(8) Conclusion. All offensive operations are impossible, as long as the imperial armies have to hold down the entirety of the occupied provinces. If Lord Wellington concentrates all his forces, he can march with 60,000 men [not including Spaniards] against either the Army of Portugal or the Army of the South. Neither of them can assemble a sufficient force to resist him, unless they abandon whole provinces. The King has ordered Soult and Marmont to march to each other’s aid if either is attacked. But they have to unite, coming from remote bases, while the enemy can place himself between them and strike at one or the other. The lines of communication between them are long and circuitous. It is easily conceivable that one of them may be attacked and beaten before the other is even aware of the danger. A catastrophe is quite possible if Lord Wellington should throw himself suddenly, with his whole force, upon either the Army of Portugal or that of the South.
The only possible way of dealing with this danger is to collect a central reserve of 20,000 men at Madrid, which can be promptly transferred to right or left, to join either Soult or Marmont as the conditions of the moment dictate. The Army of the Centre cannot serve this purpose—it is not a field-force, but an immovable army of occupation. If the Emperor could send a new corps of this size from France, Marmont could be reinforced up to a strength sufficient to enable him to face Wellington, and to besiege Ciudad Rodrigo.
But the present posture of European affairs [the Russian war] probably makes it impossible to draw such a corps from France. This being so, the central reserve must be obtained from troops already existing in the Peninsula. The only way to find them is for the Emperor to consent to the evacuation of Andalusia. Thirty thousand men of the Army of the South can then be placed to cover Madrid, in La Mancha: this force would be ample against any Spanish levies that might come up to the Sierra Morena from Cadiz and elsewhere. The remainder of the Army of the South must form the central reserve, and prepare to reinforce Marmont. The Army of Portugal would then be so strong that Wellington could not dare to take the offensive—he would be hopelessly outnumbered. If this scheme is approved by the Emperor, he may be certain that, when he comes back from Poland, his Spanish armies will be in the same secure defensive position in which he leaves them now. The right wing rests on the Bay of Biscay in the Asturias: the left on the Mediterranean in Valencia.
When Andalusia is evacuated, the remaining provinces in French occupation will not be able to pay or feed the 54,000 men of the Army of the South, in addition to the armies already stationed in them; a liberal subsidy from Paris will be necessary. In addition the King must, for the sake of his prestige, be given real civil authority over all the provinces.
It will only be when all authority, civil, military, and administrative, is concentrated in one hand, that of the King, and when His Majesty shall have received from the Emperor instructions suiting the present posture of affairs, that he can be fully responsible for Spain.’
On the whole this is a very well-reasoned document. It was perfectly true that the offensive power of the French in the Peninsula had shrunk to nothing, because no province could be held down without a large garrison. If left unoccupied, it would burst into revolt and raise an army. This was the inevitable nemesis for a war of annexation directed against a proud and patriotic people. There were 230,000 French troops in Spain; but so many of them were tied down to occupation duty, that only about 50,000 or 60,000 could be collected to curb Wellington, unless some large province were evacuated. Either Andalusia or else Valencia must be abandoned. The former was the larger and the more wealthy; but it was more remote from the strategical centre of operations in Madrid, much more infested by the bands of the patriots, and it lay close to the sphere of operations of Wellington—the great disturbing element in French calculations. Moreover its evacuation would set free a much larger field army. Against this was to be set the adverse balance in loss of prestige: as long as Cadiz appeared to be beleaguered, the national government of Spain looked like a handful of refugees in a forlorn island. To abandon the immense lines in front of it, with their dependent flotilla (which must be burnt, since it could not be removed), would be a conclusive proof to all Europe that the main frontal offensive against the Spanish patriots had failed. Seville and Granada, great towns of world-wide fame, would also have to be abandoned. Andalusia was full of Afrancesados, who must either be shepherded to Madrid, or left to the vengeance of their countrymen.
