A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809

by Charles Oman

The Marquis was completely lost to sight in his frontier fastnesses, and was able to do his best to reorganize his battered host. By February 13 he had 9,000 men under arms, nearly all old soldiers, for the Galician levies were still scattered in their homes. His dispatches during this period are very gloomy reading: he complains bitterly of the apathy of the country-side and the indiscipline of his officers. What could be expected of subalterns, he asks, when a general (Martinengo of the 2nd division) had absconded without asking leave or even reporting his departure? ‘I know not where the patriotism, of which every one boasted, is now to be found, since on the smallest reverse or misfortune, they lose their heads, and think only of saving themselves—sacrificing their country and compromising their commander.’ Much harassed for want of food, La Romana kept moving his head quarters; he was sometimes at Verin and Monterey, sometimes at Chaves just inside the Portuguese frontier, more frequently at Oimbra. He had only nine guns left; there was no reserve of ammunition, and the soldiers had but few cartridges remaining in their boxes. The strongest battalion left in the army had only 250 bayonets—many had but seventy or eighty, and others (notably the Galician local corps) had completely disappeared. He besought the Central Junta to obtain from the British money, muskets, clothing, and above all ammunition, or the army would never be fit to take the field[207]. A similar request in the most pressing terms was sent to Sir John Cradock at Lisbon.

Soult could not but be aware that La Romana’s army, or some shadow of it, was still in existence: but since it sedulously avoided any contact with him, and had completely evacuated the coast-land of Galicia, he appears to have treated it as a ‘negligible quantity’ during his first operations. Its dispersion, if it required any further dispersing, would fall to the lot of Ney and the 6th Corps, not to that of the army sent against Portugal.

Franceschi and Lahoussaye, as we have already seen, reached the Minho and the Portuguese border on February 2. It was only on the eighth that the Duke of Dalmatia set out from Santiago to follow them, in company with the division of Merle. Those of Delaborde and Mermet, released by the arrival of Ney, took the same route on the ninth and tenth respectively. The rear was brought up by the reserve and heavy artillery, and by that brigade of Lorges’ dragoons which had not been handed over to the 6th Corps. The coast-road being very good, Soult was able to concentrate his whole army within the triangle Tuy, Salvatierra, Vigo by the thirteenth, in spite of the hindrances caused by a week of perpetual storm and rain.

It was the Marshal’s intention to enter Portugal by the great coast-road, which crosses the Minho at Tuy and proceeds to Oporto by way of Valenza and Braga. But as Valenza was a fortress, and its cannon commanded the broad ferry at which the usual passage was made, it was clearly necessary to choose some other point for crossing the frontier river. After a careful survey Soult fixed on a village named Campo Saucos, only two miles from the mouth of the Minho, as offering the best starting-point. He established a battery of heavy guns on his own side of the river, and collected a number of fishing-boats[208], sufficient to carry 300 men at a voyage. As he could not discover that the Portuguese had any regular force opposite him, he resolved to attempt the passage with these modest resources.

There would have been no great difficulty in the enterprise during ordinary weather. But the incessant rains had so swelled the Minho that it was now a wild, ungovernable torrent, which it was hard to face and still harder to stem. When the heavy Atlantic surf met the furious current of the stream, during the rising of the tide, the conflict of the waters made the passage absolutely impossible. It had to be attempted at the moment between the flow and the ebb—though there was at that hour another danger—that the boats might be carried past the appointed landing-place and wrecked on the bar at the mouth of the river. But this chance Soult resolved to risk: on February 16, long before daybreak, his twenty or thirty fishing-boats, each with a dozen men on board, launched out from the northern shore, and struck diagonally across the stream, as the current bore them. They were at once saluted by a heavy but ill-directed fire from the Portuguese bank, where hundreds of peasants were at watch even during the hours of darkness. The soldiers rowed and steered badly—Soult had only been able to give them as guides a mere handful of men trained to the water[209]. The furious current swept them away: probably also their nerve was much tried by the fusillade, which, though more noisy than dangerous, yet occasionally picked off a rower or a helmsman. The general result was that only three boats with thirty-five or forty men got to the appointed landing-place, where they were made prisoners by the Portuguese. The rest were borne down-stream, and came ashore at various points on the same side from which they had started, barely avoiding shipwreck on the bar.

The attempt to pass the Minho, therefore, ended in a ridiculous fiasco: it showed the limitations of the French army, which among its numerous merits did not possess that of good seamanship. Soult was deeply chagrined, not because of the insignificant loss of men, but because of the check to his prestige. He resolved that he would not risk another such failure, and at once gave orders for the whole army to march up-stream to Orense, the first point where there was a bridge over the Minho. This entailed a radical change in his general plan of operations, for he was abandoning the good coast-road by Tuy and Valenza for a very poor mountain-way from Orense to Chaves along the valley of the Tamega. There was another important result from the alteration—the new route brought the French army down upon La Romana’s camp of refuge: his cantonments in and about Monterey lay right across its path. But neither he nor Soult had yet realized the fact that they were about once more to come into collision. The Marshal did not know where the Marquis was; the Marquis did not at first understand the meaning of the Marshal’s sudden swoop inland. Some of the Spanish officers, indeed, were sanguine enough to imagine that the French, after their failure on the lower Minho, would abandon Galicia altogether[210]!

