A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 3, Sep. 1809-Dec. 1810

by Charles Oman

A day later the French appeared in front of the fortifications of Valencia. Having surveyed the outworks, and summoned the place in vain, Suchet found that there was no more to be done. His bolt was shot: the city intended to defend itself: it was full of troops, and the whole population had been armed. Caro had given notice that the defence was to be conducted in the style of Saragossa, and as a foretaste of his intentions court-martialled and hanged several persons who were accused of being traitors[333]. After lying four days in front of Valencia, Suchet marched off again on the night of March 10-11, having convinced himself that he had been sent on a fool’s errand by Soult and King Joseph. For the expedition had only been undertaken on the hypothesis that the enemy was demoralized and ready to surrender—which was clearly not the case. No siege train had been brought, and without heavy artillery Valencia was impregnable. The retreat of the French was hastened by the fact that their communications with Aragon had already been cut off. Villacampa, undismayed by his defeat in February, had returned to the front the moment that the invading columns had passed on to the Valencian coast. He had blockaded the garrison of Teruel, cut off two small columns which were moving in its neighbourhood, and captured four guns and some 300 prisoners. At the same moment, though Suchet was unaware of the fact, Colonel Perena, with a detachment from Lerida, had made a demonstration against Monzon, and when the garrison of Eastern Aragon concentrated to defend it, had fallen on Fraga and burnt the bridge there—the only crossing of the Cinca which was in French hands. Mina, too, warned of the departure of the main body of the 3rd Corps for the South, had reassembled some of his levies, and begun to render the road from Saragossa to Pampeluna once more unsafe.

Suchet, therefore, on withdrawing from Valencia, found plenty of occupation awaiting him in Aragon. Villacampa was once more chased into the wilds of the Sierra de Albaracin: and several columns were detached in pursuit of Mina. This time the young partisan was unfortunate—he was caught between one of Suchet’s detachments and a party sent out by the governor of Navarre, and taken prisoner on March 31, with some scores of his followers. His place, however, was taken ere long by his uncle Espoz y Mina, who rallied the remnant of the guerrilleros of North-Western Aragon, and continued the struggle with an energy as great, and a success far greater, than that of his nephew.

Meanwhile, the months of February and March had been wasted, so far as the 3rd Corps was concerned, and it was not till April that Suchet was able to take in hand the enterprise which he himself had approved, and to which the Emperor had now given his consent—the siege of Lerida. A few weeks after his return to Saragossa he received from Paris two imperial letters denouncing his late campaign as presumptuous, objectless, and altogether deserving of high condemnation[334].

While the Valencian expedition had been in progress Marshal Augereau had been trying his hand at the Catalan problems which Verdier and St. Cyr had found so puzzling. His luck had been bad—and his faults had been many—for of all the commanders-in-chief who successively endeavoured to subjugate the untameable principality he was decidedly the least capable. When Gerona fell, the main body of his army was let loose for operations in the open field. But Verdier’s divisions, on whom the burden of the siege work had fallen, were in much too dilapidated a condition for active service[335]. Leaving them to recover their strength and gather up their convalescents, in cantonments between Figueras and Gerona, Augereau moved southwards in January, at the head of the troops of Souham and Pino, whose two divisions still counted 12,000 bayonets with the eagles, though they left behind them 5,000 sick in the hospitals of Figueras and Perpignan.

The Marshal’s main duty at this moment was to clear the road from Figueras to Barcelona, which the Spanish fortress of Gerona had so effectually blocked during the whole year 1809. All further advances were suspended till this operation should have been completed, by the Emperor’s special orders. Duhesme, indeed, isolated in Barcelona with some 6,000 men, communicating with France only by sea, and surrounded by a discontented population, which was reduced to semi-starvation by the blockade kept up by the British fleet, was in a perilous condition. There had been many who thought that if Blake, in October 1809, had marched against Barcelona instead of trying to throw succours into Gerona, he would have forced Augereau to abandon the siege of the latter place. For Duhesme would have been in such danger, since he was neither strong enough to fight in the open nor to man efficiently the immense circuit of the walls of Barcelona, that Augereau might probably have judged that it was better to save the capital of Catalonia than to continue the interminable blockade of the smaller town that was holding out so obstinately against him. Be this as it may, Augereau set Souham’s and Pino’s columns on the march early in January 1810, after having first executed at their head a sort of battue of the somatenes of the mountains around Gerona, as far as Ripol and Campredon. His progress was a reign of terror: he had issued on December 28th a proclamation stating that all irregulars taken with arms in their hands were to be treated as simple highway robbers, and hung without any form of trial[336]. He was as good as his word, and all the prisoners taken by the flying columns of Souham and Pino were suspended on a line of gallows erected on the high-road between Gerona and Figueras. These atrocities turned the war in Catalonia into a struggle even more ferocious than that of 1809, for the natives, very naturally, retaliated upon every French straggler that they caught, and the Spanish regular officers had great difficulty in saving the lives even of large bodies who had laid down their arms upon formal terms of surrender.

