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

by Charles Oman

On June 7 Ney reached the front of the position and ascertained that the bridge of Sampayo was broken. His artillery exchanged some objectless salvos with that of Noroña, while his cavalry rode inland to look for possible points of passage. They could find none save the fortified bridge of Caldelas, and a very difficult ford just above it, commanded, like the bridge, by the Spanish trenches on the hillside. The Marshal was also informed that at the Sampayo itself there was another ford, passable only at low tide for three hours at a time.

These reports were by no means encouraging: the Spanish position was almost impregnable, and there was no way of turning it. Indeed the only road by which the enemy could be taken in flank or rear was that from Orense to Vigo, along the Minho. This Ney could not reach: but supposing that Soult had carried out the plan of operations to which he had assented on June 1, it was just possible that he might appear, sooner or later, on that line, and so dislodge the enemy. However it was equally possible that he might be still far distant, and so Ney resolved to make an attempt to force the passage of the Oitaben. On the morning of June 8 therefore, after a long but fruitless cannonade, one body of infantry endeavoured to pass at the ford opposite the village of Sampayo[493], while another, with some cavalry, attempted to cross the other ford at Caldelas, and to storm its bridge. At both places the Galicians stood their ground, and the heads of the column were exposed to such a furious fire that they suffered heavily and failed to reach the further bank. The Marshal therefore drew them back, and refused to persist in an attack which would only have had a chance of success if the enemy had misbehaved and given way to panic. The French lost several hundred men[494], the Galicians, safe in their trenches, suffered far less.

That evening Ney received news which convinced him that Soult had left him in the lurch, and had no intention of prosecuting his march on Orense, to turn the enemy’s flank. It was reported that the 2nd Corps, after making only two days’ march from Lugo, had stopped short at Monforte de Lemos, and showed no signs of moving forward. Indeed the Duke of Dalmatia had put the regiments into cantonments and was evidently about to make a lengthy halt.

Since the Duke of Elchingen was now convinced that the enemy could not be dislodged from behind the Oitaben without his colleague’s aid, and since that colleague showed no signs of appearing within any reasonable time, the game was up. On the morning of the ninth Ney gave orders for his troops to draw off, and to retire by the road to Santiago and Corunna. He made no secret of his belief that Soult had deliberately betrayed him, and had never intended to keep his promise[495]. Without the aid of the 2nd Corps he had no hopes of being able to suppress the Galician insurrection. But till he should learn precisely what his colleague was doing, he could not make up his mind to abandon the province. He therefore sent off on June 10 an aide-de-camp with a large escort, by the circuitous route via Lugo. This officer bore a dispatch, which explained the situation, reported the check at Sampayo, and demanded that the 2nd Corps should not move any further away, but should return to lend aid to the 6th in its time of need. It was more than ten days before an answer was received. But on the twenty-first Soult’s reply came to hand: he had been found marching, not towards Orense, but eastward, in the direction of the frontiers of Leon. He refused to turn back, alleging that this was not in the bond signed at Lugo, and that his troops were in such a state of exhaustion that he was forced to lead them into the plains, to rest them and refit them. Such a reply seemed to justify Ney’s worst suspicions; abandoned by his colleague, and with the care of the whole of Galicia thrown upon his hands, he refused to risk the safety of the 6th Corps in the unequal struggle. He evacuated Corunna and Ferrol on the twenty-second and concentrated his whole force at Lugo. There he picked up the sick and wounded of Soult’s corps as well as his own, and in six forced marches retired along the high-road by Villafranca to Astorga, which place he reached on June 30. Every day he had been worried and molested by the local guerrillas, but neither Noroña nor La Romana had dared to meddle with him. In his anger at the constant attacks of the insurgents, he sacked every place that he passed, from Villafranca and Ponferrada down to the smallest hamlets. Twenty-seven Galician towns and villages are said to have been burned by the 6th Corps during its retreat. Such conduct was unworthy of a soldier of Ney’s calibre: it can only be explained by the fact that he was almost beside himself with wrath at being foiled by Soult’s breach of his plighted word, and vented his fury on the only victims that he could reach.

We must now turn back to trace the steps of the 2nd Corps in its devious march from Lugo to the plains of Leon. Soult had sent out Loison with one division by the road down the left bank of the Minho on June 1. He himself followed with the rest of the army on the next day. On the third the Marshal reached the little town of Monforte de Lemos, between the Minho and the Sil, which he found deserted by its inhabitants. In obedience to La Romana’s orders they had all gone up into the mountains.

If Soult had been honestly desirous of carrying out his compact with Ney, his next step would have been to make a rapid march on Orense. He must have been able to calculate that his colleague would now be in touch with Noroña’s forces somewhere to the south of Corunna, and it was his duty to co-operate by descending the Minho in the enemy’s rear. The mere fact that he remained for the unconscionable space of eight days at Monforte, is a sufficient proof that he never intended to carry out his part of the compact. During this time [June 3-11], while Ney was fighting out to an unsuccessful end his campaign against Noroña, Soult was absolutely quiescent, at a place only thirty miles from his starting-point at Lugo. He was unmolested save by small bands of local guerrillas, who fled to the hills whenever they were faced. His official chronicler Le Noble pleads that there were no fords to be found either over the Minho or over the Sil[496]. But in eight days, unopposed by any serious enemy, the engineers of the 2nd Corps could certainly have built bridges if the Marshal had ordered them to do so. Meanwhile the troops rested, and rejoiced in the abundant supplies of food and wine which they gathered in from the neighbourhood, for Monforte lies in the centre of a fertile upland and its neighbourhood had never before suffered from the ills of war[497].

