Such an exploit naturally drew down once more upon Mina the attention of all the neighbouring French commanders: Dorsenne and Reille again sent columns to aid the governor of Navarre, and from the 23rd to the 28th of April Mina was being hunted by powerful detachments converging on him from all sides[97]. He himself was very nearly captured at Robres by General Pannetier—who surprised him at dawn, helped by treachery on the part of a subordinate guerrillero chief, and dispersed his followers for the moment[98]. But all who were not slain or captured rallied around their indomitable leader, and followed him in a hazardous retreat, in which he threaded his way between the converging columns of the French and ultimately escaped to the Rioja. He asserts in his Memoirs, and with truth, that he was at this time of the highest service to Wellington’s main operations, since he attracted and detained beyond the Ebro such a large proportion of Dorsenne’s Army of the North, that in April and May it had not a man to spare to help Marmont. Even Dumoustier’s Guard division, under orders to return to France for the Russian war, was put into the pack of pursuers who tried in vain to hunt him down.
To sum up the results of all the operations in Catalonia, Aragon, and Navarre, which followed on the release of Reille’s troops from the Valencian expedition, it may be said that Napoleon’s scheme for the complete reduction of north-eastern Spain had completely failed by April. Large forces had been put in motion; toilsome marches had been executed over many mountain roads in the worst season of the year; all the bands of the insurgents had been more than once defeated and dispersed. But the country-side was not conquered: the isolated garrisons were still cut off from each other by the enemy, wherever the heavy marching columns had passed on. The communications were no more safe and free than they had been in December. The loss of men by sickness and in the innumerable petty combats and disasters had been immense. The game had yet to be finished, and the spare time in which it could be conducted was drawing to an end. For Wellington was on the march, and ere long not a man from the Armies of the North or the Centre was to be available to aid Reille, Suchet, and Decaen in their unending and ungrateful task. Gone, too, were the days in which reserves without end could be poured in from France: the Russian war was about to open, and when once it began reinforcements were to be drawn from Spain rather than sent into it. The invasion had reached its high-water mark in January 1812 before the walls of Valencia and Alicante.
SECTION XXXI: CHAPTER II
OPERATIONS OF SOULT IN ANDALUSIA: THE SIEGE OF TARIFA, DEC. 1811-JAN. 1812
In the south-west no less than in the south-east of Spain the month of January 1812 was to witness the last offensive movement of the French armies of invasion. But while Suchet’s advance ended, as we have seen, in a splendid success, that of Soult was to meet with a disastrous check. Neither marshal was to have another chance of taking the initiative—thanks, directly or indirectly, to the working out of Wellington’s great plan of campaign for the New Year.
In the previous volume the fortunes of Soult and the Army of Andalusia were narrated down to the first days of November 1811, when Hill’s raid into Estremadura, after the surprise of Arroyo dos Molinos, ended with his retreat within the borders of Portugal. That raid had inflicted a severe blow on Drouet’s corps of observation, which formed Soult’s right wing, and covered his communications with Badajoz. But its net result was only to restrict the activities of the French on this side to that part of Estremadura which lies south of the Guadiana. Hill had made no attempt to drive away Drouet’s main body, or to blockade Badajoz, and had betaken himself to winter quarters about Elvas, Portalegre, and Estremos. Consequently Drouet was able to settle down opposite him once more, in equally widespread cantonments, with his right wing at Merida, and his left at Zafra, and to devote his attention to sending successive convoys forward to Badajoz, whenever the stores in that fortress showed signs of running low. Drouet’s force no longer bore the name of the ‘5th Corps’—all the old corps distinctions were abolished in the Southern Army this autumn, and no organization larger than that of the divisions was permitted to remain. The troops in Estremadura were simply for the future Drouet’s and Daricau’s divisions of the ‘Armée du Midi.’ The composition of this ‘containing force,’ whose whole purpose was now to observe Hill, was somewhat changed after midwinter: for the Emperor sent orders that the 34th and 40th regiments, the victims of Girard’s carelessness at Arroyo dos Molinos, were to be sent home to France to recruit their much depleted ranks. They duly left Drouet, and marched off northward[99], but they never got further than Burgos, where Dorsenne detained them at a moment of need, so that they became attached to the ‘Army of the North,’ and (after receiving some drafts) were involved in the operations against Wellington in the valley of the Douro. Two regiments from Andalusia (the 12th Léger and 45th Line) came up to replace them in Drouet’s division, but even then the French troops in Estremadura did not exceed 13,500 men, if the garrison of Badajoz (about 5,000 strong) be deducted. This constituted a field-force insufficient to hold back Hill when next he should take the offensive; but all through November and far into December Hill remained quiescent, by Wellington’s orders, and his adversary clung to his advanced positions as long as he could, though much disturbed as to what the future might bring forth.
Of the remainder of Soult’s army, the troops in front of Cadiz, originally the 1st Corps, had been cut down to an irreducible minimum, by the necessity for keeping flank-guards to either side, to watch the Spanish forces in the Condado de Niebla on the west and the mountains of Ronda on the south. Even including the marines and sailors of the flotilla, there were seldom 20,000 men in the Lines, and the Spanish force in Cadiz and the Isle of Leon, stiffened by the Anglo-Portuguese detachment which Wellington always retained there, was often not inferior in numbers to the besiegers. The bombardment from the heavy Villoutreys mortars, placed in the works of the Matagorda peninsula, continued intermittently: but, though a shell occasionally fell in the city, no appreciable harm was done. The inhabitants killed or injured by many months of shelling could be counted on the fingers of two hands. The citizens had come to take the occasional descent of a missile in their streets with philosophic calm, and sang a derisive street ditty which told how
‘De las bombas que tiran los Gavachos
Se hacen las Gaditanas tirabuzones.’