After having, as he thought, demonstrated to his master that it would be useless to send Mortier alone, with 10,000 or 12,000 men, to make an impossible dash at the Tagus, Soult made another proposal. He would undertake not a mere raid, but the capture of Badajoz, the conquest of Estremadura, and the destruction of the army of that province; but he must take with him a force much greater than the mere 5th Corps. ‘The enterprise is a big one, but ought to succeed—at least it will produce a happy diversion in favour of the imperial army in Portugal[40].’ It would call back La Romana from Lisbon, and possibly cause Wellington to detach troops in his aid, and Masséna would have less in front of him in consequence, and might resume the offensive.
There was of course another course possible: Soult might have marched for Estremadura not with the 13,000 men of the 5th Corps alone, nor yet with the 20,000 men whom he actually took thither in January, but with the greater part of the French Army of Andalusia, 35,000 or 40,000 men. To do so he would have had to abandon Granada, Malaga, and Jaen on the one side, and his hold on the Condado de Niebla and the west upon the other. He might even possibly have had to raise the siege of Cadiz, though this is not quite certain. Many months after, in the end of March, when all chance of the conquest of Portugal was over, the Emperor told him that this would have been his proper course, and read him an ex-post-facto lecture on the advantages that might have followed, if he had evacuated two-thirds of his viceroyalty and taken an imposing force to sweep across the Alemtejo and assail Lisbon from the southern side[41]. But it must be remembered that in December and January all the orders that were sent him directed him to move no more than a small corps—in one dispatch the Emperor calls it only 10,000 men. A supreme commander-in-chief present on the spot might have seen his way to make the temporary sacrifice of the provinces which had cost so many men to conquer and to hold, in order that every available man might be sent against Lisbon, and the English might at last be expelled from the Peninsula. But Soult was not such a commander-in-chief; he was only one of the many viceroys whom Napoleon preferred to a single omnipotent lieutenant. Was it likely that he would sacrifice half his own territory, when no order to do so lay before him, in order that a colleague, sent on a separate task with forces no less than his own, might have every possible advantage? Soult is often blamed for not having seen that the crushing of Wellington’s army was the end to which all others should have been subordinated, and that it would have been cheap in the end to surrender half or three-quarters of Andalusia, and even to raise the siege of Cadiz, in order to secure that point. He might have replied that his master was no less blind than himself: dispatch after dispatch had ordered him to send a trifling detachment towards the Tagus, not to mass every available man and march on Lisbon, leaving Seville and the Cadiz lines exposed to all manner of dangers. He was primarily responsible for the retention of the Andalusia that he had conquered; it was for the Emperor, not for himself, to order the evacuation of much or all of that great realm. The Emperor gave no such directions: from September to January his whole series of dispatches spoke of nothing more than the movement of a moderate force; those of January 25th and February 6th approved of the course which Soult had actually chosen, and took it for granted that he would not move towards the Tagus till he should have captured Badajoz[42]. It was not till March, when he began to see that all his arrangements were going wrong, and that his scheme of times was erroneous, that the Emperor began suddenly to launch out into criticisms of Soult, and to complain that ‘to try to hold every point at a moment of crisis leads to possible disaster,’ that ‘Seville, Badajoz, and the Cadiz lines were the only necessary things,’ and that the Marshal ought to have 30,000 men or more with him at Badajoz instead of the 20,000 men whom he had actually taken thither[43]. If so, why had the orders not been given to that effect early in December, when Napoleon had just learnt from Foy the state and position of the Army of Portugal, which had so long been hidden from him behind Wellington’s screen of Ordenança?
