Accordingly, on the early morning of March 13th the decisive step which committed Masséna to a retreat towards Celorico and the 9th Corps was taken. The 8th Corps was marched off, covering the train, along the road which leads by Miranda de Corvo to the Ponte de Murcella and the upper Mondego, instead of toward Coimbra, now only eight miles away. To cover its flank Loison’s division was moved from Rabaçal, where it had lain on the day of the combat of Redinha, to Fonte Cuberta. Ney remained behind at Condeixa with his two old divisions, to cover the fork of the roads, and to detain the Allies as long as possible, while Junot and the trains were toiling along the bad and mountainous road towards Miranda de Corvo. The 2nd Corps was still kept at Espinhal, where it was observed by Nightingale’s brigade, which had dogged its steps at a cautious distance since the 9th.
These arrangements did not work very well, for Ney was turned out of the Condeixa position, much earlier than he or Masséna had expected, by Wellington’s skilful manœuvres. The movement used against him was much the same as at Redinha; the 3rd Division marched by a mountain path to turn his left, while the 6th Division, coming in from Souré by a wide sweep, appeared at Ega, almost behind his right wing, and threatened to get between him and Coimbra. Meanwhile the 4th and Light Divisions, with the rest of the army behind them, were halted on distant heights in his front, ready to attack when the turning movements should become pronounced. Ney was, very properly, anxious about his retreat, for he could not any longer (as at Pombal and Redinha) give back to his rear, but was forced to take a side direction, in order to follow the 8th Corps on the Miranda de Corvo road. The moment that he saw Picton making for this road, to cut him off from the rest of the French, he set fire to the town of Condeixa and moved off in great haste, just avoiding Picton, to Casal Novo, a village five miles east of his first position, where he formed up again at dusk. The day’s operations had been almost bloodless; nothing more than a few musket shots were exchanged by the skirmishers of the two sides. But they had been of the highest strategical importance, since they ended in the complete abandonment of the attempt to reach Coimbra by the French.
Incidentally, the rapid fashion in which Ney had been evicted from the cross-roads at Condeixa nearly led to disaster some of the outlying fractions of the French army. Masséna himself had halted at Fonte Cuberta, six miles to the south-east, with his staff and Loison’s division, which was escorting the reserve artillery of the 6th and 8th Corps. He was intending to cover Ney’s left from any wide turning movement by the British. The road on which this village lies falls into that from Condeixa to Miranda de Corvo about three miles from the first-named place. Ney, when preparing to evacuate Condeixa, sent an aide-de-camp to advise the Commander-in-Chief that he was about to retire. But the officer charged with the message lost his way, and only arrived at Fonte Cuberta late in the afternoon with the dispatch[177]. By this time Ney had already reached Casal Novo, some distance beyond the point at which the Fonte Cuberta road fell into his line of retreat. Masséna and the division in his company were therefore cut off from their proper route for retiring on to the main army. Within a few minutes after the arrival of Ney’s messenger, a patrol of the German hussars arrived at the village, and nearly rode into Masséna and his staff, who were dining in the open air under a tree outside its entrance. There was a mutual surprise; the Marshal’s escort of fifty men ran to their arms, while the hussars halted, not understanding what they had come upon. If they had charged, Masséna might have been taken or slain, as several French narrators assert. He mounted and galloped back in haste towards Loison’s infantry, who were camped in and beyond the village. The hussars went off to report to their squadron commander that Fonte Cuberta was still occupied—it had been with the object of obtaining information on this point that the reconnaissance had been sent out. Masséna hastened to put Loison’s men under march for Casal Novo, by a very rugged side-track, called up Clausel’s division to cover him, and got off in the dusk unhindered, save by a few flank skirmishers belonging to Picton’s division, who came upon him in the dark and were brushed away with ease[178].
This incident led to a furious quarrel between Masséna and Ney, for the former asserted, as it seems, that the latter had promised to hold Condeixa for a whole day or more, and had moved off at noon out of mere malice, so as to leave his chief in an exposed position. If we may believe the narrative of Masséna’s aide-de-camp, Fririon, he asserted that Ney had deliberately wished to get him captured, and had executed his retreat ‘clandestinement’[179]. It was impossible to persuade him to the contrary, and he saved up his wrath for the next occasion when he should be able to convict Ney of open disobedience, and not of mere errors of judgement. There can be no doubt that he was doing an injustice to his lieutenant in suspecting him of such a monstrous plot: Ney was a man of honour; Masséna had himself such a doubtful record for probity that we can well understand his suspicion of others. In truth, what happened was that the younger Marshal had promised to defend Condeixa longer than was really possible, when Wellington (as on this day) was in his happiest mood, and manœuvring with a skill which made a long resistance impracticable.
