While Gerona was enduring its last month of starvation, those whose care it should have been to succour the place at all costs were indulging in a fruitless exchange of recriminations, and making preparations when it was all too late. Blake, after retiring to Vich on November 10, informed the Junta of Catalonia that he was helpless, unless more men could be found, and that they must find them. Why he did not rather insist that the Valencian reserves should be brought up, and risk stripping Tarragona and Lerida of their regular garrisons, it is hard to say. This at any rate would have been in his power. The Catalan Junta replied by summoning a congress at Manresa on November 20, to which representatives of every district of the principality were invited. The congress voted that a levy en masse of all the able-bodied men from seventeen to forty-five years of age should be called out[64], and authorized a loan of 10,000,000 reals for equipping them. They also wrote to Seville, not for the first time, to demand reinforcements from the Central Junta. But the battle of Ocaña had just been fought and lost, and Andalusia could not have spared a man, even if there had been time to transport troops to Tarragona. All that the Catalans received was honorary votes of approval for the gallant behaviour of the Geronese. The levy en masse was actually begun, but there was an insuperable difficulty in collecting and equipping the men in winter time, when days were short and roads were bad. The weeks passed by, and Gerona fell long before enough men had been got together to induce Blake to try a new offensive movement. Why was the congress not called in September rather than in November? Blake had always declared that he was too weak to risk a battle with the French for the raising of the siege, but till the last moment the Catalans contented themselves with arguing with him, and writing remonstrances to the Central Junta, instead of lending him the aid of their last levies.
One or two points connected with this famous siege require a word of comment. It is quite clear that St. Cyr during its early stages did not try his honest best to help Verdier. During June and July his covering army was doing no good whatever at Vich: he pretended that he had placed it there in order to ward off possible attacks by Blake. But it was matter of public knowledge that Blake was far away in Aragon, engaged in his unhappy campaign against Suchet, and that Coupigny, left at Tarragona with a few thousand men, was not a serious danger. St. Cyr could have spared a whole division more for the siege operations, without risking anything. If he had done so, Gerona could have been approached on two sides instead of one, the Mercadal front might have been attacked, and the loose blockade, which was all that Verdier could keep up, for want of more men, might have been made effective. But St. Cyr all through his military career earned a reputation for callous selfishness and habitual leaving of his colleagues in the lurch. On this occasion he was bitterly offended with Verdier, for giving himself the airs of an equal, and corresponding directly with the Emperor. There can be no doubt that he took a malicious pleasure in seeing his failures. It is hardly disguised in his clever and plausible Journal des Opérations de l’Armée de Catalogne en 1808-1809[65].
Verdier, on the other hand, seems to have felt all through that he was being asked to perform a task almost impossible, when he was set to take Gerona with his own 14,000 men, unaided by the covering army. His only receipt for success was to try to hurry on the matter by delivering desperate blows. Both the assault on Monjuich on July 8 and that on the city on September 19 were premature; there was some excuse for the former: Verdier had not yet realized how well Alvarez could fight. But the second seems unpardonable, after the warning received at Monjuich. If the general, as he declared before delivering his assault, mistrusted his own troops, he had no right to order a storm at all, considering his experience of the way in which the Spaniards had behaved in July. He acted on the fallacious theory that a practicable breach implies a town that can be taken, which is far from being the case if the garrison are both desperate and ingenious in defending themselves. The only way to deal with such a resolute and capable adversary was to proceed by the slow and regular methods of siegecraft, to sap right up to the ditch before delivering an assault, and batter everything to pieces before risking a man. This was how Monjuich was actually taken, after the storm had failed. Having neither established himself close under the walls, nor subdued the flanking fires from the Calvary and Chapter redoubts, nor ascertained how far the Spaniards had prepared inner defences for themselves, he had no right to attack at all.