If we seek deep enough, we find the cause of all misdirections in the fact that the Emperor persisted in guiding the movements of all his army from Paris, and would not appoint an independent commander-in-chief of all the Spanish armies, who should be able to issue orders that would be promptly obeyed by every separate marshal or general in each province. A moment’s reflection shows that the data as to the details of the situation in the Peninsula, from which Napoleon had to construct his scheme of operations, always came to him a month late. And when he had issued the dispatch which dealt with the situation, it reached its destination after the interval of another month, and had long ceased to have any bearing on the actual position of affairs. A single example of how the system worked may suffice. Masséna started Foy for Paris, with his great report on the state of the Army of Portugal, on October 29. Foy reached Paris and saw the Emperor on November 22 and the succeeding days. The detailed dispatches to Masséna and Soult, consequent on Foy’s report, were not sent off till December 4. On January 22nd Soult acknowledges the receipt of the dispatch of that date, along with that of two others dated November 28 and December 10, all of which arrived together, because the guerrilleros of La Mancha had stopped the posts between Madrid and Seville for a full fortnight after the New Year[44]. Of what value to Soult on January 22 could be orders based on the condition and projects of Masséna on October 29? The data at the base of the orders were three months old—while Soult had been already for more than a month engaged on a campaign undertaken on his own responsibility, without any knowledge of the exact requirements of Masséna, or of the intentions of the Emperor.
The Estremaduran expedition of January-March 1811, therefore, must be looked upon as the private scheme of the Duke of Dalmatia[45], undertaken with the general object of giving indirect assistance to Masséna, because the last orders that he had received from Paris (those of October 26), telling him to give direct assistance, by sending Mortier to the Tagus, were impossible of execution[46]. Soult had two leading ideas in his mind when he planned out his campaign. The first was that he was going into a country thickly set with fortresses; the second was that, when once the skirts of the Sierra Morena have been passed, Estremadura is a ‘cavalry country,’ a land of heaths and of unenclosed tillage-fields of vast area. Accordingly he intended to march with a very large force of cavalry, and with a heavy siege-train. At Seville he had at his disposition the greatest arsenal of Spain; but for many months all that it produced had been going forward to Cadiz: no less than 290 pieces had been sent to arm the vast lines in front of the blockaded city. Accordingly it took some time to get ready the heavy guns, and to manufacture the ammunition required for such a big business as the siege of the six fortresses, small and great, into whose midst he was about to thrust himself. The personnel for the siege-train had also to be collected: requisitions were sent, both to Victor at Cadiz and to Sebastiani at Granada, to detach and send into Seville nearly all their sappers, and the men of several companies of artillery. They were also to send to the expeditionary force many regiments of cavalry. Mortier had only two (10th Hussars and 21st Chasseurs), which had sufficed when he was engaged in the heights of the Sierra Morena, but were insufficient when he was about to descend into the plain of the Guadiana. Accordingly half the cavalry of Victor’s 1st Corps was called up—four regiments (4th, 14th, 26th Dragoons, 2nd Hussars), while Sebastiani gave up one (27th Chasseurs); to these was added an experimental Spanish cavalry regiment of ‘Juramentados’ recently organized at Seville. Only one infantry regiment was requisitioned, the 63rd Line, from Victor’s 3rd Division. The putting together of these resources gave a force in which the proportions of the arms were very peculiar—4,000 cavalry, 2,000 artillery and sappers, to only 13,500 infantry; the last, all save the above-mentioned 63rd regiment, drawn from Mortier’s 5th Corps. The orders for the concentration of the troops were issued early in December, but owing to the time required for drawing in units from Granada and Cadiz, and for the preparation of the siege-train, it was not till the last day of the old year that the Marshal took his departure from Seville.
