which had just come up from France. When strengthened by these 7,000 men, Merlin considered himself able to make a stand, and took up a strong position in front of Durango, the important point at which the roads from Bayonne and from Vittoria to Bilbao meet.
When committing himself to his second expedition into Biscay, Blake was not wholly unaware of the dangers of the step, though he failed to realize them at their full value, since (in common with the other Spanish generals) he greatly underrated the strength of the French army on the Ebro. He intended to carry out his original plan of cutting off Bessières and King Joseph from their retreat on Bayonne, by forcing the position of Durango, and seizing the high-road at Bergara; but he was aware that an advance to that point had its dangers. As long as his divisions had lain in or about Villarcayo and Valmaceda, he had a perfectly clear line of retreat westward in the event of a disaster. But the moment that he pushed forward beyond Bilbao, he could be attacked in flank and rear by any troops whom the King might send up from the valley of the Ebro, by the two mountain-roads which run from Vittoria to the Biscayan capital. One of these is the main route from Vittoria to Bilbao via Murguia and Orduña. The other is a more obscure and difficult path, which leads across the rough watershed from Vittoria by Villareal and Villaro to Bilbao. Aware of the fact that he might be assailed by either of these two passes, Blake told off a strong covering force to hold them. Half of Acevedo’s Asturian division, 4,000 strong, was placed at Orduña: the other half, with the whole of Martinengo’s 2nd Division of Galicia, 8,500 bayonets in all, took its post in the direction of Villaro. These detachments were eminently justifiable, but they had the unfortunate result of enfeebling the main force that remained available for the stroke at the French in front of Durango. For that operation Blake could only count on his 1st, 3rd, and 4th Divisions, as well as the ‘Vanguard’ and ‘Reserve’ Brigades—a total of 18,000 men[428].
Blake had seized Bilbao on October 11: it is astonishing therefore to find that he made no forward movement till the twenty-fourth. By this sluggishness he sacrificed his chance of crushing Merlin before he could be reinforced, and—what was far worse—allowed the leading columns of the ‘Grand Army’ to reach Irun. If he had pressed forward on the twelfth or thirteenth, they would still have been many marches away, trailing across Guyenne and Gascony. Having once put his hand to such a dangerous manœuvre as that of pushing between the French flank and the northern sea, Blake was most unwise to leave the enemy time to divine his object and to concentrate against him. A rapid stroke at Durango and Bergara, so as to cut the great high-road to France in the rear of Bessières, was his only chance. Such an attempt would probably have landed him in ultimate disaster, for the enemy (even before the ‘Grand Army’ arrived) were far more numerous than he supposed. He had valued them at 40,000 men, while they were really 64,000 strong. But having framed the plan, he should at least have made a strenuous attempt to carry it out. It is possible to explain but not to excuse his delay: his army was not equipped for a winter campaign, and the snow was beginning to lie on the upper slopes of the Cantabrian hills and the Pyrenees. While he was vainly trying to obtain great-coats and shoes for his somewhat tattered army, from the Central Junta or the English, and while he was accumulating stores in Bilbao, the days slipped by with fatal rapidity.
It was not till October 24 that he at last moved forward from Bilbao, and committed himself to the now hopeless task of clearing the way to Durango and Bergara. On that day his advanced guard drove Merlin’s outlying posts from their positions, and came face to face with the French main body, drawn out on the hillsides of Baquijano, a few miles in front of Durango. The enemy expected him to attack next day, but he had just received confused notices from the peasantry to the effect that enormous reinforcements had reached Irun and San Sebastian, and were within supporting distance of the comparatively small force with which he had hitherto been dealing. This information threw him back into the condition of doubt and hesitation from which he had for a moment emerged, and he proceeded to halt for another full week in front of the Durango position. Yet it was clear that there were only two rational alternatives before him: one was to attack Merlin and Verdier before they could draw succour from the newly arrived corps. The other was to fall back at once to a position in which he could not be enveloped and outflanked, i.e. to retire behind Bilbao, holding that town with nothing more than a small detachment which could easily get away if attacked. But Blake did nothing, and waited in the supremely dangerous post of Zornoza, in front of Durango, till the enemy fell upon him at his leisure.