The garrison of the Retiro had surrendered on August 14th: Wellington remained for seventeen days longer in Madrid, and did not leave it, to take the field again, until August 31st. His stay in the Spanish capital was not due, in the first instance, to the causes which might seem most plausible—a desire to give his war-worn infantry a rest during the hottest weeks of the year, or a determination to reorganize the military resources of Madrid and New Castile for the profit of the allied cause[752]. Both these ideas existed, and the latter in especial absorbed much of his attention—he spent long hours in trying to concert, with Carlos de España, measures for the utilization of the captured munitions of the Retiro, and for the recruiting of the regiments of the Spanish ‘Fifth Army.’ In this he accomplished less than he had hoped, partly because of the dreadful exhaustion of the central provinces of Spain after the famine of the preceding year, partly because of the inefficiency of most of the Spanish officials with whom he had to deal. He was much discontented with the list of persons appointed by the new Regency to take up authority in the reconquered provinces; and Castaños, whom he most trusted, and desired to have with him, was lingering in Galicia[753].
But the main reason for the halt at Madrid was the uncertainty as to the movements of Soult. Was the Duke of Dalmatia about, as would seem reasonable, to evacuate Andalusia? And if so, would he pick up King Joseph and the Army of the Centre in La Mancha, and march on Madrid with the 65,000 men whom they could collect? Or would he retire on Valencia and join Suchet? Or again, would he persist in his intention, expressed in dispatches to Joseph, which had fallen into Wellington’s hands, of holding on to Andalusia and making it a separate base of French power, despite of the fact that he had been cut off from communication with the imperial armies of the East and North?
‘Any other but a modern French army would now leave the province [of Andalusia],’ wrote Wellington to Lord Bathurst on July 18[754], ‘as they have now absolutely no communication of any kind with France or with any other French army; and they are pressed on all sides by troops not to be despised, and can evidently do nothing. Yet I suspect that Soult will not stir till I force him out by a direct movement upon him: and I think of making that movement as soon as I can take the troops to the South without injuring their health.’ All military reasons were against the probability of Soult’s holding on in Andalusia, yet he had certainly expressed his intention of doing so as late as the middle of July, and, what was more important still in judging of his plans, he had not made a sudden movement of retreat when the news of Salamanca reached him. Hill writing on August 4th, six days after the receipt of the tidings of Marmont’s disaster, had to report[755] that ‘the recent glorious event’ seemed to have had very little effect on the enemy, who ‘continued in a strong position in his front.’ And this was true, for Soult, after hearing the news of Salamanca, had made his last frantic appeal to King Joseph to fall back on Andalusia, and make his base at Seville if Madrid were lost. Wellington was right in suspecting that, if the Marshal had got his desire, the South would have been maintained against him, and he would have had to march thither in person, to pick up Hill, and to bring matters to an issue by another pitched battle. It was only on August 12th that Soult reluctantly resolved to evacuate Andalusia: his first precautionary movements for retreat were made on August 15th, but it was not till the 24th that the Cadiz Lines were destroyed, or till the 26th that all the French troops in front of Hill suddenly vanished. Wellington was therefore kept for more than a fortnight in a state of complete uncertainty as to whether he might not have to march southward in the end, to evict Soult from his viceroyalty. It was only on the 24th that he got information from Hill (written on the 17th) which gave the first premonitory warning that the French seemed to be on the move[756]. Next day confirming evidence began to come to hand: ‘it is generally reported, and I have reason to believe, that the Army of the South is about to make a general movement ... it is supposed in the direction of Granada and Valencia[757].’ On August 30, ‘though Sir Rowland Hill on the 17th instant had no intelligence that the march was commenced, there was every appearance of it.’ The fact that seemed to make it incredible that Soult could be proposing to hold Andalusia any longer, was precise information that King Joseph and the Army of the Centre had marched upon Valencia to join Suchet, and had passed Chinchilla on August 24th, going eastward[758]. If the King had gone by the passes of the Sierra Morena southward, to join Soult, doubt might still have been possible: but since he had made Valencia his goal, and was crawling slowly along in that direction with his immense convoy of refugees and baggage, Soult—left entirely to his own resources—could not retain his present position. He must march on Valencia also, and it would be many weeks before he could place himself in touch with Suchet, and produce a threatening combination on the Mediterranean coast.
On August 31st, therefore, with no absolutely certain news yet to hand as to Soult’s retreat, but with every military probability in favour of its having been begun, Wellington resolved to leave Madrid and to return to the valley of the Douro, where the movements of Clausel and the French Army of Portugal demanded his attention. He never thought for a moment of endeavouring to march through La Mancha to intercept or molest Soult’s retreat. The distance was too great, the roads unknown, the problem of feeding the army in the desolate and thinly-peopled country about the Murcian and Andalusian borders too difficult. Wellington made up his mind that he had some time to spare: he would march against Clausel and then ‘return to this part of the country [Madrid] as soon as I shall have settled matters to my satisfaction on the right of the Douro. And I hope I shall be here [Madrid] and shall be joined by the troops under Sir Rowland Hill, before Soult can have made much progress to form his junction with the King[759].’ It is important, therefore, to realize that, in Wellington’s original conception, the operations in Old Castile, which we may call the Burgos campaign, were to be but a side-issue, an intermediate and secondary matter. The real danger in Spain, as he considered, was the approaching, but not immediate, junction of Soult, Suchet, and King Joseph at Valencia. And the Commander-in-Chief evidently proposed to be at Madrid, to face this combination, by October 1st. How and why he failed to carry out this intention must be explained at length in the next volume.