The collection of a field army of 20,000 men, which was to cut itself loose from Andalusia for a time, imposed some tiresome problems on Soult. Since he had resolved not to evacuate Granada or Malaga on the one hand, nor the posts west of the Guadalquivir on the other, and since he was drawing off the 5th Corps, which had hitherto provided for the safety of Seville and found detachments for the Condado de Niebla, he had to make provision for the filling of the gap left behind him. Hence we find him calling upon Victor to spare men from in front of Cadiz—a demand which the Duke of Belluno took very ill—since he truly declared that he had no more troops in the 1st Corps than sufficed to man the lines and to keep posts of observation in his rear. The garrison of Cadiz was always increasing, and included a strong nucleus of British troops. How could he face sorties, or disembarkations in his rear, if he was cut down to a mere 18,000 men in place of the 24,000 on which he had hitherto reckoned? Nevertheless, he was forced to provide a detachment to hold Xeres, as a half-way house to Seville, and to send out a cavalry regiment (9th Dragoons) and one battalion west of the Guadalquivir. Similarly, the brigade of Godinot in the kingdom of Cordova[47] was required to find a skeleton garrison for Seville, which was raised to a somewhat higher figure, in appearance, by the doubtful aid of some ‘juramentado’ companies of Spaniards, and of the dépôts and convalescents of the 5th Corps. The great city, with a turbulent population of 100,000 souls, which formed the centre of his viceroyalty, became at this time Soult’s weakest point—he left it so inadequately held that it was at the mercy of any considerable hostile force which might approach it—and such a force was ere long, as we shall see, to make its appearance. Godinot had also to look after the insurgent bands of the central Sierra Morena, who often blocked the post road to Madrid. Sebastiani (save for the cavalry and artillery borrowed from him) was left with his 4th Corps intact, and his duty was unchanged—to watch the Spanish army of Murcia, and to suppress the guerrilleros of the Sierra de Ronda and the eastern coast—an unending task from which Soult thought that he ought not to be distracted. Napoleon, wise after the event, wrote in March that Soult should have left no more than the Polish division of the 4th Corps in the direction of Granada, and have brought the remainder of it to strengthen or support the troops at Seville and in the lines before Cadiz. In that case the Poles would certainly have had to move westward also ere long, since there were but 5,000 of them, and all Eastern Andalusia would have had to be evacuated. But this idea had never struck Soult as practicable, and Sebastiani’s whole corps was left in its old posts in the kingdom of Granada.
The invasion of Estremadura was carried out in two columns of about equal strength, which used the two main passes between Western Andalusia and the valley of the Guadiana. The right column under Latour-Maubourg took the route by Guadalcanal, Llerena, and Usagre; it was composed of his own regiments of dragoons from the 1st Corps, and of Girard’s infantry division of the 5th Corps, which latter had been cantoned in Llerena since the autumn, and was now picked up and taken forward by the cavalry. The left column, which was accompanied both by Soult and by Mortier, was composed of Briche’s light cavalry and Gazan’s division of the 5th Corps. It had to escort the slowly moving siege-train of 34 guns, which (with the 60,000 kilos of powder belonging to it) was drawn by 2,500 draught oxen, requisitioned along with their drivers from the province of Seville. This column took the route Ronquillo, Sta Olalla, Monasterio, which, if less steep and better made than the Llerena-Guadalcanal road, is longer, and passes through an even more desolate and resourceless country. It was intended that the two columns should join at Los Santos or Almendralejo, in the Estremaduran plain, and lay siege at once to Badajoz, the enemy’s most formidable stronghold. Its fall, so Soult hoped, would lead to the easy conquest of the minor fortresses.
But the two columns did not meet with equal fortune. That commanded by Latour-Maubourg met practically no resistance in its first stages. On arriving at Usagre on January 3, it found in its front almost the whole of the allied cavalry in Estremadura—Butron with 1,500 Spaniards, Madden with nearly 1,000 Portuguese. But this was merely a screen thrown out to cover the retreat beyond the Guadiana of Mendizabal and the division of Spanish infantry which had been cantoned in this region. That officer had been ordered by his chief, La Romana, to break the bridge of Merida, after retiring over it, and then to attempt to hold the line of the Guadiana. He did neither; precipitately marching on Merida, he passed through it in great haste, but forgot to see that the bridge was duly destroyed, and then retired along the north bank of the Guadiana to Badajoz. Latour-Maubourg, according to his directions, did not cross the river, but halted near Almendralejo, to wait for the other column, which was not forthcoming. Only Soult himself and Briche’s light cavalry appeared at Zafra on the 5th, and joined Latour-Maubourg on the 6th of January. Gazan’s infantry and the siege-train were far away, and unavailable for many a day. The plans of the left invading column had miscarried. For when its head reached Monasterio, at the summit of the long pass, its tail, the siege-train, was dragging far behind. In the desolate stages about Ronquillo and Sta Olalla it had met with tempestuous rains, as might have been expected at the season. Many of the oxen died, the unwilling Spanish drivers deserted wholesale, and there was much delay and considerable loss of vehicles. The train and its small escort got completely separated from Gazan’s infantry. At this moment Soult’s cavalry reported to him that a formidable column of hostile infantry was lying a few miles to the west of Monasterio, on the bad cross-road to Calera, and was apparently moving round his flank, either to fall upon the belated convoy or perhaps to make a dash at Seville.