On the eleventh Soult at last moved on. But it was not in the direction of Orense. He had no news of Ney, and professed to be concerned that the 6th Corps had not yet been heard of on the Orense road. Finally he announced that he was compelled to believe that the Duke of Elchingen had not executed his part of the joint campaign[498], and that there was no longer any reason that the 2nd Corps should carry out its share of the plan. Accordingly he marched, not toward Ney, but in the opposite direction, up the valley of the Sil, with his face set towards the east. He pretended that he hoped to catch and disperse the corps of La Romana, to whom he attributed a design of marching on Puebla de Senabria—the same movement that the Marquis had executed once before in the first days of March. But as a matter of fact La Romana was at Orense, and far from having any intention of retreating eastward, if he were attacked by the 2nd Corps, he was looking on Portugal as his line of retreat[499].

On the thirteenth Soult reached Montefurado, where the Sil is bridged by masses of rocks which have fallen into its bed: the river forces its way beneath them by a tunnel sixty feet broad, which is supposed to have been cut by the Romans. Crossing on this natural bridge, he turned southward to follow the valley of the Bibey, which leads to Puebla de Senabria and the plains of Leon. He met no resistance save from the local insurgents, headed by the Abbot of Casoyo and a partisan called El Salamanquino, who received little or no aid from the regular army. Indeed the only Spanish troops in this remote corner of Galicia were 200 men under an officer called Echevarria, a dépôt left behind at Puebla de Senabria by La Carrera, when he had marched to Vigo in May. This handful of men joined the local guerrillas, and the appearance of their uniforms among the enemy’s ranks served Soult as an excuse for stating that he was contending with the army of La Romana. Any reader of his dispatches would conclude that during the last days of June he was opposed by a considerable body of that force. As a matter of fact he was never anywhere near the Galician army, which lay first at Orense, then at Celanova, finally at Monterey on the Portuguese frontier, always moving to the right, parallel with the Marshal’s advance, so as to avoid being outflanked on its southern wing. It was with the peasants of the valley of the Bibey alone that Soult had to do. Thrusting them to right and left, and cruelly ravaging the country-side on both banks of the river, he reached Viana on June 16. From thence Franceschi sent a flying expedition over the hills to La Gudina, on the road from Monterey to Puebla de Senabria. It brought back news that La Romana had come down to Monterey when the 2nd Corps moved to Viana, but that he was evidently not marching eastward. It had met and routed a party of Spanish cavalry sent out from Monterey[500]; the prisoners taken from them said that the Marquis was returning to Orense now that he had seen the 2nd Corps committing itself to an advance up the valley of the Bibey, and passing away in the direction of the plains of Leon.

It was while halting at Larouco, during this march, that Soult received the dispatch which Ney had written to him from Santiago on June 10. His reply, as we have already seen, was a peremptory refusal to turn back to the aid of the 6th Corps. He asserted that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain made at Lugo (which he assuredly had not), and refused to undertake any further offensive operations with troops in a state of utter destitution and fatigue. He declared to his staff, and wrote to King Joseph, that he believed that Ney had deliberately mismanaged his expedition against Vigo, and had suffered himself to be checked, in order to have an excuse for detaining the 2nd Corps in Galicia[501]. Why, he asked, had not the Duke of Elchingen sent a turning column against Orense, instead of making a frontal attack against the line of the Oitaben? The plain answer to this query—viz. that Ney with a field-force of only 10,000 men, and having three weak garrisons behind him, could not afford either to divide his army or to go too far from Corunna and Lugo—he naturally did not give.

Accordingly, on June 23, Soult abandoned the valley of the Bibey, and crossed the watershed of the Sierra Segundera in two columns, one descending on to La Gudina, the other on to Lobian. On the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth the whole army was united at Puebla de Senabria. The town was taken without a shot being fired; and the French found there several cannon which La Carrera had not carried off when he marched to Vigo, and which Echevarria had spiked but neglected to destroy. The corps rested for five days in Puebla de Senabria, where it obtained abundance of food and comfortable lodging. But Franceschi and his light-horse, now reduced to not more than 700 sabres, were pushed on at once to Zamora, to bear news to King Joseph of the approach of the 2nd Corps, and to beg that the stores, money, artillery, and clothing, which Soult had demanded in his letter from Lugo, might be forwarded to him as soon as possible[502]. Although the authorities at Madrid had heard nothing of the doings of the Marshal since June 1, they had already prepared much of the material required, and sent it to Salamanca. From thence it was now transferred to Zamora and Benavente, where it was handed over to the war-worn 2nd Corps. Other stores were procured from Valladolid and even from Bayonne. But the artillery, the most important of all the necessaries, was long in coming.