Meanwhile, when he marched off to the Douro with part of his army, he had to make provisions for the conduct of affairs in the South during his absence. Hill, as has been shown in another chapter, had been told to march on Madrid, as soon as Soult’s forces had made their definitive departure for the East. As Drouet only disappeared from Hill’s front on August 26th, the northward march of the army from Estremadura began late: it had not commenced to cross the Guadiana on September 1: its progress to and along the Tagus valley was slow, owing to the difficulty of procuring food, and its main body had not reached Almaraz and Talavera before the 20th September, and was only concentrated about and behind Toledo at the end of the month. But though Hill’s movement was not rapid, it was made in sufficiently good time to face the danger that was brewing on the side of Valencia. And there can be no doubt that if he had received orders to hurry, he could have been in line some days before he actually appeared[760]. He brought up all his force[761] except Buchan’s Portuguese brigade[762], which was left at Truxillo and Merida, to keep up his communication with Elvas. Estremadura, so long the contending ground of armies, had now no solid body of troops left in it save the Spanish garrison of Badajoz. For Penne Villemur and Morillo, with the division which had so long operated in Hill’s vicinity, moved with him into New Castile. They went by the rugged roads through the mountains of the province of Toledo[763], and took post at Herencia, on the high-road from Madrid to the Despeñaperros pass, in front of the British 2nd Division.
In the rear of Hill’s column, and separated from it by many days’ march, was another small British force toiling up to Madrid from a very distant point. This was the force under Colonel Skerrett, which had taken part in the fighting round Seville. It consisted of the battalion of the Guards from Cadiz, the 2/47th and 2/87th, two companies of the 2/95th, a squadron of the 2nd Hussars K.G.L., the 20th Portuguese Line, and a battery. By Wellington’s orders no British troops were now left in Cadiz save the 2/59th, part of de Watteville’s regiment, the ‘battalion of foreign recruits,’ soon to become the 8/60th, and a few artillery. Skerrett’s column, some 4,000 strong, marched by Merida and Truxillo, and reached Toledo in time to join Hill for the autumn campaign in front of Madrid. Hill’s corps, when joined by Skerrett, provided a force of over 20,000 men, about equally divided between British and Portuguese.
It would have been profitable to Wellington, as matters went in the end, if he had handed over the entire task of observing Soult’s operations to Hill. But being under the impression that he would return ere long to Madrid, he left there and in the neighbourhood nearly half the force that he had brought from Salamanca. He only took with him to oppose Clausel the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions, with Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese, and Bock’s and Ponsonby’s (late Le Marchant’s) brigades of heavy dragoons, a force of some 21,000 men[764]. He left the 3rd and Light Divisions at Madrid, the 4th Division at the Escurial, and Carlos de España’s Spaniards at Segovia. The cavalry of Victor Alten and D’Urban were assigned to this force, and remained, the former at Madrid, the latter at the Palacio de Rio Frio, near Segovia. The British infantry divisions had all suffered heavily at Badajoz, and the 4th at Salamanca also—they were weak in numbers, but were expecting ere long to be joined by numerous convalescents. The total force left behind amounted to about 17,000 men, including the Spaniards[765]. Thus when Hill and Skerrett came up from the South, there was a mass of nearly 40,000 men accumulated round Madrid, while Wellington himself, after picking up Clinton and the 6th Division, and the other troops left on the Douro, had a little under 30,000. This proved in the autumn campaign an ideally bad partition of the army, for on each wing the Anglo-Portuguese force was decidedly less numerous than that which the French could bring against it. If Wellington had taken his full strength to the North, he could have defied Clausel and Caffarelli, and they could never have made head against him, or pressed him away from Burgos. Hill, on the other hand, in front of Madrid, would have been no more helpless with 22,000 men than he actually was with 38,000 men, when Soult and King Joseph brought 60,000 against him in October. In either case he could only retreat without offering battle. But Wellington, if the three additional divisions left in New Castile had been brought to the North, would have had such a superiority over the French in Old Castile that he could have dealt with them as he pleased. The only explanation of the unfortunate proportional division of his army, is that Wellington undervalued the task he had to execute beyond the Douro, thought that he could finish it more quickly than was to be the case, and calculated on being back at Madrid in October before Soult could give trouble.
Yet when he started he was not comfortable in his mind about the general situation. If the French drew together, their total strength in Spain was far too great for him. In a moody moment he wrote to his brother Henry: ‘though I still hope to be able to maintain our position in Castile, and even to improve our advantages, I shudder when I reflect upon the enormity of the task which I have undertaken, with inadequate powers myself to do anything, and without assistance of any kind from the Spaniards.... I am apprehensive that all this may turn out ill for the Spanish cause. If by any cause I should be overwhelmed, or should be obliged to retire, what will the world say? What will the people of England say? What will those in Spain say?[766]’
Wellington’s forebodings were, only too soon, to be justified. But the tale of the campaign against Clausel and Caffarelli, of the advance to and retreat from Burgos, must be told in another volume.