Meanwhile, pending the confirmation of the news of the French advance, Beresford’s engineers asked leave to open another parallel, and 1,400 men had been paraded for the purpose of starting it, when complete details as to Soult’s progress came to hand. It had been so rapid that the Marshal at once ordered all the siege operations to be discontinued, though the engineers tried to persuade him to risk two days’ more work, by the vain promise that they would undertake to produce two practicable breaches in that space of time. Beresford wisely refused to listen to them, and ordered that all the guns and ammunition should be returned at once to Elvas, with such of the siege stores as could be readily moved. But the mass of gabions and fascines had to be burnt, as these would be profitable to the garrison, and would certainly be carried into the town if they were left intact. The troops, English, Portuguese, and Spanish (three battalions of Castaños’s infantry had come up from Merida), were ordered to prepare to march for Albuera in successive detachments, the 4th Division and the Spaniards being left to the last in the trenches, to cover the removal of the guns and stores.
Beresford’s total casualties in this mismanaged fragment of a siege, from May 6th to May 12th, had been 533 British and 200 Portuguese, or 733 in all, lost in the trenches and in the sortie. It will be seen that the sortie cost far more lives than the actual beleaguering work. All the British loss save seven casualties was in Kemmis’s brigade of the 4th Division[354], which lay on the Cristobal side, and suffered both in the trench-building and in the sortie. The Portuguese loss was partly in the 17th Line, which acted with Kemmis, partly among the artillery.
SECTION XXVI: CHAPTER II
FUENTES DE OÑORO: PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS.
APRIL 12nd-MAY 3rd, 1811
The Army of Portugal, sullenly retiring far within the frontiers of Spain, had been lost to Wellington’s sight on April 8th, when it passed the Agueda and fell back in diverging columns towards various towns of the kingdom of Leon—Salamanca, Toro, and Zamora—where it went into cantonments. Only Drouet with the two divisions of Conroux and Claparéde remained in observation of the Allies, with his head quarters at San Muñoz. The British general was well aware of the dilapidated state in which the enemy had reached his base, and calculated that it would take many weeks for Masséna to get his army into fighting trim again. He considered that he might even hope to gain possession of Almeida before the French would be in a position to attempt its relief, though it could only fall by famine, since there were no heavy guns to form a battering-train for its siege nearer than Oporto, Abrantes, or Lisbon. He had already inspected the place, and saw that it had been put in such a good state of defence by the governor, Brennier, that all external traces of the great explosion of August 1810 had disappeared. That the town within was still a mass of ruins, with nearly every house cut off sheer at the first story, was of no military importance, when the enceinte and the bomb-proofs were in good order.
There was a short moment during which Wellington had some hopes of being able to lay hands on Ciudad Rodrigo as well as Almeida. He had learnt that the Spanish fortress was almost as depleted of food as the Portuguese, and that Masséna’s troops had consumed 200,000 rations from its stores when they reached the frontier; he thought that the extra garrison which Junot had thrown into it, before he passed onward, would only serve to exhaust the magazines so much the earlier. Accordingly he not only requested that active and enterprising partisan Julian Sanchez, to beset the roads between Salamanca and Rodrigo, in order that no provisions might get through, but made preparations to throw some British light troops across the Agueda to co-operate with him, when the approach of a convoy should be reported. With this object he moved up the Light Division and Arentschildt’s brigade of cavalry close to the Agueda and within a few miles of Rodrigo. Their head quarters were at Gallegos, their outposts extended from the bridge of Barba del Puerco on the north as far as El Bodon on the south. It was intended that, when Don Julian signalled the approach of the French, the Light Division should make a dash across the fords of the Agueda, and endeavour to intercept the convoy. This plan failed on the 13th of April, owing, as Wellington held, to the slowness of Sir William Erskine[355], who was still in command of the division, though news had just arrived—to the great satisfaction of all the battalions—that its old general, Craufurd, was daily expected at Lisbon on his way to the front.
Rodrigo having been revictualled, Wellington abandoned all hope of molesting it further; to have invested it would have been useless, when he had no siege-train. But Almeida he intended to reduce at his leisure, being of the opinion that it would be starved out before Masséna was in a position to take the field to relieve it. Nothing short of his whole army would suffice for that operation—if that even were enough. And knowing that the troops had just reached Salamanca in a demoralized and discontented condition, without shoes, without train, almost without ammunition, and with the remnant of their cavalry and artillery horses dying off at the rate of several hundreds a day, Wellington doubted if his adversary would be able to come out of his cantonments before the summer was far spent. At any rate, he calculated that he had a good many weeks before him, in which he was not likely to find the Army of Portugal a serious danger. Accordingly he resolved to put his own host into cantonments also, in such a position as to block the road to Almeida, and to give it a well-earned rest while that fortress was being starved out. He had, as we observed in a previous chapter, no intention of assuming the offensive against the French in Leon till he had organized his line of communication with his new base at Coimbra, and established large intermediate dépôts at Lamego, Celorico, and other conveniently placed localities. The army was living from hand to mouth,—all the country about Almeida, Guarda, and Sabugal having been thoroughly devastated,—on convoys which were only struggling up at irregular intervals from the lower Mondego. The horses especially were in very poor order, from want of proper forage. ‘The regiments subsisted on the green corn, which was dreadful to the inhabitants, and of little use to the horses, when they had to work. There was nothing else, and we had to cut their rye.... How our army has been carried though this desolate abandoned country is astonishing[356].’ Till there were dépôts and a regular service established, it was impossible to concentrate the army, much less to send it forward into Spain.