As to Marmont, his reply to King Joseph’s dispatch was couched in terms of less open disobedience, but it was by no means satisfactory. He wrote from Salamanca, on April 29th, after his return from the raid to Sabugal and Guarda, that he had now learnt (what he did not know ten days before), that Wellington had been pursuing him with five divisions. This force was still in the Beira, and the British general himself had been at Ciudad Rodrigo on the 26th. It was, therefore, quite clear that Soult had not ‘the whole English army on his shoulders.’ This being so, it was not necessary to send into the valley of the Tagus such a large force as was asked. But one division should move to Avila at once, and could drop down on to Talavera in two days, if it turned out to be necessary. Two more should be cantoned about Arevalo and the Pass of Piedrahita [20 miles north-west of Avila] respectively, points from which they could be transferred to the valley of the Tagus in a few days. Marmont then proceeded to warn Jourdan against any scheme for concentrating any considerable force in the direction of La Mancha, urging that he must be able to collect as many of his divisions opposite Wellington as possible, in case of an advance by the Anglo-Portuguese army towards the Tormes. All that was necessary on the Tagus was to have the forts at Almaraz well garrisoned and provided with stores, so that troops dropping down from Avila on a southward march should find a base and magazines ready for them. Summing up, he ends with a dictum that ‘if we defend Andalusia by sacrificing the Army of Portugal, we may save that province for the moment, but the North will be in danger: if a disaster occurs there, Andalusia will soon be lost also. If, on the contrary, we make its defence in the North, the South may be lost, but the North still remains secure.’ By these somewhat cryptic words, Marmont seems to mean that, looking at the affairs of Spain at large, Andalusia may be lost without any shock to the imperial domination in Leon and Old Castile. But a disaster in Leon or Old Castile entails inevitably the loss of Andalusia also. This was true enough, though Soult refused to see it.
But the result of Marmont’s very partial fulfilment of Joseph’s orders, and of Soult’s and Suchet’s entire neglect of them, was that Jourdan’s main design of providing for close and speedy co-operation between the Armies of Portugal and Andalusia was completely foiled. When, on May 17th-19th, Hill made his celebrated irruption into the valley of the Tagus, with the object of destroying the bridge and forts of Almaraz, the point where the interests of Soult and Marmont were linked together, he found no French troops within fifty miles of his objective, save the single division of Foy and D’Armagnac’s 3,000 men from the Army of the Centre. Marmont’s nearest division in support was at Avila, Soult’s in the Sierra Morena; both lay so far off from Almaraz that Hill could not only deliver his blow, but could depart at leisure when it was struck, without any risk of being beset by superior forces. If King Joseph’s orders of April had been carried out, Wellington’s stroke in May would have been impossible—or risky to the verge of rashness. Indeed we may be certain, on Wellington’s record, that he would not have made it, if three French divisions, instead of one, had been about Talavera and Almaraz. We may add that his self-reliance during the Salamanca campaign rested largely on the fact that Soult could not succour Marmont, within any reasonable space of time, even if he wished to do so, because the bridge of Almaraz was broken. Wherefore Jourdan and King Joseph must be pronounced to have been wise in their foresight, and the Dukes of Ragusa and Dalmatia highly blameworthy for their disregard of the orders given them. They looked each to their own local interests, not to the general strategic necessities of the French position in Spain, which the King and his Chief-of-the-Staff were keeping in mind.
So far their precautions were wise: to blame them for not taking the tremendous step of evacuating Andalusia without the Emperor’s leave, and concentrating such a force in central Spain as would have paralysed Wellington’s offensive, would be unjust. They dared not have given such an order—and if they had, Soult would have disobeyed it.
Napoleon himself, indeed, would have agreed with Soult at this time. For not long after Jourdan’s Mémoire of May 1812, with its request for leave to abandon Andalusia, had started on its journey for Dresden, there arrived at Madrid a dispatch from Berthier, setting forth the final instructions left by the Emperor before he started from Paris on May 9th. It was of a nature to strike dismay into the heart of the level-headed and rather despondent Jourdan; for it ignored all the difficulties which his recently dispatched appeal set forth with such clearness. The King was directed to keep a grip on all the conquered provinces of Spain, and to extend their limits till the enemy should be extirpated. The conquest of Portugal might be postponed till ‘les événements détermineraient absolument cette mesure.’ The region to which the Emperor devoted most attention was the sphere of the Army of the North. ‘This is the part on which it is indispensable to keep a firm hold, never to allow the enemy to establish himself there, or to threaten the line of communications. Wherefore a most active war must be waged upon the “Brigands” [Mina, Porlier, Longa, &c.]: it is of no use to hunt and scatter them, leaving them power to reunite and to renew their incursions. As to the English, the present situation seems rather to require a defensive posture: but it is necessary to maintain an imposing attitude in face of them, so that they may not take any advantage of our position. The strength of the forces at the King’s disposition enables him to do, in this respect, all that circumstances may demand. Such are the principal ideas which the Emperor, before departing, has expressed on the Spanish problem.’
This was a heart-breaking document. Just when the King and Jourdan had demonstrated that they had no available field army left to hold back Wellington, they were informed that their forces were ample for the purpose. When they had asked leave to evacuate Andalusia they are told to ‘conserver les conquêtes et les étendre successivement.’ They had been wishing to concentrate at all costs a central reserve—now they were directed to spread the already scattered army of occupation over a still greater surface—presumably the Emperor’s phrase meant that he wished to see Murcia, the Catalonian inland, the whole of the Asturias, and the Condado de Niebla garrisoned, in addition to all that was held already. The one central problem to Joseph and Jourdan was how to face Wellington’s expected onslaught by making the armies co-operate—the Emperor forbids concentration, and recommends ‘the assumption of an imposing attitude!’ As if Wellington, whose knowledge of the movements and plans of his adversaries was beginning to appear almost uncanny to them, was to be contained by ‘attitudes,’ imposing or otherwise.
The unhappy Commander-in-Chief and Chief-of-the-Staff of the united armies of Spain were reduced to a sort of apathetic despair by the Emperor’s memorandum. Jourdan, in his Mémoires, appears to shrug the shoulders of resignation in commenting on its effect. ‘If only instead of “hold all you have, and conquer the rest bit by bit,” we had been told that we might evacuate some provinces and concentrate the troops, there would have been much good in the instructions. The King might have dared to abandon the South in order to keep down the North, if he had not received this dispatch. But he could not take that portentous step without the imperial permission. All that he could now do, was to reiterate his directions to Soult and Marmont that they must so place their troops as to be able to succour each other. We shall see how they obeyed those orders[349].’
So, by the special and deliberate directions of the Emperor, the 230,000 effective men ‘present under arms,’ forming the five imperial armies of Spain, were placed at the mercy of Lord Wellington and his modest force of eight divisions of Anglo-Portuguese. In a flight of angry rhetoric, Berthier, writing under Napoleon’s dictation, had once asked whether it was reasonable ‘que quarante mille Anglais gâtent toutes les affaires d’Espagne.’ The reply of the fates was to be that such a contingency was perfectly possible, under the system which the Emperor had instituted, and with the directions which he persisted in giving.
SECTION XXXIII: CHAPTER II
THE BRIDGE OF ALMARAZ. MAY 1812