Wellington’s ambition at the moment did not go beyond the hope of recovering Almeida, which he conceived to be doomed to fall, and possibly Ciudad Rodrigo also, if the enemy should be forced to fall back towards Salamanca. But Almeida, at least, he was determined to make his own, and the first necessity was to clear away the 9th Corps from its neighbourhood. He was convinced that Drouet would retreat when he heard that Masséna had retired to the Agueda, and thought that his motions might be quickened by a demonstration. The 6th Division and Pack’s Portuguese were destined for the blockade of Almeida, but they would not be up for some days, and meanwhile Trant’s Militia, which was already on the lower Coa, was directed to push in boldly upon the place, and promised the support of Slade’s cavalry brigade on the 7th. Trant, always daring and full of enterprise, pressed forward to Val de Mula, on the further side of Almeida, and met there Claparéde’s division on its way towards the Agueda—Conroux had already departed. The Militia engaged in an irregular fight with the French, who turned promptly round upon them, and seemed likely to make havoc of them near the village of Aldea do Obispo. But just as the attack grew threatening Slade’s dragoons appeared from the south, with Bull’s horse artillery battery, and drew up on the flank of the enemy’s troops. The artillery were already beginning to enfilade them, when Claparéde, forming his division into battalion squares, made a hasty retreat towards the Agueda, and passed it at the bridge of Barba del Puerco. Erskine, who was in command of the expedition, did not press him hard, and the French, according to their own account, only lost 7 killed and 4 officers and 24 men wounded, all by cannon shot, for the dragoons were not allowed to charge home[255]. Slade captured, however, some baggage and a good many stragglers, marauders, and guards of small convoys, who were surprised in the open rolling country before they could get over the Agueda.
Wellington could now surround and blockade Almeida; he had been nourishing some hopes that the French might evacuate it, when Drouet departed from its neighbourhood, for he was aware that its stores had run very low. But when it became evident that the place was not to be abandoned, he realized that it would take some weeks to reduce it, for he had no battering-train whatever, indeed there were no heavy guns nearer than Oporto and Abrantes. It was not till the following autumn that a proper siege-train was organized for the Anglo-Portuguese army. Almeida could only be attacked by the weapon of famine; Badajoz, which was beleaguered at the same time, had to be battered with a few guns borrowed from the ramparts of the neighbouring fortress of Elvas. The British army had now been two years in Portugal, yet Wellington still lacked the materials for conducting the smallest offensive operation against strongholds in the hands of the French.
It was known, however, that the stores in Almeida had run low, for the 9th Corps had been consuming them while it lay close by, in spite of Masséna’s strict directions to the contrary. But starvation knows no laws. As a matter of fact there were still over thirty days’ rations in the magazines, though it had been reported both to Wellington and to Masséna that the stock had run down much lower;[256] Drouet had falsely stated on one occasion that there was only enough to last for fifteen days. The British general fancied that four weeks’ blockade might reduce the place, and thought that he was quit of the Army of Portugal for a much longer space of time. He even hoped to effect something against Ciudad Rodrigo[257], which was also under-victualled, for on reaching the frontier Masséna had been forced to indent upon it for supplies for his broken host. If the French retired to Salamanca, as seemed quite probable, Wellington had hopes that he might be able to starve out Rodrigo. But he was not intending to throw his troops around it; they were to remain on the Dos Casas and the Azava, covering the siege of Almeida, but only observing the Spanish fortress with cavalry. For the cutting of the road between it and Salamanca only irregular forces were to be used: Wellington would not send any of his own divisions forward beyond Rodrigo, but requested the daring and resourceful guerrillero chief Julian Sanchez to throw his bands in this direction, the moment that the French army should have retired from the Agueda. Sanchez had been for many months already occupied in similar work, having spent all the winter in raids to cut off convoys and small parties passing from Salamanca to Ciudad Rodrigo, or from that place to Almeida. He had been hunted, often but vainly, by General Thiébault, the governor of the province, whose columns he had usually succeeded in avoiding, while he was always at hand to fall on weak or incautious detachments on the march[258].
On April 8th, as Wellington had expected, the Army of Portugal resumed its march into the interior of the kingdom of Leon, all the three corps passing the Agueda, and retiring, Reynier to San Felices el Grande, Junot to Santi Espiritus, Loison to Alba de Yeltes. Junot, while passing, had been ordered to send into Rodrigo a reinforcement for the garrison; he detached a battalion of the 15th and another of the Irish Legion, which brought up the troops in the place to 3,000 men. From the 8th to the 11th the retreat continued, till at last the 6th Corps went into cantonments at Salamanca, Alba de Tormes, and other neighbouring places, the 2nd at and about Ledesma, and the 8th at Toro, behind the others. Drouet and his two divisions held the line of observation against the Anglo-Portuguese, with head quarters at San Muñoz. So ended, fifty miles within the borders of Spain, the movement that had begun at Santarem and Punhete.
