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

by Charles Oman

On the whole, there were probably never more than 20,000 guerrilleros in arms at once, in the whole region between the Sierra de Guadarrama and the shore of the Bay of Biscay. They never succeeded in beating any French force more than two or three battalions strong, and were being continually hunted from corner to corner. Yet, despite their weakness in the open field, their intestine quarrels, their frequent oppression of the country-side, and their ferocity, they rendered good service to Spain, and incidentally to Great Britain and to all Europe, by pinning down to the soil twice their own numbers of good French troops. Any one who has read the dispatches of the commandants of Napoleon’s ‘military governments,’ or the diaries of the officers who served in Reille’s or Dorsenne’s or Caffarelli’s flying columns, will recognize a remarkable likeness between the situation of affairs in Northern Spain during 1810 and 1811 and that in South Africa during 1900 and 1901. Lightly moving guerrilla bands, unhampered by a base to defend or a train to weigh them down, and well served as to intelligence by the residents of the country-side, can paralyse the action of an infinitely larger number of regular troops.

In the north-east of Spain, where the French were engaged not with mere scattered bands of guerrilleros, but with two regular armies, O’Donnell’s Catalans and Caro’s Valencians, the fortune of war took no decisive turn during the autumn of 1810, though one dreadful blow to the Spanish cause—the loss of Tortosa—was to fall in the winter which followed.

We left Suchet in August 1810, established in his newly-conquered positions at Lerida and Mequinenza, master of all the plain-land of Aragon, as well as of a strip of Western Catalonia, and only waiting for the co-operation of Macdonald and the 7th Corps to recommence his operations[592]. That co-operation, however, was long denied him. The Emperor’s last general orders, which had reached Suchet in June, briefly prescribed to him that the conquest of the city and kingdom of Valencia was his final object, but that he must first break the Spanish line by capturing Tortosa, the great fortress of the Lower Ebro, and Tarragona, the main stronghold of Southern Catalonia[593]. For both these latter operations he was to count on the aid of Macdonald and the Army of Catalonia[594]. Relying on this support, Suchet, after less than a month had elapsed since the capture of Mequinenza, had pushed his advanced guard down the Ebro, till it was at the very gates of Tortosa. One detachment even passed the town, and seized the ferry of Amposta, the only passage of the Ebro near its mouth, actually cutting the great road from Tarragona to Valencia, and only leaving the bridge of Tortosa itself open, for the linking of the operations of Caro and O’Donnell. Meanwhile Suchet was preparing his siege-train at Mequinenza, and waiting for a rise in the Ebro, which would commence to become navigable with the arrival of the autumn rains, in order to ship his guns down-stream to their destined goal. He was at the same time making the land route to Tortosa passable, by repairing the old military road from Caspe to Mora and Tivisa, which had been constructed during the wars of the Spanish Succession, but had long ago fallen into ruin.

Suchet was quite aware that by thrusting a comparatively small force—he had only brought up 12,000 men—into the near neighbourhood of Tortosa, he was risking the danger of being attacked at once by the Army of Valencia from the south and O’Donnell’s Catalans from the north. But he trusted that Macdonald and the 7th Corps would keep the latter—the more formidable enemy—employed, while he had a well-founded contempt for the generalship of Caro, who had always proved himself the most incompetent and timid of commanders. But Macdonald arrived late, having been forced to spend the whole summer, as has been already related[595], in his triple revictualling of Barcelona, and meanwhile the Valencian army came to the front. Its leading division, under Bassecourt, threatened Morella, on Suchet’s flank, early in August, hoping to draw him away to defend this outpost. But a single brigade under Montmarie sufficed to turn back the Valencian detachment, and Suchet kept his positions. O’Donnell meanwhile, vainly hoping for solid help from Caro, had joined the division of his army which was kept at Falcet[596], and after threatening Suchet’s head quarters at Mora on July 30, so as to distract his attention, suddenly turned aside and entered Tortosa with 2,500 men. Calling out all the troops available for a sortie, he issued from the town on August 3, and beat up the outposts of the division under Laval, which was in observation before his gates. But though the Catalans fought fiercely, and drove in the first French line, they were not strong enough to push the enemy away from Tortosa. O’Donnell should have brought a heavier force if he intended to accomplish his end. Shortly after he returned to Tarragona, whither he was called by the movements of Macdonald.

Some days later than he had covenanted, Caro came up to Vinaros, on the coast-road from Valencia, and to San Mateo on the parallel inland road, with his whole army, including the force which Bassecourt had been commanding. It consisted of no more than 10,000 ill-organized troops of the Line, who had been joined by nearly as many unregimented peasants in loose guerrilla bands. The whole mass was far from being formidable, as Suchet knew. Wherefore the French general, cutting down to the smallest possible figure the containing troops left before Tortosa, and at his head quarters at Mora, marched with eleven battalions and a cavalry regiment—only 6,000 men in all—to meet the Valencians. He drove their advanced cavalry from Vinaros, and advanced against their positions at Calig and Cervera del Maestre. Caro at once ordered a precipitate retreat, and did not stop till he had placed thirty miles between himself and the enemy. His obvious terror and dismay at the approach of the French roused such anger that he was summoned to give up the command by his own officers, and obeyed without hesitation[597]. He fled by sea to Majorca, knowing, it is said, that he would have been torn to pieces if he had shown his face before the populace at Valencia, over which he had exercised a sort of dictatorship for more than a year. Suchet, unable to catch such an evasive enemy, and regarding the routed army as a negligible quantity, returned to Mora, where he received the news that the long-expected Macdonald was at last about to appear (August 20).