As to Blake, even after making all possible allowances for the fact that he could not trust his troops—the half-rallied wrecks of Maria and Belchite—for a battle in the field, he must yet be pronounced guilty of feebleness and want of ingenuity. If he could never bring up enough regulars to give him a chance of facing St. Cyr, the fault was largely his own: a more forcible general would have insisted that the Valencian reserves should march[66], and would have stripped Lerida and Tarragona of men: it could safely have been done, for neither Suchet nor Duhesme was showing any signs of threatening those points. He might have insisted that the Catalan Junta should call out the full levy of somatenes in September instead of in November. He might also have made a better use of the irregulars already in the field, the bands of Rovira, Milans, and Claros. These miqueletes did admirable service all through the siege, by harassing Verdier’s rear and cutting off his convoys, but they were not employed (as they should have been) in combination with the regulars, but allowed, as a rule, to go off on excursions of their own, which had no relation to the main objects of Blake’s strategy. The only occasion on which proper use was made of them was when, on September 1, they were set to threaten Verdier’s lines, while Garcia Conde’s convoy was approaching Gerona. It may be pleaded in the Spanish general’s defence that it was difficult to exact obedience from the chiefs: there was a distinct coolness between the regulars and the irregulars, which sometimes led to actual quarrels and conflicts when they met. But here again the reply is that more forcible captain-generals were able to control the miqueletes, and if Blake failed to do so, it was only one more sign of his inadequacy. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he mismanaged matters, and that if in his second and third attempts to relieve Gerona he had repeated the tactics of his first, he would have had a far better chance of success. On September 1 only did he make any scientific attempt to distract the enemy’s attention and forces, and on that occasion he was successful. Summing things up, it may be said that he was not wrong to refuse battle with the troops that he had actually brought up to Gerona: they would undoubtedly have been routed if he had risked a general engagement. His fault was that he did not bring up larger forces, when it was in his power to do so, by the exercise of compulsion on the Catalan and Valencian Juntas. But these bodies must share Blake’s responsibilities: they undoubtedly behaved in a slack and selfish fashion, and let Gerona perish, though it was keeping the war from their doors for a long eight months.
All the more credit is due to Alvarez, considering the way in which he was left unsuccoured, and fed with vain promises. A less constant soul would have abandoned the defence long before: the last two months of resistance were his sole work: if he had fallen sick in October instead of December, his subordinates would have yielded long before. But it is not merely for heroic obstinacy that he must be praised. Every detail of the defence shows that he was a most ingenious and provident general: nothing was left undone to make the work of the besiegers hard. Moreover, as Napier has observed, it is not the least of his titles to merit that he preserved a strict discipline, and exacted the possible maximum of work from soldier and civilian alike, without the use of any of those wholesale executions which disgraced the defence of Saragossa. His words were sometimes truculent, but his acts were just and moderate. He never countenanced mob-law, as did Palafox, yet he was far better obeyed by the citizens, and got as good service from them as did the Aragonese commander. He showed that good organization is not incompatible with patriotic enthusiasm, and is far more effective in the hour of danger than reckless courage and blind self-sacrifice.
SECTION XVII: CHAPTER IV
THE AUTUMN CAMPAIGN OF 1809: TAMAMES, OCAÑA, AND ALBA DE TORMES
As early as August 30, when Wellington had not fully completed his retreat from Almaraz and Jaraicejo to Badajoz and Merida, the central Junta had already begun to pester him and his brother, the Ambassador at Seville, with plans for a resumption of the offensive in the valley of the Tagus. On that day Martin de Garay, the Secretary of State, wrote to represent to Wellesley that he had good reason to believe that the troops of Victor, Mortier, and Soult were making a general movement to the rear, and that the moment had arrived when the allied armies in Estremadura and La Mancha should ‘move forward with the greatest activity, either to observe more closely the movements of the enemy, or to attack him when circumstances may render it expedient[67].’ The French movement of retreat was wholly imaginary, and it is astonishing that the Spanish Government should have been so mad as to believe it possible that ‘their retrograde movement may have originated in accounts received from the North, which compel the enemy either to retire into the interior of France, or to take up a position nearer to the Pyrenees.’ On a groundless rumour, of the highest intrinsic improbability, they were ready to hurl the newly-rallied troops of Eguia and Venegas upon the French, and to invite Wellington to join in the advance. Irresponsible frivolity could go no further. But the Junta, as has been already said, were eager for a military success, which should cause their unpopularity to be forgotten, and were ready to seize on any excuse for ordering their troops forward. This particular rumour died away—the French were still in force on the Tagus, and, as a matter of fact, the only movement northwards on their part had been the return of Ney’s corps to Salamanca. But though the truth was soon discovered, the Junta only began to look out for new excuses for recommencing active operations.
Wellington, when these schemes were laid before him, reiterated his refusal to join in any offensive campaign, pointed out that the allied forces were not strong enough to embark on any such hazardous undertaking, and bluntly expressed his opinion that ‘he was much afraid, from what he had seen of the proceedings of the Central Junta, that in the distribution of their forces they do not consider military defence and military operations so much as political intrigue, and the attainment of petty political objects.’ He then proceeded to make an estimate of the French armies, to show their numerical superiority to the allies; in this he very much under-estimated the enemy’s resources, calculating the whole force of the eight corps in Spain at 125,000 men, exclusive of sick and garrisons not available for active service. As a matter of fact there were 180,000 men, not 125,000, with the Eagles at that moment, after all deductions had been made, so that his reasoning was far more cogent than he supposed[68]. But this only makes more culpable the obstinate determination of the Junta to resume operations with the much inferior force which they had at their disposal.