This was a striking instance of an assault on a very broad breach, by a strong force, being beaten off by musketry fire alone. The French seem never to have had a chance in face of the steady resistance of the 87th and their comrades. Their loss is given by the official French historian at only 48 killed and 159 wounded, which seems an incredibly low figure when over 2,000 men were at close quarters with the besieged, in a very disadvantageous position, for some time[124]. The British lost 2 officers and 7 men killed, 3 officers, 2 sergeants, and 22 men wounded: the Spaniards had a lieutenant-colonel killed and about 20 men killed and wounded.
The assault having failed so disastrously, the spirits of the besiegers sank to a very low pitch. The rain continued to fall during the whole day and the following night, and the already water-logged trenches became quite untenable. On New Year’s Day, 1812, the dawn showed a miserable state of affairs—not only were the roads to the rear, towards Fascinas and Vejer, entirely blocked by the swelling of mountain torrents, but communications were cut even between the siege-camps. All the provision of powder in the siege-batteries was found to be spoilt by wet, and a great part of the cartridges of the infantry. Nearly a third of the horses of the train had perished from cold combined with low feeding. No rations were issued to the troops that day, and on the three preceding days only incomplete ones had been given, because of the impossibility of getting them up from the reserve dépôt, and many of the men wandered without leave for three miles to the rear in search of food or shelter. An exploring party of the 47th pushing out into the trenches found them quite unguarded[125] and full of water. Leval wrote a formal proposal for the abandonment of the siege to his chief, Victor, saying that the only choice was to save the army by retreat, or to see it perish in a few days if it remained stationary[126]. The Marshal, however, refused to turn back from an enterprise in which he considered his honour involved, and the tempest having abated on the night of Jan. 2nd-3rd, ordered the batteries and approaches to be remanned, and directed that an attempt should be made to sap forward toward the Jesus tower from the left advanced trenches. The work done was feeble—the batteries had fired only fifty shots by evening, and the repairs to the damaged works were very incomplete.
Even Victor’s obstinacy yielded, however, when on the night of the 3rd-4th January another furious storm arose, and once more stopped all possibility of continuing operations. No food had now come up from the base for many days, and the stores at the front being exhausted, the Marshal saw that it was necessary to march at once. An attempt was made to withdraw the guns from the batteries, but only one 12-pounder and two howitzers were got off—the horses were so weak and the ground so sodden that even when 200 infantry were set to help, most of the pieces could not be dragged more than a few yards. Wherefore the attempt was given over, the powder in the batteries was thrown open to the rain, the balls rolled into the Retiro ravine, the nine remaining heavy guns spiked.
On the night of the 4th-5th the army crawled off on the road to Vejer, abandoning nearly all its material in its camps. An attempt was made to fire a mass of abandoned vehicles, but the rain stopped it. Next morning the French were passing the defile of Torre Peña, under the not very effective fire of an English frigate, which kept as close to the shore as was possible on a very rough day. The four guns from the battery at this point were brought on, with much toil, and no wounded were abandoned. On the 6th the column reached Tayvilla, where it found a convoy and 100 horses, which were of inestimable value, for those with the field-force were completely spent. Nevertheless the one 12-pounder brought off from Tarifa was abandoned in the mud. On the 7th Vejer was reached, and the expedition was at an end. The troops of Victor’s division, after a short rest, went back to the Cadiz Lines, those of Leval’s division marched for Xeres.
Thus ended the leaguer of Tarifa, which cost the besiegers about 500 lives, more by sickness than by casualties in the trenches. There were also some deserters—fifteen Poles came over in a body and surrendered to Captain Carroll on the 3rd[127], and other individuals stole in from time to time. But the main loss to the French, beyond that of prestige, was that the battalions which had formed part of the expeditionary force were so tired out and war-worn, that for several weeks they continued to fill the hospitals in the Lines with sick, and were incapable of further active service. Wherefore Soult could not send any appreciable detachment to help Suchet on the side of Valencia: the cavalry brigade, which sacked Murcia on January 26 and killed La Carrera,[128] was his only contribution to the operations on the east side of Spain. The field-force which might otherwise have accompanied Pierre Soult’s cavalry raid had been used up in the Tarifa expedition.
