Thus ended in disaster the story of Figueras. But both the capture of the place and its defence form a most honourable page in the history of the war. Rovira’s enterprise in seizing it and Martinez’s obstinacy in maintaining it, long after all hope was gone, were equally praiseworthy. Though nothing came of the exploit in the end, they had immobilized the whole French 7th Corps for the entire summer of 1811, and had prevented Macdonald from giving a single battalion to help Suchet’s attack on Tarragona. If Campoverde had possessed the most ordinary capacity or resolution, he might have turned the opportunity given him by the somatene chiefs to such good account as to wreck all the campaign planned by Napoleon for the subjection of Catalonia. Better management on May 3rd might have led to the defeat of Baraguay d’Hilliers, and if he had been driven off from Figueras, and isolated from Macdonald, who was then far away at Barcelona, Suchet would have had to march to the help of his comrades, and the siege of Tarragona could never have begun. We are brought back to the point which has already so often confronted us—Campoverde’s miserable inefficiency was the final cause of all the disasters of 1811 in the principality of which he was the Captain-General.
Two such blows as the fall of Tarragona and the recapture of Figueras seemed to render inevitable the final subjection of Catalonia. It is with astonishment that we find that its obstinate people maintained their resistance for two years more, and were found still defending themselves when the war came to an end with the abdication of Napoleon in 1814. The new Captain-General, Lacy, was a man harsh and unpopular, but he had at least the merit of energy. His army was a mere wreck, but he issued orders for a general levy of all men between 18 and 40 to fill the depleted cadres of the few surviving regular battalions, and despite the ill-will of the Junta—who wished to lean more on the miqueletes, and distrusted the old army—he gradually collected a new force. Early in August, as if in bravado, he burst into France on the side of Puigcerda, and executed a destructive raid along the valleys of Cerdagne. If he was not strong enough to help Figueras, or to oppose Suchet, he was at least determined to do all the harm that he could to the enemy. This incursion threw Napoleon into a fit of rage, and, forgetting his own orders to Suchet which prescribed the invasion of Valencia as the next decisive move in the war, he wrote him an angry dispatch on August 22nd[673], in which he told the newly appointed Marshal that he ought to have left a strong French division at Vich, and to have marched with his main body against the Catalonian inland, aiming at Cardona and Urgel and the other unsubdued places. ‘He should have profited by the panic into which the Spaniards had been thrown, and might have terminated the war in the province, while by making his retrogression to Saragossa he has given the enemy the chance of rallying on all sides.’ It is sufficient answer to this accusation to say that, if the Marshal had thrown all his available troops into the Catalan mountains, he would have become involved in a series of endless marches and counter-marches after an intangible enemy, which would have prevented him from carrying out in the autumn his great and successful attack on Valencia. The strength of the Catalan resistance did not lie in the possession of Cardona or Urgel or any other old-fashioned stronghold, but in the determination of its people not to lay down their arms. There is no probability that the war could have been ‘terminated’ in the way that the Emperor hoped.
By September Lacy had reorganized the remnants of the old Army of Catalonia into three weak divisions under Eroles, Milans, and Sarsfield, each containing only four or five battalions. Every one of the new units represented many lost corps—the single regiment of Baza included all the remnants of the Granadan division, which Reding had brought to Catalonia in 1809 fourteen thousand strong. The new Cazadores de Cataluña raised by the well-known miquelete-chief Manso were formed from the cadres of six old Catalonian tercios[674]—it was the same with the regiments bearing the local names of Manresa, Mataro, and Ausona. The cavalry, consisting of the few hundred Catalonian horse who had but joined in Gasca’s retreat to Valencia, amounted to five squadrons of hussars and cuirassiers. The whole, including garrisons, may have made up 8,000 men—all that was left of the 25,000 organized troops which had formed the ‘1st Army’ on December 1st, 1810. But there still remained an Army of Catalonia, and as Macdonald and Maurice Mathieu and Decaen were to find, the Catalans were still ready to fight.
When the enemy was under the delusion that with the fall of Montserrat and Figueras the back of the resistance of the Principality had been broken, Lacy began to take the offensive. On September 11-12, aided by English ships, he drove the French out of the Medas Islands, at the mouth of the Ter, and built on the largest of them a fort which gave him a secure point of communication with the Mediterranean Squadron. But this was a side-issue: in October he accomplished something far more important. Descending on the line of garrisons by which the French kept open the road from Barcelona to Lerida, he took 200 men at Igualada on October 4, captured a large convoy near Cervera three days later, and on October 11 took that town with 645 prisoners, and the neighbouring Belpuig with 150 more on October 14. The chain of forts was broken, and to the intense joy of all Catalonia the French dismantled the monastery of Montserrat and evacuated the Holy Mountain. Half of Suchet’s work in the summer had been undone. A few days later Macdonald was recalled to Paris (October 28); he was the third marshal whose reputation got no profit from his Catalonian campaign—his failure was as bad as that of Augereau, and he had not even got the small credit that St. Cyr won in battle. The command of the 7th Corps fell to General Decaen.
SECTION XXIX
WELLINGTON’S AUTUMN CAMPAIGN OF 1811