When the three batteries erected on the summit of the Sierra opened on the castle, the walls began to crumble at once. At the end of eight days its front towards the French trenches was a mass of shapeless ruins. Carbon then surrendered, without waiting for an assault, which must undoubtedly have proved successful. There was nothing particularly obstinate, or, on the other hand, particularly discreditable, in the defence. The castle was not a modern fortress; its sole strength had lain in its inaccessible position; and when the French had climbed up on to a level with it, nothing more could be done.
Having mastered Lerida and Mequinenza, and obtained a firm footing in the plain of Western Catalonia, Suchet had now harder work before him. His first necessity was to clear the country behind him of the insurgents, who had swarmed down from the hills to attack the troops left behind in Central Aragon, while the main army had been concentrated before Lerida. Villacampa had half destroyed a column of 350 men at Arandija on the Xalon on May 14. Catalan somatenes had attacked the garrison of the valley of Venasque, on the very frontier of France, on May 16. Valencian bands had besieged the castle of Alcañiz for many days. But all the enemies of Suchet had to fly, as soon as his main army became once more free for field service. No attempt was made to oppose a serious resistance to his movable columns: the insurgents fled to right and left: the most extraordinary proof of their demoralization was that, on June 13, General Montmarie, at the head of one of these columns, found the strong fort of Morella, within the Valencian border, absolutely unoccupied. He seized and garrisoned it, knowing that this place, which commands the mountain-road from Aragon to Valencia, was of immense strategical importance.
When June came round, Suchet had once more mastered all Aragon, and was free for work outside its borders. A march against Valencia, on the one side, or against Tortosa and Tarragona on the other, was equally possible. But at this moment Napoleon was set on proceeding ‘methodically’—in Eastern Spain no less than in Portugal—and the orders issued to the Commander of the 3rd Corps were, to proceed against Tortosa, and cut off Valencia from Catalonia by its capture. The longer and more difficult advance against Valencia itself was relegated to a distant date; there must be no more fiascos like that of February. Accordingly, Suchet was ordered to follow up the capture of Lerida and Mequinenza by the reduction of Tortosa[361]. He was informed at the same time that Macdonald, the new commander of the Army of Catalonia, was ordered to attack Tarragona. In this way, the restless O’Donnell would find his hands full at home, and would not be able to spare time or men for the relief of Tortosa. Only from the Valencian Army, which had always been badly led, and managed with the most narrow particularism by José Caro and his Junta, need Suchet expect any trouble.
But until Macdonald was prepared to lead down his corps to the neighbourhood of Tarragona and the lower Ebro, Suchet felt that his own enterprise must be held back, or at least conducted with caution. And although Macdonald had received his orders in May, on taking over Augereau’s post, it was some time before he was able to execute them. June and July had passed, and August had arrived, before he appeared in the regions where Suchet had been told to expect him, and at last placed himself in communication with the Army of Aragon. This long delay was entirely due to the burden imposed upon him by the necessities of Barcelona, with its large garrison and its vast civil population. The provisions which Augereau had introduced into the city in the early spring were exhausted, and his successor was forced to replace them by escorting thither two new convoys of great size in June and July. So active were the miqueletes that Macdonald found himself obliged to take with him his French and his Italian division as escort on each occasion. For a first-class convoy is a vast affair, stretching out to long miles in a mountain country, and requiring to be strongly guarded at every point of its unwieldy length. The Emperor was bitterly disappointed at Macdonald’s delays: it was hard to convince him that the problem of food-supply in Catalonia was almost insoluble, and that neither Barcelona nor the field army could be permanently fed by seizing the resources of the valley of the Llobregat, or the Campo of Tarragona, and making war support war in the regular style. Catalonia had never fed its whole population even in time of peace, but had largely depended on corn brought up from Aragon or imported by sea. But the British Mediterranean squadron now made the transport of food to Barcelona by water impossible, while, till the 3rd Corps and the 7th Corps should finally meet, it was impossible to supply the latter from the Aragonese base. While neither of the normal ways of procuring a regular supply of provisions was practicable, nothing remained but the weary task of escorting convoys from Perpignan and Figueras to Barcelona. This Macdonald accomplished thrice, in June, July, and August: it was only after the third journey that he left the storeshouses of Barcelona so thoroughly replenished that he was able to think of further offensive operations, and to concert the long-delayed junction with Suchet and the 3rd Corps. The Marshal in his autobiography confesses that he hated the task set him, and found it entirely out of the lines of his experience. He began his career by repealing Augereau’s hanging edicts, and endeavoured to introduce more humane methods of warfare. But his own men were out of hand, and the Spaniards being as fierce as ever, his task was a very hard one.