Another distraction had come upon Soult while the Tarifa expedition was in progress. On December 27, six days after Victor and Leval commenced the siege, General Hill had once more begun to move on the Estremaduran side, after remaining quiescent for nearly two months since the surprise of Arroyo dos Molinos. His advance was a diversion made by Wellington’s direct orders, with the purpose of drawing Soult’s attention away from the pursuit of Ballasteros and the molesting of Tarifa[129]. It failed to achieve the latter purpose, since the operations of Victor had gone so far, before Hill moved, that the Marshal stood committed to the siege, and indeed only heard that Hill was on the move after the assault of December 31st had been made and beaten off. But it caused Soult to cut off all support from Victor, to turn his small remaining reserves in the direction of Estremadura, and to welcome as a relief, rather than to deplore as a disaster, the return of the defeated expeditionary force to the Lines of Cadiz on January 7th. For about that date Hill was pushing Drouet before him, and the reserves from Seville were moving northwards, so that Soult was pleased to learn that the 10,000 men from Tarifa had returned, and that, in consequence of their reappearance, he could draw off more men from the direction of Cadiz to replace the troops moved toward Estremadura.
Hill crossed the Portuguese frontier north of the Guadiana on December 27th, with his own division, Hamilton’s Portuguese, two British cavalry brigades (those of Long and de Grey[130]) and one of Portuguese (4th and 10th regiments under J. Campbell of the former corps), or about 12,000 men. The small remainder of his force[131] was left about Elvas, to watch any possible movement of the French from the direction of Badajoz. His objective was Merida, where it was known that Dombrouski, with the greater part of the 5th French Division, was lying, in a position far advanced from the main body of Drouet’s troops, who were cantoned about Zafra and Llerena. There was some hope of surprising this force, and a certainty of driving it in, and of throwing Drouet and Soult into a state of alarm. Wellington directed Hill to keep to the desolate road north of the Guadiana, because a winter raid from this direction would be the last thing expected by the enemy. He bade his lieutenant keep a wary eye in the direction of Truxillo and Almaraz, from which the divisions of Marmont’s army then in New Castile might possibly descend upon his rear. But the warning turned out to be superfluous, since, before Hill moved, Marmont had been forced by the Emperor’s orders to detach his troops on the Tagus for the ruinous expedition under Montbrun to Alicante.
Marching very rapidly Hill reached Albuquerque on the 27th, and La Rocca, only twenty miles from Merida, on the 28th. On the next day[132] the prospect of surprising Dombrouski came to an end by the merest of chances. The French general had sent out that morning a small column to raise requisitions of food in the villages on this road. A troop of hussars at its head discovered Hill’s advanced cavalry, near Navas de Membrillo, and alarmed the infantry, three companies of the 88th regiment under a Captain Neveux, who formed up and began to retreat hastily towards Merida. Hill sent two squadrons each of the 13th Light Dragoons and 2nd Hussars of the King’s German Legion in pursuit, with orders to head off and capture, if possible, these 400 men. The result was a combat of the same sort as that of Barquilla in 1810, where it had already been shown that steady infantry could not be ridden down by cavalry save under very exceptional circumstances. Neveux, seeing the dragoons hurrying forward, turned off the road, formed his men in square, and made for a cork wood on a rising ground. The cavalry overtook him, and delivered five determined charges, which were all beaten off with heavy loss. We are told that their order and impetus were both broken by scattered trees outside the wood, but the main cause of their defeat was the impossibility of breaking into a solidly-formed square of determined men, well commanded[133]. After the final charge the squadrons drew off, and Neveux hastened on through the wood, fell back again into the road, and reached Merida, though he lost a few men[134] by shells from Hawker’s battery, which came up late in the day. The K.G.L. Hussars had 2 men killed and 1 officer and 17 men wounded: the 13th Light Dragoons 1 killed and 19 wounded.