The whole French army had now made a half-turn to the left, and was marching in a north-easterly direction. Lahoussaye’s dragoons, starting from Salvatierra, led the advance, Heudelet’s division marched at the head of the infantry; Delaborde, Mermet, and Merle, each at a convenient interval from the preceding division, stretched out the column to an interminable length. The heavy artillery and wagon train brought up the rear. Nine hundred sick, victims of the detestable weather of the first fortnight of February, were left behind at Tuy under the guard of a half-battalion of infantry.

It was on the march from Tuy to Orense that Soult began to realize the full difficulties of his task. He had already met with small insurgent bands, but they had been dispersed with ease, and he had paid little attention to them. Now however, along the steep and tiresome mountain road above the Minho, they appeared in great force, and showed a spirit and an enterprise which were wholly unexpected by the French. The fact was that in the month which had now elapsed since the battle of Corunna, the peasantry and the local notables had found time to take stock of the situation. The first numbing effect of the presence of a large hostile army in their midst had passed away. Ruthless requisitions were sweeping off their cattle, the only wealth of the country. Although Soult had issued pacific proclamations, and had tried to keep his men in hand, he could not restrain the usual plundering propensities of a French army on the march. Enough atrocities had already been committed to make the Galicians forget the misconduct of Moore’s men. La Romana, from his refuge at Monterey, had been dispersing appeals to the patriotism of the province, and sending out officers with local knowledge to rouse the country-side. These probably had less effect on the Galicians—the Marquis was a stranger and a defeated general—than the exhortations of their own clergy. In the first rising of the peasantry most of the leaders were ecclesiastics: in the region which Soult was now traversing the peasantry were raised by Mauricio Troncoso, Abbot of Couto, and a friar named Giraldez, who kept the insurgents together until, some weeks later, they handed over the command to military officers sent by La Romana or by the Central Junta. In the valley of the Sil, beyond Orense, it was Quiroga, Abbot of Casoyo, who first called out the country-side[211]. Every narrative of the Galician insurrection, whether French or Spanish, bears witness to the fact that in almost every case the clergy, regular and secular, were the earliest chiefs of the mountaineers. It was characteristic of the whole rising that many of the bands took the field with the church-banners of their parishes as substitutes for the national flag.

This much is certain, that as soon as the violent February rains showed signs of slackening, the whole of rural Galicia flew to arms. From Corcubion on the surf-beaten headland of Finisterre, to the remote headwaters of the Sil under the Sierra de Penamarella, there was not a valley which failed to answer the appeal which La Romana had made and which the clergy had circulated. From the weak and sporadic movements of January there sprang in February a general insurrection, which was all the more formidable because it had no single focus, was based on no place of arms, and was directed not by one chief but by fifty local leaders, each intimately acquainted with the district in which he was about to operate.

The first result of this widespread movement was to complete the severance of the communications between the various French divisions in Galicia. From the earliest appearance of the invaders, as we have already seen, there had been intermittent attempts to cut the lines of road by which the 2nd and 6th Corps kept touch with each other and with Madrid. But hitherto a convoy, or escort of a couple of hundred men, could generally brush aside its assailants, and get through from post to post. In February this power of movement ceased: the insurgents became not only more numerous and more daring, but infinitely more skilful in their tactics. Instead of endeavouring to deliver combats in the open, they broke the bridges, burnt the ferry-boats, cut away the road in rocky places, and then hung persistently about any corps that was on the move, as soon as it began to get among the obstacles. They fired on it from inaccessible side-hills, attacked and detained its rearguard so as to delay its march, thus causing a gap to grow between it and the main body, and only closed when the column was beginning to get strung out into a series of isolated groups. The convoys which were being sent up from Astorga to the 2nd and 6th Corps were especially vulnerable to such tactics: the shooting of a few horses in a defile would hopelessly block the progress of everything that was coming on from behind. The massing of men to repair or rehorse disabled wagons only gave the lurking insurgent a larger and an easier target. Hence the bringing up to the front of the heavy transport of the French army became such a slow and costly business, that the attempt to move it was after a time almost abandoned. Another point which the insurgents soon perceived was the helplessness of the French cavalry among rocks and defiles. A horseman cannot get at an enemy who lurks above his head in precipitous crags, refuses to come down to the high-road, and takes careful shots from his eyrie into the squadron below. If, worried beyond endurance, the French officers dismounted some of their men to charge the hillside, the lightly-equipped peasants fled away, and were out of sight before the dragoons in their heavy boots could climb the first fifty yards of the ascent. The copious annals of the Galician guerrilla bands almost invariably begin with tales of the annihilation of insufficiently guarded convoys, or of the defeat and extermination of small bodies of cavalry caught in some defile. A very little experience of such petty successes soon taught them the right way to deal with the French. The invaders could not be beaten en masse, but might be cut off in detail, harassed into exhaustion, and so isolated one from the other that it would require the sending out of a considerable expedition to carry a message between two neighbouring garrisons, or to forward a dispatch down the high-road to Madrid.