The Duke of Tarentum had thrown the third and last of his great convoys into Barcelona on the 18th of August, having brought with him as its escort the French division of his army, which was now commanded by Frère[598], and the Italian divisions of Severoli and Pignatelli. He had left behind him General Baraguay d’Hilliers, in the position which Reille had been wont to hold, as the defender of the Ampurdam and Northern Catalonia as far as Hostalrich. Eighteen thousand men were told off for this task, including all the German brigades; but after garrisoning Gerona, Rosas, Figueras, and Hostalrich, d’Hilliers had no great field-force left, and found full employment in warding off the raids of Manso, Rovira, and the other miquelete leaders upon the communication between Gerona and Perpignan. Nearly 10,000 men had also been left in Barcelona, including many sick, and the three divisions with which Macdonald marched to join Suchet did not exceed 16,000 sabres and bayonets, though the whole force of the 7th Corps was reckoned at over 50,000 men.

On August 13 Macdonald forced the Pass of Ordal, after some skirmishing with the somatenes, and entered the plain of Tarragona. It was the news of his approach to the Catalan capital which brought O’Donnell back in haste from Tortosa. He concentrated the greater part of his troops, on the hypothesis that the 7th Corps might be intending to lay siege to the place. He brought down Campoverde’s division from the north to join those of Ibarrola, Sarsfield, and the Baron de Eroles, which were already on the spot. It soon became known, however, to the Spaniards that Macdonald could not be bent on siege operations, for he was bringing with him neither the heavy artillery nor the enormous train of provisions that would be required in such a case. He marched past Reus and Valls to Momblanch, skirmishing all the way with O’Donnell’s detachments, and thence to Lerida, which he reached on August 29. There he found Suchet awaiting him for a conference. The orders from Paris, on which both were acting, seemed to prescribe that Tortosa and Tarragona should both be attacked[599]. But the General and the Marshal agreed that their joint strength was not more than enough for one siege at a time. They agreed that the 3rd Corps should undertake the leaguer of Tortosa, and ‘the containing’ of the Valencian army, while the 7th should cover these operations by keeping O’Donnell and the Catalans fully employed. Suchet therefore drew his detachments southward from Lerida and the plains of the Segre, handing over all that tract to Macdonald. From this fertile region alone could the Marshal have fed his corps, Central Catalonia being barren, and so overrun by O’Donnell’s detachments that it was impossible to forage freely within its bounds. Suchet undertook to provide for his own corps during the siege of Tortosa by bringing up stores from Saragossa and the valley of the Ebro, via Mequinenza. Macdonald lent him, meanwhile, the weakest of his three divisions, 2,500 Neapolitans under Pignatelli, who were to escort the siege-train for Tortosa along the Ebro, when the autumn rains made the river navigable from Mequinenza to the sea.

While Suchet was moving southward and making ready for the siege, the Duke of Tarentum established himself with head quarters at Cervera on the Barcelona-Lerida road, and brigades at Lerida, Agramunt, and Tarrega, all in the plain; he was ready to fall upon O’Donnell’s flank if the Catalans should make any attempt to succour Tortosa, by marching from Tarragona along the roads parallel to the sea coast. Meanwhile he had completely lost touch both with the garrison of Barcelona and with Baraguay d’Hilliers in the Ampurdam. This was the regular state of things during the Catalan war; for if the French left detachments to guard a line of communication, they were invariably cut off by the enemy; while, if they did not, the roads were blocked and no information came through. So vigorous were the somatenes at this moment, that small parties moving from Tarrega to Cervera,—places only twelve miles apart, and in the middle of the cantonments of the 7th Corps,—were not unfrequently waylaid and destroyed. Macdonald, despite his well-known humanity, was forced to burn villages, and shoot road-side assassins caught red-handed. He lay in the position which he had taken up on September 4-6 for the greater part of that month and the succeeding October, concentrating at intervals a part of his forces for an expedition into the hills, when the Catalans pressed him too closely. At the commencement of his sojourn in the plains, he sent Severoli with an Italian brigade to collect provisions in the valley of the Noguera Palleresa. This raid led to dreadful ravaging of the country-side, but Severoli returned with no spoil and many wounded. He had pushed his advance as far as Talarn, skirmishing the whole way, and driving the somatenes before him, but could accomplish nothing save the burning of poor villages evacuated by their inhabitants. A week later other expeditions scoured the mountain sides eastward, with little more success[600].