But Loison’s division was not the only French force which was in serious danger on March 13. Montbrun had lingered in front of Coimbra, till his retreat also was imperilled by the loss of Condeixa and its all-important bifurcation of roads. At eight o’clock in the morning he had made his last vain attempt to win his way into the city—this time by negotiation. He sent a parlementaire on to the broken bridge, with a demand that Trant should give up the place, and a promise that the citizens should suffer no harm, and the garrison should be allowed free egress. This last was really not his to grant, for during the night Trant had removed everything from the city except a battalion of Militia and the two guns at the bridge. The sergeant in command of these pieces (a certain José Correia Leal, whose name the Portuguese have very properly preserved) adroitly wasted time by detaining the French officer. He told him that he must wait till an answer came from Trant, whose absence he kept concealed, and then, after some hours, said that his commander had gone to visit a distant point of the river defences, from which he would not be back till the next morning[180]. Meanwhile, if any attempt were made to attack the bridge, he had orders to blow up several more arches, which were mined. Time drifted on, and meanwhile Montbrun received at noon the news that Ney was forced to give up Condeixa[181], i. e. that there was no more prospect of using Coimbra as a crossing-point. Moreover his own retreat was in danger, if an English detachment should march straight from Condeixa towards the bridge, a distance of only eight miles. The French general was obliged to abscond, and the only route open to him, since the chaussée was lost, was a rough path which, after coasting along the south bank of the Mondego for some time, turns up into the valley of the Eça[182], and so reaches Miranda de Corvo. After blowing up many of his wheeled vehicles, Montbrun hastened to take this track, and escaped by it, though he was discovered and pursued by some of Wellington’s cavalry patrols, who pressed his rearguard and made many prisoners. But the division of dragoons, with the infantry battalion attached, and the two horse artillery batteries—their caissons had to be destroyed because of the badness of the road—ultimately reached Miranda with no great loss.
This was a truly important day, the most critical in the whole campaign, since at its end Coimbra was safe, and the whole French army had been turned on to the road towards Spain. Wellington was satisfied, and had no reason to be otherwise. The accusation made against him by many critics of over-caution, which is said to have prevented him from destroying Loison’s and Montbrun’s detachments, seems unjustifiable. The cardinal fact that he was not superior in numerical strength to the army that he was pursuing is too often forgotten; indeed, the French writers from Masséna down to to-day have nearly always credited him with 50,000 or 60,000 men, whereas he had barely 45,000, of whom only 32,000 were British, and the Portuguese were still in great part untried troops; for though those of them who had passed the test of battle (Pack’s and Power’s[183] brigades, the Caçadores in the Light Division, and the artillery) had done admirably hitherto, there were still four whole brigades which had never been in serious action since they were reorganized in 1809[184]. Nothing was to be risked, and partial attacks by unsupported vanguards were to be eschewed, when (as Wellington remarked in his dispatch of March 14) ‘the whole country affords advantageous positions to a retreating army, of which the enemy has shown that he knows how to avail himself. They are leaving the country, as they entered it, in one solid mass, covering their rear on every march by one (or sometimes two) corps d’armée, in the successive positions which the country affords, which corps d’armée are closely supported by the rest.’ A general action against equal or superior numbers ranged on a strong hill-position was clearly inadvisable, and the plan of manœuvring the enemy out of each line that he took up by a short flanking movement was infinitely preferable. Flanking movements take time, and unless the enemy is very slow or very rash, have effective rather than brilliant results. But Wellington never ‘played to the gallery’; he was no vendor of bulletins; he had a small army which it was difficult to reinforce, and he could not afford to waste his precious men in hazardous combats. It would have been of little profit to him if he had destroyed a division or two of the enemy, and had then arrived on the Spanish frontier with an army diminished by 10,000 men. The enemy had unlimited supports behind him; he had practically none. For when he had taken out his field army, and had detached Beresford to Estremadura, there were no regular troops left in Portugal save the newly formed 7th Division, which was coming up from Lisbon to join the main body.