This column was the 5,000 infantry of Ballasteros, who, as it chanced, had begun to march southward at the same moment that Soult had started northward. The Spanish general had just received orders from Cadiz bidding him cut himself loose from the Estremaduran army, and move into the Condado de Niebla, where he was to unite with the local levies under Copons, drive out the weak French detachment there stationed, and threaten Seville from the west if it should be practicable. These orders had been given, of course, before Soult’s plan for invading Estremadura was suspected at Cadiz. But though unwise in themselves—it was not the time to deplete Estremadura of troops—they had the effect of bringing Soult’s great manœuvre to a standstill for some weeks. The Marshal determined that he must free his flank from this threatening force before continuing his march, and ordered Mortier to attack Ballasteros without delay. This was done, but the Spaniard, after a running fight of two hours, retired to Fregenal, fifteen miles further west, without suffering any serious harm (January 4th). He was still in a position to threaten the rear of the convoy, or to slip round the flank of the French column towards Seville. Soult therefore resolved to go on with his cavalry and join Latour-Maubourg, but to drop Gazan’s infantry in the passes, with the order to head off Ballasteros at all costs, and to cover the siege-train in its journey across the mountains. Gazan therefore took post at Fuentes de Leon, but soon heard that Ballasteros had moved south again from Fregenal towards the Chanza river, and was apparently trying to get round his flank. Leaving a detachment to help the convoy on its slow and toilsome route, Gazan resolved to pursue the Spanish column and destroy it at all costs. This determination led him into three weeks of desperate mountain-marching and semi-starvation, at the worst season of the year. For Ballasteros, who showed considerable skill in drawing his enemy on, moved ever south and west towards the lower Guadiana, and picked up Copons’s levies by the way. He at last turned to fight at Villanueva de los Castillejos on January 24th. Gazan, who had been joined meanwhile by the small French detachment in the Condado de Niebla, brought his enemy to action on the 25th. The Asturian battalions which formed Ballasteros’s division made a creditable resistance, and when evicted from their position retired across the Guadiana to Alcoutim in Portugal, without having suffered any overwhelming loss[48]. Gazan therefore resolved to pursue them no further—indeed he had been drawn down into one of the remotest corners of Spain to little profit, and realized that Soult must be brought to a standstill one hundred miles away, for want of the 6,000 infantry who had now been executing their toilsome excursion in the mountains for three weeks.
Accordingly, the French general bade Remond, the commander of the Niebla detachment, watch Ballasteros, and himself returned to Estremadura by a most painful march through Puebla de Guzman, El Cerro, Fregenal, and Xeres de los Caballeros. He reported his return to Soult at Valverde on February 3rd. His services had been lost to his chief for a month all but two days, a fact which had the gravest results on the general course of the campaign of Estremadura[49].
For the Duke of Dalmatia, when he had joined Latour-Maubourg on January 6th, found that he had at his disposition 4,000 cavalry but only the 6,000 infantry of Girard, while the siege-train was still blocked in the passes by Monasterio. With such a force he did not like to beleaguer a place so large and so heavily garrisoned as Badajoz. Accordingly, he was forced to abandon his original intention of forming its siege, and to think of some lesser enterprise, more suited to his strength. After some hesitation, he determined to attack the weak and old-fashioned fortress of Olivenza, the southernmost of all the fortified places on the Spanish-Portuguese frontier. To cover his movement he sent Briche’s cavalry to Merida, which they occupied on January 7th, almost without resistance, finding the bridge intact. From thence they sought for Mendizabal on the north side of the Guadiana, and discovered that he had withdrawn to Albuquerque, twenty miles north of Badajoz. Meanwhile Latour-Maubourg with four dragoon regiments took post at Albuera to watch the garrison of Badajoz, while Soult marched with Girard’s infantry and one cavalry regiment to attack Olivenza, before whose walls he appeared on January 11th, 1811.