What Joseph most desired, a real directing power over the movements of all the French troops in Spain, was not given him. But he was granted a sort of illusory superintending authority: if he was at the head quarters of any of the armies, he was to be given the honours of supreme command; all the marshals and generals commanding armies were to send him frequent reports, and not to undertake any operations without informing him of them. ‘The King must have reports of everything that happens; he must know everything, and be able to act in his central position as a sort of agency for transmitting information to the generals. This communication of intelligence, observations, and advice may even take place through his Spanish Minister of War[279],’ wrote the Emperor. The King flattered himself that this meagre concession gave him something like a directing authority over the armies. He told his courtiers that he was given the position of General-in-Chief[280], and used his brother’s permission to send advice in reams to each of the local commanders. Unfortunately there was no way of making them take this advice; they answered more or less politely, showing reasons why they could not follow it, and went on their own ways as before. It was to no effect that Joseph got leave to have his old friend Marshal Jourdan sent back to him, first as governor of Madrid, and later as chief of the staff. He flattered himself that his dispatches would be taken more seriously by Soult or Suchet when they came countersigned by a marshal of France. But he erred, for the younger commanders looked upon Jourdan as effete and past his prime—nor were they altogether wrong.

Nothing can be more curious than the Emperor’s memorandum to Berthier, which directs him to lay these conditions before Joseph. ‘I am thus,’ he writes, ‘satisfying the desires which the King expressed to me, save on the single point of the supreme command over my troops. I cannot give away that supreme command, because I do not see any man capable of managing the troops, and yet the command ought to be one and indivisible. In the note which the King gave me, all the arrangements were complex and confused. It is in the nature of things that if one marshal were placed at Madrid, and directed all operations, he would want to have all the glory along with all the responsibility. The commanders of the Armies of the South and of Portugal would think themselves under the orders not so much of the King as of that marshal, and in consequence would not give him obedience.... My intention is to make no change whatever in the military command, neither with the Army of the North, nor the Army of Aragon, nor the Army of the South, nor the Army of Portugal, save so much as is necessary to secure for the King reports from them all.... I want to do all that I can to give the King a new prestige on his return to Spain, but nothing that may in any way disorganize the Army of Andalusia, or any of the other armies[281].’

It is clear that we have in these few sentences the key to all Napoleon’s difficulties in conducting the Spanish war. He did not wish to ‘have a marshal at Madrid who would want to have all the glory along with all the responsibility,’ i. e. he refused to make one of his servants dangerously great. Soult’s intrigues for kingship at Oporto in 1809 were not forgotten, and Soult would have been the obvious candidate for supreme command, now that Masséna had been tried and found wanting. The Emperor preferred to go on with the hopeless system that was already working, by which he himself directed operations from Paris, basing his orders on facts that were often a month old when he learnt of them, and sending out those orders to reach their destination another month later. He was aware of the evils of this arrangement, but anything was better than to hand over supreme power over 300,000 soldiers to a single lieutenant. It is strange that he did not resolve to descend into Spain himself during the summer of 1811, for European politics were at the moment so quiet that he was actually thinking of concentrating 80,000 men at Boulogne, for a real or a threatened descent on the British Isles[282], a project which he had not been able to dream of since Trafalgar. The tension between France and Russia, which was to increase in a dangerous fashion during the autumn, was not so great in May or June as to make the idea of a Spanish campaign impossible. If it was possible to think of an invasion of England at this moment, it was surely equally feasible to consider the advantages of a descent on Lisbon or Cadiz. But apparently it was the physical distance between Paris and the further end of the Peninsula which deterred the Emperor from seizing what turned out to be the last available opportunity for a sally beyond the Pyrenees. As he himself observed on another occasion, he would be at the end of the world in Portugal, and a crisis might arise behind his back before he got any adequate news of it[283]. This was different from campaigning in central Europe; when at Vienna or Berlin he was still in touch with Paris. The only parallel to an invasion of Portugal would be an invasion of Russia, and it will be remembered that Napoleon’s apprehensions were absolutely justified by what occurred in the autumn of 1812 during his absence at Moscow. The astounding conspiracy of General Malet was within an ace of succeeding, because it was possible to put about all manner of false rumours, when the Emperor was lost to sight on the steppes. A handful of plotters—we might almost say a single plotter, Malet himself—with no assets save impudence and reckless courage, seized the imperial ministers, mustered an armed force, and almost established a provisional government and mastered Paris. This was only possible because the Emperor and the grand army had got so far off that the touch between them and France had been lost, and absence of news for many days had set the tongue of rumour loose[284]. Under such circumstances almost anything might happen, for imposing as was the Colossus of the French Empire, it stood on no firm base, its feet were of clay. Napoleon hoped to build a permanent structure, but there can be no doubt that all through his reign its stability depended on his own life and strength. If he had been cut off suddenly by a cannon-ball at Jena or Wagram, or by the knife of a fanatic such as Staps—Spain could have produced such enthusiasts by the score—chaos would have supervened in France. When once the rumour was set about that the Emperor was dead, anything became possible in Paris. No one knew this better than himself; in his cynical moments he would remark to his confidants that he was well aware that if sudden death came to him the public feeling would be one of relief rather than of sorrow. It was the constraining force of his own indomitable will alone which kept everything together, and if he removed himself to some very remote corner of Europe, from which his orders could not be transmitted continuously and at short intervals, there was grave danger that the machine might run down.

