‘Twenty-four hours after the receipt of this dispatch you will start off on the march one of your divisions, with its divisional artillery, and its exact composition as it stands at the moment of the arrival of this order, and will send it to Burgos, to form part of the Army of the North. His Majesty forbids you to change any general belonging to this division, or to make any alterations in it. In return you will receive three provisional regiments of detachments, about 5,000 men, whom you may draft into your battalions. They are to start from Burgos the day that the division which you are ordered to send arrives there. All the Guards are under orders for France, and can only start when your division has reached that place.... The Army of the North will then consist of three divisions: (1) that which you are sending off; (2) Caffarelli’s division (due at Pampeluna from Aragon); (3) a third division which General Dorsenne will organize from the 34th Léger, the 113th and 130th of the line and the Swiss battalions.... By this arrangement the Army of the North will be in a position to aid you with two divisions if the English should march against you[231].’
Along with this dispatch arrived another from Dorsenne[232], clamouring for the division which was to be given him—he had already got the notice that he was to receive it, as he lay nearer to France than Marmont. He promised that the three provisional regiments should be sent off, as the Emperor directed, the moment that the ceded division should reach him. The Duke of Ragusa could not refuse to obey such peremptory orders from his master, and ordered Bonnet’s division, from Benavente and Leon, to march on Burgos. His letter acknowledging the receipt of the Emperor’s dispatch was plaintive. ‘I am informed that, according to the new arrangement, the Army of the North will be in a position to help me with two divisions if I am attacked. I doubt whether His Majesty’s intentions on this point will be carried out, and in no wise expect it. I believe that I am justified in fearing that any troops sent me will have to be long waited for, and will be an insignificant force when they do appear. Not to speak of the slowness inevitable in all joint operations, it takes so long in Spain to get dispatches through, and to collect troops, that I doubt whether I shall obtain any help at the critical moment.... The net result of all is that I am left much weaker in numbers.’
Marmont might have added that the three provisional regiments, which he was to receive in return for Bonnet’s division and the 130th Line, were no real reinforcement, but his own drafts, long due to arrive at the front, but detained by Dorsenne in Biscay and Old Castile to garrison small posts and keep open communications. And he was not destined to receive them as had been promised: Dorsenne wrote on February 24 apologizing for not forwarding them at once: they were guarding the roads between Irun and Vittoria, and could not be spared till other troops had been moved into their scattered garrisons to relieve them.
On January 27th the news of the advance of Wellington against Ciudad Rodrigo had at last reached Paris—eight days after the fortress had fallen. It caused the issue of new orders by the Emperor, all exquisitely inappropriate when they reached Marmont’s hands on February 10th. The Marshal had been contemplating the tiresome results of the storm of the fortress for nearly three weeks, but Napoleon’s orders presupposed much spare time before Rodrigo would be in any danger: Dorsenne is to stop the march of the Guards towards France, and to bring up all the forces he can to help the Army of Portugal: Montbrun will be back at Madrid by January 18 [on which day he was really in the middle of the kingdom of Murcia], and at the front in Leon before February 1st. After his arrival the Army of Portugal will be able to take up its definitive line of action. Finally, there is a stab at Marmont, ‘the English apparently have advanced in order to make a diversion to hamper the siege of Valencia; they only did so because they had got information of the great strength of the detachment which the Army of Portugal made in that direction[233].’
The Marshal could only reply by saying that the orders were all out of date, that he had (as directed) given up Bonnet’s division to the Army of the North, and that, Ciudad Rodrigo having fallen far earlier than any one had expected, and long before any sufficient relieving force could be collected, he had been unable to save it, and had now cantoned his army (minus Bonnet) with four divisions in the valley of the Douro and three in the valley of the Tagus, in expectation of an approaching move on the part of Wellington towards Badajoz.
These dispositions had not long been completed when another dispatch arrived from Paris, dated February 11th, in which the Emperor censured once more all his lieutenant’s actions, and laid down for him a new strategical policy from which he was forbidden to swerve.
‘The Emperor regrets that when you had the division of Souham and three others united [i. e. on January 23] you did not move on Salamanca, to make out what was going on. That would have given the English much to think about, and might have been useful to Ciudad Rodrigo. The way to help the army under the present circumstances is to place its head-quarters at Salamanca, and concentrate your force there, detaching one division to the Tagus valley and also reoccupying the Asturias. [This concentration] will oblige the enemy to remain about Almeida and in the North, for fear of an invasion of Portugal. You might even march on Rodrigo, and, if you have the necessary siege artillery, capture the place—your honour is bound up with it. If want of the artillery or of food renders it necessary to put off such an operation, you could at least make an incursion into Portugal, and advance towards the Douro and Almeida. This menace would keep the enemy “contained”.... Your posture should be offensive, with Salamanca as base and Almeida as objective: as long as the English know that you are in strength at Salamanca they will not budge: but if you retire to Valladolid yourself, and scatter divisions to the rear, and above all if you have not got your cavalry effective by the time that the rainy season ends, you will expose all the north of Spain to misfortunes.
‘It is indispensable to reoccupy the Asturias, because more troops are needed to hold the edge of the plain as far as Biscay than to keep down that province. Since the English are divided into two corps, one in the South and the other opposite you, they cannot be in heavy strength: you ought to outnumber them greatly.... I suppose that you consider the English mad, for you believe them capable of marching against Badajoz when you are at Salamanca, i. e. of allowing you to march to Lisbon before they can get back. They will only go southward if you, by your ill-devised schemes, keep two or three divisions detached on the Tagus: that reassures them, and tells them that you have no offensive projects against them.
‘To recapitulate, the Emperor’s intentions are that you should stop at Salamanca, that you should reoccupy the Asturias, that your army should base itself on Salamanca, and that from thence you should threaten the English.’
It may seem profane to the worshippers of the Emperor to say that this dispatch was purely wrong-headed, and argued a complete misconception of the situation. But it is impossible to pass any other verdict on it. Marmont, since Bonnet’s division had been stolen from him, had seven divisions left, or about 44,000 men effective, including cavalry and artillery. The Emperor tells him to keep one division on the Tagus, to send a second to occupy the Asturias. This leaves him about 34,000 net to concentrate at Salamanca. With this force he is to attempt to besiege Rodrigo, or at least to execute a raid as far as Almeida and the Douro. ‘The English are divided and so must be much numerically inferior to you.’ But, as a matter of fact, the only British detachment that was not under Wellington’s hand at the moment was Hill’s 2nd Division, and he had just brought that up to Castello Branco, and would have had it with him in five days, if Marmont had advanced from Salamanca. The Marshal would have seen 55,000 men falling upon his 34,000 if he had moved on any day before the 20th of February, and Wellington was ‘spoiling for a fight,’ or, in his own quiet phraseology, ‘if the French move this way, I hope to give a good account of them[234].’ Supposing Marmont had, by some evil inspiration, done what the Emperor had wished him to do before the orders came, he would have been crushed by almost double numbers somewhere in the neighbourhood of Rodrigo or Almeida. The battle of Salamanca would have been fought six months too soon.