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

by Charles Oman

The French had disappeared, and it was only next morning that Silveira followed them up on the Montalegre road. He captured a few laggards by the way, but on reaching the little town found that Soult’s rearguard had quitted it two hours before his arrival[445]. By Wellesley’s orders he pushed on for one day more in pursuit, but found that the enemy was now so far ahead that he could do no more than pick up moribund stragglers. On the nineteenth, therefore, he turned back and retraced his steps to Montalegre[446].

Much the same fortune had befallen Beresford’s column. By Wellesley’s orders Tilson’s brigade and their Portuguese companions marched from Chaves by Monterey on the eighteenth, on the chance that Soult, after passing the Serra de Gerez, might drop into the Monterey-Orense road. But the Marshal had not taken this route: he had kept to by-paths, and marched by Porquera and Allariz, to the left of the line on which Beresford’s pursuit was directed. At Ginzo the cavalry of the pursuing column picked up fifty stragglers, and came into contact with a small party of Franceschi’s chasseurs, which Soult had thrown out to cover his flank. Learning from the peasantry that the French had gone off by a different route, Beresford halted and returned to Chaves. His men were so thoroughly worn out, and the strength of the column was so much reduced, that he could have done little more even if he had come upon the main body of the enemy[447].

On May 19 Soult’s dilapidated and starving host poured into Orense, where they could at last take a day’s rest and obtain a decent meal. The Marshal caused the troops to be numbered, and found that he had brought back 19,713 men. As he had started from the Spanish frontier with 22,000 sabres and bayonets, and had received 3,500 more from Tuy, when Lamartinière’s column joined him, it would appear that he had left in all some 5,700 men behind him. Of these, according to the French accounts[448], about 1,000 had fallen in the early fighting, or died of sickness, before Wellesley’s appearance on the Vouga. About 700, mostly convalescents, had been captured at Chaves by Silveira[449]. After the storm of Oporto the British army found 1,500 sick in the hospitals of that city, of Braga and of Viana[450]. They also took some 400 unwounded prisoners at Oporto and at Grijon[451]. It results therefore that the losses of the actual retreat from Baltar to Orense, between the thirteenth and the nineteenth of May, must have been rather more than 2,000 men. But all these had been able-bodied fighting-men—the sick, as we have seen, were abandoned before the break-neck march over the mountains began: adding them and the prisoners of the eleventh-twelfth, to the actual casualties of the retreat, on the same principle which we used when calculating the losses of Moore’s army in the Corunna campaign, we should get a total of 4,000 for the deficiency in the French ranks during the nine days which elapsed between Wellesley’s passage of the Vouga and Soult’s arrival at Orense. Thus it would seem that about one-sixth of the 2nd Corps had been destroyed in that short time—a proportion almost exactly corresponding to that which Moore’s force left behind it in the retreat from Sahagun to Corunna, wherein 6,000 men out of 33,000 were lost.

In other respects these two famous retreats afford some interesting points of comparison. Moore had an infinitely longer distance to cover: in mere mileage his men marched more than twice as far as Soult’s[452]: their journey occupied twenty days as against nine. On the other hand the French had to use far worse roads. From Benavente to Corunna there is a good chaussée for the whole distance: from Baltar to Orense the 2nd Corps had to follow impracticable mule-tracks for more than half the way. As to the weather, there was perhaps little to choose between the two retreats: the nine days of perpetual rain, during which Soult effected his passage of four successive mountain chains, was almost as trying as the cold and snow through which the British had to trudge. Moore’s men were not so hardly pressed by starvation as the 2nd Corps, and they were moving through a country-side which was not actively hostile, if it could scarcely be described as friendly. On the other hand they were pursued with far greater vigour than the French: their rearguard was beset every day, and had constantly to be fighting, while Soult’s troops were hard pressed only on two days—the sixteenth and seventeenth of May. This advantage the Marshal gained by choosing an unexpected line of retreat over obscure by-paths: if he had taken either of the high-roads by Braga and Chaves his fate would have been very different. On this same choice of roads depends another contrast between the two retreats: to gain speed and safety Soult sacrificed the whole of his artillery and his transport. When he arrived at Orense, as one of his officers wrote, ‘the infantry had brought off their bayonets and their eagles, the cavalry their horses and saddles—everything else had been left behind—the guns, the stores, the treasure, the sick.’ Moore, in spite of all the miseries of his march, carried down to Corunna the whole of his artillery, part of his transport, and the greater number of his sick and wounded. If he lost his military chest, it was not from necessity but from the mismanagement of the subordinates who had charge of it. His army was in condition to fight a successful battle at the end of its retreat, and so to win for itself a safe and honourable departure.