Two roads lead from Gerona and the valley of the Ter to Barcelona—that by Vich and that by Hostalrich. They unite near Granollers, twenty miles outside Barcelona. Augereau marched with the Italian division of Pino by the second road, while he sent Souham by the other. Both met with opposition: the small castle of Hostalrich was still held by the Spaniards—it was the only fortified place in central Catalonia which was now in their hands, and commanded, though it did not actually block, the main road to Barcelona. On arriving before it, the Marshal ordered Mazzuchelli’s Italian brigade to form the siege, trusting that the place would fall in a few days; but finding the resistance more serious than he had expected, he finally continued his march, with the remainder of the Italian division, towards Granollers and Barcelona. He had ordered Duhesme to come out to meet him at the former place, with as many of his troops as he could spare from garrison duty.

Souham meanwhile, on the eastern road, had entered Vich on January 11. He found that it had just been evacuated by the main body of the Spanish Army of Catalonia, whose head quarters had been maintained in that town all through the later months of the siege of Gerona. This force, still numbering about 7,000 men, was no longer under the command of its old general. Blake had resigned at Christmastide, after a lively altercation with the Junta of Catalonia, who laid the blame for the fall of Gerona on his shoulders, while he maintained that they were to blame for not having ordered the general levée en masse of the principality at an earlier date[337]. The command then passed in quick succession to the two senior general officers of the Catalan army, first to the Marquis of Portago, and then, after he had fallen ill, to General Garcia Conde, Governor of Lerida. But these interim commanders-in-chief were replaced in a few weeks by a younger and much more active leader, Henry O’Donnell—the man who had conducted the second convoy for Gerona, and had cut his way out of the place with such splendid address and resolution. He had only just been raised to the rank of Major-General, yet was now entrusted by the Central Junta with the control of the entire army of Catalonia. As he was setting to work to reorganize it, Souham arrived in front of his head quarters. Judging it unwise to offer battle at the head of demoralized troops, O’Donnell evacuated Vich, and fell back to the mountains above it. Souham followed him with an advanced guard as far as the pass called the Col de Suspina, where the Spaniard suddenly turned upon the pursuing force, and hurled it back with loss upon the main body of the division (January 12, 1810). He refused, however, to face Souham next day, and retreated towards Manresa; thereupon the French general also turned back, thinking it profitless to leave the Vich-Barcelona road, and to plunge into the hills in pursuit of an evasive enemy. He ended by making his way across the mountains to join the Marshal.

Meanwhile, Augereau, with Pino’s Italian brigades, reached Granollers, and came into touch with Duhesme’s troops, just in time to find that a disaster had preceded his arrival. The Governor of Barcelona, in obedience to the orders sent him, had marched out on January 16 with three battalions and 250 cuirassiers in order to meet the Marshal. He waited four days at Granollers, and then left the brigade under the charge of Colonel Guétry, and returned in person to Barcelona, recalled by rumours of a threatened attack from the side of Tarragona. On the morning after his departure Guétry’s force, which believed itself in complete security, was suddenly surprised in its camps by a detachment sent out by O’Donnell. That enterprising officer had heard that Augereau was still twenty miles away, and that Guétry had scattered his men in the three villages of Santa Perpetua, Mollet, and Granollers, in order to cover them from the bitter January weather. Accordingly, he resolved to risk an attack on this unwary detachment. Two brigades—about 4,000 men—under the Marquis of Campo Verde, made a forced march across the mountains, and fell upon the villages at dawn. The battalion of the 112th in Santa Perpetua was completely cut to pieces or captured—only two men are said to have escaped. The 7th and the cuirassiers at Mollet fared somewhat better, but were driven back to Barcelona with heavy loss. Part of the third battalion, one of the 5th Italian Line regiment, which was posted at Granollers, escaped destruction by throwing itself into a fortified convent, and held out for two days, till it was saved by the approach of Augereau along the high-road. Altogether, Duhesme’s division was thinned by the loss of 1,000 men on January 21-22: Guétry had been taken prisoner, with some 600 men more and two guns. The Spaniards disappeared the moment that Augereau came in sight, and rejoined O’Donnell in the hills.