Reckoning up all their armies, the Junta had in the end of January some 135,000 men in arms,—a force insufficient to face the French in the open, for the latter (even after the departure of the Imperial Guard) had still nearly 300,000[44] sabres and bayonets south of the Pyrenees, but one quite capable of keeping up the national resistance if it were only conducted upon the proper lines. For, as Napoleon and his marshals had yet to learn, no Spanish district could be considered conquered unless a garrison was left in each of its towns, and flying columns kept in continual motion through the open country. Of the 288,000 French who now lay in Spain more than half were really wanted for garrison duty. A district like Galicia was capable of keeping 40,000 men employed: even the plains of Old Castile and Leon swallowed up whole divisions.
But, unfortunately for Spain, the mania for fighting pitched battles was still obsessing the minds of her generals. Within a few weeks three wholly unnecessary and disastrous engagements were to be risked, at Valls, Ciudad Real, and Medellin. Instead of playing a cautious defensive game, and harassing the French, the Spaniards persisted in futile attempts to face the enemy in general actions, for which their troops were wholly unsuited. The results were so deplorable that but for a second British intervention—Wellesley’s march to Talavera—Andalusia would have been in as great peril in July, 1809, as it had been in January.
The Central Junta must take its share of the responsibility for this fact no less than the Spanish generals. It still persisted in its old error of refusing to appoint a single commander-in-chief, so that each army fought for its own hand, without any attempt to co-ordinate its actions with those of the others. Indeed several of the generals were at notorious enmity with their colleagues—notably Cuesta and Venegas. It was to no purpose that the Central Government displayed great energy in organizing men and collecting material, if, when the armies had been equipped and sent to the front, they were used piecemeal, without any general strategical scheme, and led ere long to some miserable disaster, such as Ucles, or Medellin, or Ocaña. The Junta, the generals, and the nation were all alike possessed by the delusion that with energy and sufficient numbers they might on some happy morning achieve a second Baylen. But for such a consummation Duponts and Vedels are required, and when no such convenient adversaries were to be found, the attempt to encompass and beat a French army was certain to end in a catastrophe.
The only Spanish fighters who were playing the proper game in 1809 were the Catalonian somatenes, and even they gave battle far too often, and did not adhere with a sufficient pertinacity to the harassing tactics of guerrilla warfare. General Arteche has collected in his fourth volume something like a dozen schemes for the expulsion of the French from Spain, which were laid before the Junta, or ventilated in print, during this year. It is interesting to see that only one of them advocates the true line of resistance—the avoiding of battles, the harassing of the enemy’s flanks and communications, and the employment of numerous flying bands instead of great masses[45]. Some of the other plans are the wild imaginings of ignorant fools—one wiseacre wished to run down the French columns with pikemen in a sort of Macedonian phalanx, another to arm one-sixth of the troops with hand-grenades! But the majority of the Junta’s self-constituted advisers thought that numbers were the only necessary thing, and proposed to save Spain by crushing the invaders with levies en masse of all persons between sixteen and fifty—one enthusiast makes the age-limit fourteen to seventy!
These were the views of the nation, and the generals and the Junta were but infected with the common delusion of all their compatriots. They would not see that courage and raw multitudes are almost helpless when opposed by equal courage combined with skill, long experience of war, superior tactics, and intelligent leading.
SECTION X
THE AUTUMN AND WINTER CAMPAIGN IN CATALONIA
CHAPTER I
THE SIEGE OF ROSAS