Meanwhile, Henry O’Donnell was granted three months in which to reorganize the Catalan army, which had suffered so severely at Margalef. His untiring energy enabled him to raise his force by the end of July to 22,000 men, organized in five divisions, with which he formed a double front, facing Suchet on the west and Macdonald on the east. One division under Campo Verde lay northward in the mountains, with head quarters at Cardona, and detachments pushed forward as far as Urgel and Olot: its main task was to harass the French garrison of the Ampurdam, and to threaten Macdonald’s rear every time that he moved forward towards Barcelona. A second division lay facing that city, on the lower Llobregat, with detachments at Montserrat and Manresa, which kept up the communications with Campo Verde and the North. Two more divisions lay westward, in the direction of Falcet and Borja Blanca, watching Suchet, and prepared to oppose any serious attempt on his part to close in upon Tortosa. The fifth division, or reserve, formed a central mass of troops, ready to reinforce either the detachments which watched Suchet or those which watched Macdonald; it lay south of Tarragona, at the Col de Alba. Thus posted O’Donnell waited for further developments, and continued to drill and exercise his new levies, to dismiss inactive and incompetent officers, to collect magazines, and to quarrel with the local Junta. For this active and intelligent, if reckless and high-handed, young officer was on even worse terms with the Catalan authorities than his predecessor, Blake. The main cause of quarrel was that O’Donnell wished to strengthen his regular troops, by drafting into the depleted cadres of Reding’s and Coupigny’s old battalions every recruit that he could catch. He held that the French could only be brought to a final check by disciplined troops. The Junta, on the other hand, believed in guerrilla warfare, and preferred to call out from time to time the miqueletes and somatenes, who drifted back to their homes whenever a crisis was over. Both sides had much to say for themselves: the Catalans could point out that the regular troops had been beaten times out of number, while their own irregulars had achieved many small successes, and done the French much harm. O’Donnell, on the other hand, was quite right in holding that guerrilla operations, much as they might incommode the enemy, would never deal him a fatal blow or finish the war. He dreamed of recruiting his army up to a force of 50,000 men at some happy future date, and of delivering a stroke with superior numbers which should destroy the French hold on Catalonia. Meanwhile, much as they quarrelled, the Irish-Spanish general and the local Junta were both too good haters of France to allow their disputes to prevent a vigorous resistance from being kept up in the principality. O’Donnell carried his point to the extent of persuading the Junta to allow him to form many of the ever-changing tercios of miqueletes into ‘legions,’ which were to be kept permanently embodied[362], and to count as part of the regular army. Hence came the large rise in his muster-rolls.
SECTION XX: CHAPTER II
OPERATIONS IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN DURING THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1810 (MARCH–OCTOBER 1810)
The situation which had been created by King Joseph’s rapid conquest of the open country of Andalusia in January and February 1810, and by his failure to capture Cadiz, was destined to remain unchanged in any of its more important details for a full year. Soult, with the three corps of Victor, Sebastiani, and Mortier, was strong enough to hold the towns and plains, strong enough also to blockade Cadiz and to spare expeditionary forces at intervals for operations outside the limits of his own sphere of command. From time to time he sent the greater part of Mortier’s corps against Estremadura, and the greater part of Sebastiani’s corps against Murcia. But his 70,000 men were not sufficient to provide an army for the permanent conquest of either of these provinces. And every time that 10,000 or 15,000 sabres and bayonets were distracted to one of these raids, the total of troops left behind to watch Cadiz, to guard Seville, and to repress the interminable activity of the guerrilleros of the mountains was found to be dangerously small. Ere long the force that had marched out for external operations had to be called back in haste, to ward off some peril to one or other of the vital points of Andalusia.
Soult himself remained for the greater part of his time at Seville, occupied not only in keeping the movements of his three corps in unison—no easy task, for both Victor and Sebastiani had wills of their own, and even the placid Mortier occasionally murmured—but in superintending the details of civil administration. It was very seldom that he marched out in person at the head of his last reserves, to strengthen some weak point in his line of offence or defence. During the next two years he was quite as much the Viceroy as the Commander-in-Chief in Andalusia. Though the Emperor had refrained from naming that kingdom one of the ‘Military Governments,’ which he had created by his decree of Feb. 15, 1810, yet Soult made himself in fact, if not in name, as independent as the governors of Aragon or Navarre or Catalonia. The bond of common interests and desires which had united him to King Joseph during the winter of 1809-10 was soon broken. The monarch at Madrid soon discovered that his presence was not desired in Andalusia—some good military reason could always be discovered which made it impracticable that he should revisit Seville. Little or no money was remitted to him from the South: rich as was Soult’s sphere of governance, it was always made to appear that the expenses of the sustenance of the army and of the siege of Cadiz were so great that no surplus remained for the central government. When the King murmured, and appealed to Paris, his brother usually supported the Marshal[363]; it was Napoleon’s first maxim that war should maintain war, and he thought it of far more importance that the army of Andalusia should pay for itself, than that the bankrupt exchequer at Madrid should be recruited[364]. As the months rolled on, and Joseph gradually realized the position, his hatred for the plausible Marshal became as bitter as it had been during their earlier quarrel in the summer of 1809. He had good reason to be angry, for Soult undoubtedly sacrificed the interests of the King of Spain to those of the Viceroy of Andalusia. He played a selfish game, though he had always a good military excuse for any particular refusal to fall in with the King’s plans or to obey his orders. In 1810 his conduct may be justified, but in 1811 and 1812 he undoubtedly—as will be shown in chapters to come—ruined what small chance there was of bringing the Peninsular War to a successful termination, by pursuing a policy which made the maintenance of the French authority in Andalusia its chief end, and not the general good of the imperial arms in Spain.