SECTION XXXIII: CHAPTER XI
THE TWO DIVERSIONS: (1) OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH: SIR HOME POPHAM AND CAFFARELLI. (2) OPERATIONS IN THE EAST: SUCHET, O’DONNELL, AND MAITLAND. JUNE-AUGUST 1812
It has already been made clear that the whole of Wellington’s victorious advance, from Ciudad Rodrigo to Madrid, was rendered possible by the fact that he had only to deal with the Army of Portugal, succoured when it was too late by the Army of the Centre. If Caffarelli and his 35,000 men of the Army of the North had been able to spare any help for Marmont, beyond the single cavalry brigade of Chauvel, matters must have taken a very different turn from the first, and the Douro (if not the Tormes) must have been the limit of the activity of the Anglo-Portuguese army. How Caffarelli was to be detained, according to Wellington’s plan, has been explained in an earlier chapter[712]. The working out of the scheme must now be described.
The essential duty of the French Army of the North was twofold, according to Napoleon’s general conception of the Spanish war. It was Marmont’s reserve, bound to assist him in time of trouble; but it was also the force of occupation for the Biscayan provinces, Navarre, Santander, and Burgos. Of its 35,000 men more than half were at all times immobilized in the innumerable garrisons which protected the high-road from Bayonne to Burgos, and the small harbours of the coast, from San Sebastian to Santoña. The system of posts was complicated and interdependent. Since the great guerrillero Mina started on his busy career in 1810, it had been necessary that there should be fortified places at short intervals, in which convoys moving to or from France (whether by Vittoria and San Sebastian, or by Pampeluna and Roncesvalles) could take refuge when attacked by the bands. And since a convoy, when it had sought shelter in one of the minor garrisons, might be blockaded there indefinitely, unless the high-road were cleared betimes, large movable columns had to be ready in three or four of the larger places. Their duty was to march out on the first alarm, and sweep the guerrilleros away from any post that they might have beset. Such bodies were to be found at Bayonne, where the ‘Reserve of the Army of Spain’ kept a brigade of 3,500 men under General D’Aussenac to watch for any exceptional outbreak of trouble in Guipuzcoa; at Pampeluna, where General Abbé had the head-quarters of his division; and at Vittoria, where the General-in-Chief, Caffarelli himself, normally lay with the brigade of Dumoustier—the last unit of the Imperial Guard still remaining in Spain—ready to keep the line of the Ebro under surveillance, and to communicate when necessary with the three large outlying garrisons of Santoña, Santander, and Burgos. Each of these last consisted of some 1,300 or 1,500 men[713]; even so, they were only strong enough to provide for their own safety in normal times, and might require assistance from head-quarters in face of any specially large and threatening combination of the insurgents. But the larger half of Caffarelli’s army was locked up in small towns, forts, and blockhouses, in bodies ranging down from a battalion to half a company. Every one of the dozen little ports on the Biscay coast had to be held, in order to prevent the bands of the inland from communicating with the English cruisers, which occasionally appeared in the offing to throw weapons and ammunition ashore. And similarly all the little towns along the Ebro had to be garrisoned, in order to keep touch with Reille at Saragossa; wherever there was a gap Mina’s Navarrese slipped in between.
Since the autumn of 1810, when Porlier and Renovales had made their vain attempt, with British naval aid, to break up the line of communication along the coast,[714] there had been no general attempt to shake the French occupation of Biscay and Cantabria. The Spanish resources were at a low ebb whenever Bonnet held the Asturias, and (as we have seen) he was generally in possession of that province, or at least of its capital and its chief harbours, from 1810 down to the summer of 1812. The idea of attacking the harbour-fortresses of the northern coast with a considerable naval force, which should get into regular touch with the patriot forces of the inland, and establish posts to be held permanently on suitable points of the northern littoral, had been started by Sir Home Popham, approved by Sir Howard Douglas, the British Commissioner in Galicia, and warmly adopted by Wellington himself, who at once realized the pressure which such a policy would bring upon Caffarelli. He counted upon this diversion as one of his most valuable assets, when he drew up his scheme for the invasion of Leon in May 1812. It more than fulfilled his expectation.