Both generals, it will be observed, were driven into danger by causes for which they did not regard themselves as responsible. Soult was placed in peril by attempting to carry out his master’s impracticable orders. Moore thought himself bound to run the risk, because he had realized that there was a political necessity that the English army should do something for the cause of Spain, for it could not with honour retire to Portugal before it had struck a blow. In their management of their respective campaigns both made mistakes. Moore hurried his men too much, and did not take full advantage of the many positions in which he could have held off the pursuer by judicious rearguard actions. Soult’s faults were even greater: nothing can excuse his stay at Oporto during the days when he should have been directing Loison’s movements at Amarante. That stay was undoubtedly due to his vain intrigues with the Portuguese malcontents; it was personal ambition, not any military necessity, which detained him from his proper place. Still more worthy of blame was his disposition of his forces at the moment when the British troops crossed the Vouga: they were scattered in a dangerous fashion, which made concentration difficult and uncertain. But the weakest feature of his whole conduct was that he allowed himself to be surprised in Oporto by Wellesley on May 12. When an army in close touch with the enemy is taken unawares at broad midday, by an irruption of its opponents into the middle of the cantonments, the general-in-chief cannot shift the blame on to the shoulders of subordinates. It was Soult’s duty to see that his officers were taking all reasonable precautions to watch the British, and he most certainly did not do so. Indeed, we have seen that he turned all his attention to the point of least danger—the lower reaches of the Douro—and neglected that on which the British attack was really delivered. It was only when he found himself on the verge of utter ruin, on May 13, that he rose to the occasion, and saved his army, by the daring march upon Guimaraens which foiled Wellesley’s plans for intercepting his retreat. To state that ‘his reputation as a general was nowise diminished by his Portuguese campaign’ is to do him more than justice[453]. It would be more true to assert that he showed that if he could commit faults, he could also do much towards repairing their consequences.

As to Wellesley, it is not too much to say that the Oporto campaign is one of his strongest titles to fame. He had, as we have already seen, only 16,400 British and 11,400 Portuguese troops[454], of whom the latter were either untried in the field or demoralized by their previous experiences beyond the Douro. His superiority in mere numbers to Soult’s corps of 23,000 men was therefore small, and he was lamentably destitute of cavalry and artillery. It was no small feat to expel the enemy from Northern Portugal in nine days, and to cast him into Galicia, stripped of his guns and baggage, and with a gap of more than 4,000 men in his ranks. This had been accomplished at the expense of no more than 500 casualties, even when the soldiers who fell by the way from sickness and fatigue are added to the 300 killed and wounded of the engagements of May 11, 12, and 17. There is hardly a campaign in history in which so much was accomplished at so small a cost. Wellesley had exactly carried out the programme which he had set before himself when he left Lisbon—the defeat of the enemy and the deliverance of the two provinces beyond the Douro. He had expressly disclaimed any intention or expectation of destroying or capturing the 2nd Corps[455], which some foreign critics have ascribed to him in their anxiety to make out that he failed to execute the whole project that he had taken in hand.

There was, it is true, one short moment at which he had it in his power to deal Soult a heavier blow than he had contemplated. On the night of May 12-13, when the Marshal in his bivouac at Baltar learnt of Loison’s evacuation of Amarante, the main body of the 2nd Corps was in a deplorable situation, and must have been destroyed, had the British been close at hand. If Wellesley had pursued the flying foe, on the afternoon of the victory of Oporto, with all his cavalry and the less fatigued regiments of his infantry, nothing could have saved the French. But the opportunity was one which could not have been foreseen: no rational officer could have guessed that Loison would evacuate Amarante, and so surrender his chief’s best line of retreat. It was impossible that Wellesley should dream of such a chance being thrown into his hands. He constructed his plans on the natural hypothesis that Soult had still open to him the route across the Tamega; and he was therefore more concerned with the idea that Beresford might be in danger from the approach of Soult, than with that of taking measures to capture the Marshal. His men were fatigued with the long march of eighty miles in four days which had taken them from the Mondego to Oporto: his guns and stores had not yet passed the bridgeless Douro. It was natural, therefore, that he should allow himself and his army a night’s rest before pressing on in pursuit of Soult. It will be remembered that he did push Murray’s brigade along the Baltar road in the tracks of the Marshal, but that officer never came up with the French. If blame has to be allotted to any one for the failure to discover the unhappy situation of the 2nd Corps upon the morning of the thirteenth, it would seem that Murray must bear the burden rather than the Commander-in-chief. He should have kept touch, at all costs, with the retreating French, and if he had done so would have been able to give Wellesley news of their desperate plight.

As to the pursuit of Soult, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth, it is hard to see that more could have been done than was actually accomplished. ‘It is obvious,’ as Wellesley wrote to Castlereagh, ‘that if an army throws away all its cannon, equipment, and baggage, and everything that can strengthen it and enable it to act together as a body; and if it abandons all those who are entitled to its protection, but add to its weight and impede its progress[456], it must be able to march by roads on which it can not be followed, with any prospect of being overtaken, by an army which has not made the same sacrifices[457].’ This puts the case in a nutshell: Soult, after he had abandoned his sick and destroyed his guns and wagons, could go much faster than his pursuers. The only chance of catching him was that Beresford or Silveira might be able to intercept him at the Misarella on the seventeenth. But the troops of the former were so exhausted by their long march in the rain from Amarante, that although they reached Chaves on the night of the sixteenth-seventeenth, they were not in a condition to march eighteen miles further on the following morning. Whether Silveira, who had taken a shorter but a more rugged route than Beresford, might not have reached Ruivaens ten or twelve hours earlier than he did is another matter. Had he done so, he might have held the cross-roads and blocked the way to Montalegre. We have no details of his march, though we know that he had a bad mountain-path to traverse in abominable weather. All military critics have joined in condemning him[458], but without a more accurate knowledge of the obstacles that he had to cross, and of the state of his troops, we can not be sure of the exact amount of blame that should fall upon him. It is at any rate clear that Wellesley was not responsible for the late arrival of the Portuguese division at Ruivaens and the consequent escape of the enemy.