Hence it may perhaps be said that the Peninsula was saved from the presence of the Emperor in 1811 because of the necessary limitations of a one-man power. He dared not remove himself from the centre of affairs; he would not make one of his jealous and ambitious lieutenants over-great, by giving him supreme command. This being so, the bad old system had to go on, and that system of over-late orders grounded on over-late information[285], and followed (or not followed) by over-late execution, was bound to fail, when the enemy’s movements were guided by the cool and resolute brain of Wellington. More than once Napoleon wrote in a petulant mood to complain that it was absurd that all his Spanish armies should be detained and kept in check by a mere 30,000 British troops[286]; he refused for a long time to take the Portuguese seriously, and would only reckon the Spanish guerrilleros as ‘brigands’ or ‘canaille.’ What he failed to see was that a small army worked by a general on the spot, who had minute local knowledge and admirable foresight, was necessarily superior to a much larger force directed by orders from a distance, and commanded by several marshals who were bitterly jealous of each other. Moreover he never thoroughly comprehended the way in which the movements of his armies were delayed by the fact that they were moving in a country where every peasant was their enemy, where provisions could only be collected by armed force, and where no dispatch would reach its destination unless it were guarded by an escort of from 50 to 250 men. And he refused to see that a division or an army corps was in Spain practically no more than the garrison of the province which it occupied—that, if it moved, that province immediately became hostile soil again, and would have to be reconquered. He was always prescribing the concentration of large bodies of men, by means of the evacuation of places or regions of secondary importance[287]. His marshals, knowing the practical inconveniences of such evacuations, were loth to carry them out. To disgarrison a region meant that all communications were cut off, and that the nearest posts were at once blockaded by guerrillero bands. Whenever the Army of Andalusia concentrated, it ceased to receive its dispatches or its convoys from Madrid, and soon learned that Granada and Seville were being menaced. Whenever the Army of the North concentrated, the road between Vittoria and Burgos was cut, and the partidas descended from the Cantabrian mountains to threaten all the posts in Old Castile. And the concentration, when made, could only continue for a few days for lack of food, for there is hardly a region in Spain where a very large army, 80,000 or 100,000 men, can live on the country for a week. It was this, and no mere jealousy of rival generals, which forced Soult and Marmont to part, as we shall see, in June 1811, and Marmont and Dorsenne in September of the same year, and which in November 1812 prevented the immense body formed by the united Armies of the South, Centre, North, and Portugal, from pursuing Wellington to Ciudad Rodrigo. If such a force as 80,000 men were concentrated, it had to be fed; after a few days of living on the country it would be forced to ask for convoys. But convoys coming from long distances were the destined prey of the guerrilleros; if not captured they were at least delayed ad infinitum. Meanwhile the army in front would run out of provisions, and be forced to scatter itself once more in order to live. After Masséna’s venture no French marshal ever dared to think of plunging into Portugal, where he knew that he would find before him a country systematically devastated. No one was better aware of this limitation of the French power than Wellington. He had written as early as 1809 that the enemy could not turn him out of the Peninsula with anything less than 100,000 men, and that he could make such arrangements that an army of that number could not live in the country. The prophecy was fulfilled over and over again. With the enormous strength of the imperial armies it was not impossible to collect 80,000 or 100,000 men—but it was impossible to feed them. All concentrations must be but temporary. When the enemy was massed, the Anglo-Portuguese army might have to give ground, or only to accept an action under the most favourable conditions. But the French would soon have to scatter, and then Wellington regained his freedom of action.

It was useless, therefore, for the Emperor to reiterate his orders that his marshals were to join their armies and ‘livrer enfin une belle bataille’ against Wellington[288]. It takes two sides to fight a battle, and Wellington was determined never to accept a general action, when the numbers were hopelessly against him. He would give back into Portugal, and the enemy could not follow him for more than a march or two.

Meanwhile, though he could not undertake to descend himself into Portugal, Napoleon did not cease to pour troops across the Pyrenees. It is often said that after Masséna’s expedition of 1810 he began to neglect the Peninsula, and to turn all his thoughts towards the growing tension with Russia. This is not correct; it ignores the fact that the French armies in Spain rose to their highest numbers during the year 1811. While not ceasing to send their regular drafts to all the corps there engaged, the Emperor dispatched three new divisions of his best troops to the front during the summer. These were no collections of newly-raised fourth battalions or régiments de marche, but old units of high reputation, drawn partly from the Army of Italy, partly from the garrisons of the coasts of France. One division, under General Souham, ultimately went to join the Army of Portugal, the second, under General Caffarelli, was absorbed in the Army of the North, the third, under General Reille, was sent to reinforce the garrison of Navarre and Aragon, where Suchet wanted fresh troops to occupy the land behind him, when he was pushing forward towards Catalonia and Valencia. In addition, two fresh regiments of Italian troops were requisitioned from the Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais for service in eastern Spain[289]. The total reinforcement to the armies beyond the Pyrenees amounted to some 25,000 men, in addition to the regular annual draft of conscripts. The deficit in the strength of the French forces caused by Masséna’s losses in Portugal was more than made up, and the gross total in October 1811 amounted to no less than 368,000 men. Nothing was withdrawn from the Peninsula till the following winter.

SECTION XXV: CHAPTER II

SUCHET ON THE EBRO. THE FALL OF TORTOSA.
DECEMBER 1810-MARCH 1811

In the last pages of the third volume of this work we brought the history of the campaigns of Suchet and Macdonald in Aragon and Catalonia as far as December 12th, 1810, the day on which the Marshal came down to the lower Ebro at the head of the field-divisions of the 7th Corps, in order to cover the long-delayed siege of Tortosa, which his colleague, the commander of the Army of Aragon, was about to take in hand.