The effective of Masséna’s army, was on April 15th 39,546 sabres and bayonets. It had started in September 1810 with 65,050 officers and men, and had numbered 44,407 on March 15th. The exact loss, however, was not the mere difference between its force of September 15, 1810, and of April 15, 1811 (25,504), for it had received at midwinter two drafts under Gardanne and Foy, amounting to 3,225 men in all[259]. On the other hand, the figures of April 15th do not include two convoys of sick sent back into Spain, one of 82 officers and 833 men dispatched under the charge of Drouet from the Alva on March 11, and a second and larger one sent back from Celorico to Almeida on March 22, along with which went some dismounted cavalry, and some artillery which could no longer follow the army. The whole may have amounted to 3,000 men. Both of these convoys dropped large numbers of dead and stragglers by the way, but it is impossible to ascertain their total. We must also deduct the escort of an officer, Major Casabianca, sent from the front to Ciudad Rodrigo on 21st January, who took 400 men[260] with him and never returned. Deducting the 4,315 thus sent back to Spain, and setting them against the 3,225 received from thence, it appears that Masséna’s total loss must have been just under 25,000 men, or 38 per cent. of his original force. Of these Wellington had some 8,000 as prisoners, including the 4,000 captured in the hospital of Coimbra on October 7th, 1810. The remainder had perished—not more than 2,000 in action, the rest by the sword of famine. Wellington’s scheme had justified itself, though its working out had taken many more weeks than he expected. Nor was the mere loss in men all that the Army of Portugal had suffered. It returned to Leon stripped of everything—without munitions, uniforms, or train. It had lost 5,872 horses of the 14,000 which it had brought into Portugal, and practically all its wheeled vehicles; there were precisely 36 waggons left with the army. The men were still ready to fight fiercely when they saw the necessity for it, but were sulky, discontented, and perpetually carping against the Commander-in-Chief, whose last unhappy inspiration—the projected march from Guarda to Plasencia—had filled up the measure of their wrath. And indeed they had good reason to be disgusted at it, for it was wholly insane and impracticable. But every misfortune of the last six months—the bloody repulse at Bussaco, the loss of the hospitals and magazines at Coimbra, the long starvation at Santarem, the slow and circuitous course of the retreat, was imputed to Masséna’s account by his chief subordinates as well as by his rank and file. What the generals muttered in the morning was loudly discussed around every camp-fire at night. The whole army had lost in morale from six months of systematic marauding, was quite out of hand in the way of discipline, and had no confidence in its leader, who was absolutely detested. The departure of Ney, who was liked and admired by all ranks, had been a great discouragement, because his skilful handling of the rearguard during the retreat had been understood and appreciated, while Masséna was cried down as a tactician no less than as a strategist on the general results of the campaign. A general whose troops no longer rely on him cannot get the best out of his army, and for this reason alone Napoleon was justified in removing the old Marshal from his command in April, when the full tale of the retreat had reached him.
Yet there can be no doubt that Masséna was hardly treated. That the expedition of Portugal failed was, in the main, no fault of his. Neither he nor his master, nor any one else on the French side, had foreseen Wellington’s plans—the devastation of the country-side, which rendered it impossible for the invader to live long by marauding, and the systematic fortification of the long front of the Lisbon Peninsula. For the actual game that was set before him, Masséna had not been given sufficient pieces by the Emperor. As Wellington had said more than a year before[261], the French could not turn him out of Portugal with less than 100,000 men, and Napoleon had only provided 65,000. Moreover, as the British general had added, he should so manage affairs that 100,000 French could not live in the country if they did appear; and this was no vain boast.
Masséna, then, was sent to accomplish an impossible task, and his merit was that he came nearer to his end than Wellington had believed possible, before he was forced to recoil. Many of the French marshals would never have got to Coimbra: certainly none of them would have succeeded in holding on at Santarem for three months. There can be no doubt that the Prince of Essling did not exaggerate when he wrote to Berthier[262], on March 31st, that it was his own iron will alone which had kept the army so long and so far to the front—that but for him it would have recoiled on to Spain many weeks earlier. His heroic obstinacy gave his adversary many an uneasy day, while it seemed in January and February as if the calculation for famishing the French had failed. Masséna, in short, had done all that was possible, and the general failure of the campaign was not his fault, any more than it was that of Soult, on whom the blame has always been laid by the elder marshal’s advocates. We have shown in an earlier chapter[263] that Soult did all and more than all that Napoleon had directed him to accomplish. If he had literally obeyed the tardy orders that reached him from Paris he would only have exposed the 5th Corps to defeat, if not to destruction. The ex post facto rebukes that the Emperor sent him were unjust. We are once more driven back to our old conclusion that the determining factors in the failure of the campaign of Portugal were firstly that Napoleon refused to appoint a single commander-in-chief in the Peninsula, to whose orders all the other marshals should be strictly subordinate, and secondly that he persisted in sending plans and directions from Paris founded on facts that were seven weeks late, or more, when his dispatches reached the front. On this we have enlarged at sufficient length on an earlier page.