On June 17th, four days after the Anglo-Portuguese army crossed the Agueda, Sir Home Popham sailed from Corunna with two line of battleships[715], five frigates[716], two sloops[717], and one or two smaller vessels, carrying two battalions of marines, and several thousand stand of small-arms for the insurgents. Popham had credentials from Castaños, as captain-general of Galicia, for Mendizabal, the officer who was supposed to exercise authority over all the bands of Cantabria and Biscay. These scattered forces consisted in the more or less organized brigades of Porlier in the Eastern Asturias, and Longa in Cantabria—both of which were reckoned part of the national army—and in addition of the guerrilleros of Jauregui [’El Pastor’] in Guipuzcoa, Renovales in Biscay, Marquinez, Saornil, the Curé Merino, and others in the mountains between the Douro and the sea. These were bands of varying strength, often scattered by the French, but always reassembled after a space, who roamed from region to region according as the enemy was stronger or weaker at one point or another. Occasionally Mendizabal was in touch with Mina and the Navarrese, but generally the French were in too great force about the high-road from Burgos to Pampeluna to make co-operation practicable.
At the moment of Popham’s start matters were exceptionally favourable along the Biscay coast, because Bonnet was just evacuating the Asturias, in order to join his chief Marmont in the plains of Leon. His departure isolated Santoña and Santander, which had been the links by which he was joined to Caffarelli’s army. It also gave Porlier and Longa an open communication with Galicia, from which they had hitherto been cut off by Bonnet’s presence in Asturias, and a safe retreat thitherward if they should be pressed. In addition Marmont had called up all the small garrisons and detached columns from his rear, for the main struggle with Wellington; so that the Upper Douro valley and the Soria country were much more free from the French than they had been for a long time. The opportunity for molesting Caffarelli and his much-scattered Army of the North was unique.
The idea which lay at the back of Popham’s plan was that a fleet furnished with the heaviest ship guns, and with a landing-force of over 1,000 men, could operate at its choice against any one of the long chain of posts which the French held, calling in to its aid the local bands in each case. The insurgents had never been able to capture any of these places because they lacked a battering-train. The fleet supplied this want, and with few exceptions the French strongholds were not suited for resistance against heavy guns. They were mediaeval castles, fortified convents, or the patched-up walls of little towns, all defensible against irregular bands without cannon, but most vulnerable to 18-or 24-pounders. The number of the French garrisons gave ample liberty of choice between one and another: individually they were generally weak—not over 300, 500, or 1,000 men. There were succouring columns, no doubt, ready to relieve them, at Bayonne and Vittoria and elsewhere. But the squadron had the power of misleading these forces to any extent—of drawing them from one remote port to another by false attacks and demonstrations, and then of attacking some third point when the enemy had been lured as far as possible from it. Here lay the beauty of naval operations—the squadron could appear to threaten any objective that it chose, could attract the enemy thither, and then could vanish, and be fifty miles away next day. The relieving column could only follow slowly over mountain roads, and would invariably be late in learning what new direction the squadron had taken. It was something like the advantage that the Danes had in their attacks on England in the ninth century: a defending army cannot guard all points of a coast-line at once against a movable landing force on shipboard. The weaker points of the scheme were, firstly, the dependence of all operations on fine weather—contrary winds could in those days delay a fleet for whole weeks on end; secondly, the want of a base nearer than Corunna, till some good and defensible haven should have been captured; and third and greatest of all, the difficulty of inducing the local chiefs to combine: they paid a very limited amount of obedience to their nominal chief, Mendizabal: they had private grievances and jealousies against each other: and each of them disliked moving far from the particular region where his men were raised, and where every inch of the mountain roads was known to him.
However, all these dangers were known and were chanced, and the game was well worth the risk. The operations began with the appearance of the squadron before Lequeitio on June 21st. Popham landed a heavy gun and some marines, and the band of El Pastor [’Don Gaspar’ as the English dispatches call him] appeared to co-operate from the inland. The defences consisted of a fort and a fortified convent: the 24-pounder breached the former, which was then stormed by the guerrilleros in a very handsome fashion[718]: its garrison was slain or captured. The gun was then brought up against the fortified convent, whose commander, the chef de bataillon Gillort, surrendered without further fighting; the prisoners amounted to 290 men, a half-battalion of the 119th regiment (June 22). Popham then moved off to Bermeo and Plencia, both of which the French evacuated in haste, leaving guns unspiked and some useful stores of provisions. The British force had set the wildest rumours abroad, and Renovales, the Spanish commander in Biscay, appeared at Orduna with his bands and threatened Bilbao, the capital of the province. It was these reports which made Caffarelli suddenly break off his project for sending reinforcements to Marmont, and prepare rather to march northward when he was most wanted on the Douro[719].