But to weigh prestige against solid military advantage, though it might appeal to Napoleon—whose reputation as universal conqueror was part of his political stock-in-trade—did not occur to the common-sense intellect of Jourdan. He voted for the evacuation of Andalusia: so did his friend and master, King Joseph. Possibly their decision was not rendered more unwelcome by the fact that it would certainly be most distasteful to Soult, whom they both cordially detested. The Viceroy should pay at last for the selfish policy of the General: his realm, for the last two years, had been administered with much profit and glory to himself, but with little advantage to the King at Madrid, or the general prosperity of the French cause in Spain. Whether personal motives entered into the decision of Joseph and Jourdan we need not trouble to consider: it was certainly the correct one to take.
Permission to evacuate Andalusia was therefore demanded from the Emperor: King Joseph did not dare to authorize it on his own responsibility. Meanwhile, long before the Mémoire of May 1812 had been completed or sent off, to Napoleon, he issued the orders which he thought himself justified in giving in the interim, to act as a stop-gap till the permission should be granted. Marmont was told to fall back on his own old policy of keeping a large detachment in the Tagus valley, in order that he might get into touch with Drouet and Soult’s Estremaduran corps of observation. He was directed to send two divisions of infantry and a brigade of light cavalry to join Foy, who was still in the direction of Almaraz and Talavera. They were to be ready to act as the advance of the Army of Portugal for a march on Truxillo and Merida, if Wellington’s next move should turn out to be an attack on Soult in Andalusia. In a corresponding fashion, Soult was ordered to reinforce Drouet up to a force of 20,000 men, and to push him forward to his old position about Almendralejo, Zalamea, Merida, and Medellin, in order that he might march via Truxillo to join the Army of Portugal, in case the Anglo-Portuguese army should choose Salamanca, not Seville, as its next objective. The small part of the Army of the Centre that could be formed into a field-force—three battalions and two cavalry regiments, under General d’Armagnac—was directed to move to Talavera, to relieve Foy there if he should be called to move either north to join Marmont on the Tormes, or south to join Soult on the Guadiana[346]. To replace these troops, drawn from the provinces of Cuenca and La Mancha, Joseph—as we have already seen[347]—requested Suchet to send ‘a good division’ from Valencia by Cuenca, on to Ocaña in La Mancha[348]. In this way the King and Jourdan thought they would provide for active co-operation between the Armies of Portugal and Andalusia, whether Wellington should make his next move to the South or the North.
It is curious, but perhaps not surprising, to find that these orders, the first-fruits of Joseph’s new commission as Commander-in-Chief, were obeyed neither by Suchet, by Soult, nor by Marmont.
The former, as we have already seen, when analysing Jourdan’s Mémoire of May 1812, not only refused to send a division to Ocaña, but stated that he should be obliged to withdraw the regiment that he was keeping at Cuenca, because he was authorized by the Emperor to reserve all his own troops for the defence of his own sphere of action, in Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia. Soult declared that it was impossible for him to reinforce Drouet—‘he could not keep 20,000 men on the Guadiana unless he received large reinforcements: all that he could promise was that the force in Estremadura should move up again to Medellin and Villafranca, possibly even to Merida, if Wellington had really gone northward with his main army. Drouet, with his 10,000 or 12,000 men, might serve to “contain” Hill and the British detachment in Estremadura, and his position would prevent the enemy from making any important movement in the valley of the Tagus. Meanwhile he himself must, as an absolute necessity, lay siege to Tarifa for the second time, and make an end of Ballasteros: no more troops, therefore, could be sent to Drouet: but when Tarifa and Ballasteros had been finished off, the siege of Cadiz should be pressed with vigour.’ This reply is not only a blank refusal to obey the King’s orders, but amounts to a definite statement that the local affairs of Andalusia are more important than the general co-operation of the French armies in Spain. As we shall presently see, Soult was ready to formulate this startling thesis in the plainest terms—he was, ere long, to propose that the King and the Army of the Centre should evacuate Madrid and retire upon Andalusia, when things went wrong with the Army of Portugal.