Unfortunately the Galicians moved late, in small numbers, and with marked timidity. They exercised no influence whatever on the course of the campaign, either in June or in July. Yet after Bonnet evacuated the Asturias and went off eastward on June 15th, the Army of Galicia had no field-force of any kind in front of it. The only French left in its neighbourhood were the 1,500 men[458] who formed the garrison of Astorga. Castaños, who had moved up to Santiago in June, and assumed command, did not take the field himself, but handed over the charge of the troops at the front to Santocildes. The latter sat down in front of Astorga with his main body, and only pushed forward a weak division under Cabrera to Benavente, where it was still too remote from Marmont to cause him any disquiet. The siege of Astorga was only a blockade till July 2nd, as no battering-train was brought up till that date. First Abadia, and later Castaños had pleaded that they had no means for a regular siege, and it was not till Sir Howard Douglas pointed out a sufficient store of heavy guns in the arsenal of Corunna, that Castaños began to scrape together the battering-train that ultimately reached Astorga[459]. But this was not so much the weak point in the operations of the Galician army, as the fact that, of 15,000 men brought together on the Orbigo, only 3,800 were pushed forward to the Esla, while the unnecessarily large remainder conducted a leisurely siege of the small garrison of Astorga. Wellington had reckoned on having an appreciable force, 10,000 or 12,000 men, at the front, molesting Marmont’s flank; this would have forced the Marshal to make a large detachment to keep it off. But not a man appeared on the east bank of the Esla, and the operations of D’Urban’s small brigade were of far more service to the main army than that of the whole of the Galicians. Marmont ignored the presence of the few thousand men pushed forward to Benavente, and was justified in so doing. Meanwhile Santocildes, with an optimism that proved wholly unjustifiable, sent messages that Astorga would be taken within a few days, and that he would then move forward with his main body. As a matter of fact the place held out till the 18th of August.
Wellington, therefore, was building on a false hypothesis when he wrote to Lord Bathurst, on July 7, that he was surveying all the fords of the Douro, and waiting till the river should have fallen a little and made them more practicable. ‘By that time I hope that the Army of Galicia under General Santocildes will have been able to advance, the siege of Astorga having been brought to a conclusion[460].’ Two days later he added, ‘it would not answer to cross the river at all in its present state, unless we should be certain of having the co-operation of the Galician troops[461].’ His delay in making an attempt to force the line of the Douro, therefore, may be attributed in the main to the tiresome conduct of Santocildes, who played to him much the same part that Caffarelli played to Marmont.
While remaining in this waiting posture, Wellington placed his troops opposite the various passages of the Douro, on a line of some fifteen miles. His left, consisting of the 3rd Division, Pack’s and Bradford’s Portuguese, and Carlos de España’s Spaniards, with Le Marchant’s and Bock’s heavy dragoons, lay near the point where the Trabancos falls into the Douro, holding the ford of Pollos, where the favourable configuration of the ground enabled them to be sure of the passage, the enemy’s line being perforce drawn back to some distance on the north bank. It was always open to Wellington to use this ford, when he should determine on a general advance. The Light, 4th, 5th, and 6th Divisions, forming the right wing, lay opposite Tordesillas, with Rueda and La Seca behind them. Their front was covered by Alten’s cavalry brigade, their right (or outer) flank by Anson’s. The reserve was formed by the 1st and 7th Divisions quartered at Medina del Campo, ten miles to the rear. The whole could be assembled for an offensive or a defensive move in a day’s march.
Marmont was drawn up, to face the attack that he expected, in an almost equally close and concentrated formation: his front, extending from the junction of the Pisuerga with the Douro near Simancas on his left, to the ground opposite the ford of Pollos on his right, was very thickly held[462]; but on the 5th he rightly conceived doubts as to whether it would not be easy for Wellington to turn his western flank, by using the ford of Castro Nuño and other passages down-stream from Pollos. He then detached Foy’s division to Toro and the neighbourhood, to guard against such a danger: but this was still an insufficient provision, since Toro is fifteen miles from Pollos, and a single division of 5,000 men would have to watch rather than defend such a length of river-line, if it were attacked in force. Therefore when Bonnet, so long expected in vain, arrived from the North on July 7th, Marmont placed him in this portion of his line, for the assistance of Foy. He still retained six divisions massed around Tordesillas, whose unbroken bridge gave him a secure access to the southern bank of the Douro. With this mass of 35,000 men in hand, he could meet Wellington with a solid body, if the latter crossed the Douro at or below Pollos. Or he might equally well take the more daring step of assuming a counter-offensive, and marching from Tordesillas on Salamanca against his adversary’s communications, if the allies threatened his own by passing the river and moving on Valladolid.
A word to explain the tardiness of Bonnet’s arrival in comparison with the earliness of his start is perhaps required. He had evacuated Oviedo and Gijon and his other posts in the Asturias as early as June 14th, the actual day on which Wellington commenced his offensive campaign. This he did not in consequence of Marmont’s orders, which only reached him when he had begun to move, but on his own responsibility. He had received correct information as to the massing of the allied army round Ciudad Rodrigo, and of the forward movement of the Galicians towards Astorga. He knew of the dispersed state of Marmont’s host, and saw the danger to himself. Should the Marshal concentrate about Salamanca, he could never join him, if the whole Army of Galicia threw itself between. Wherefore not only did he resolve to retreat at once, but he did not move by the pass of Pajares and Leon—the obvious route to rejoin the Army of Portugal. For fear that he might be intercepted, he took the coast-road, picking up the small garrisons that he had placed in one or two small ports. He reached Santander on the 22nd, not molested so much as he might have been by the bands of Porlier and Longa (whose haunts he was passing), because the bulk of them had gone off to help in Sir Home Popham’s raid on Biscay. From Santander he turned inland, passed Reynosa, in the heart of the Cantabrian Sierras, on the 24th June, and arrived at Aguilar del Campo, the first town in the province of Palencia, on the 29th. From thence he had a long march of seven days in the plains, before he reached Valladolid on the 6th, and reported himself at Marmont’s head-quarters on the 7th of July. He brought with him a strong division of 6,500 infantry, a light field-battery, and a single squadron of Chasseurs—even 100 sabres[463] were a welcome reinforcement to Marmont’s under-horsed army. It was an odd fact that Bonnet’s division had never before met the English in battle, though one of its regiments had seen them during the last days of Sir John Moore’s retreat in January 1809[464]. For the three years since that date they had always been employed in the Asturias.
The arrival of Bonnet brought up the total of Marmont’s infantry to 43,000 men, and his guns to 78. The cavalry still remained the weak point: but by a high-handed and unpopular measure the Marshal succeeded, during his stay on the Douro, in procuring nearly 1,000 horses for the dismounted dragoons who were encumbering his dépôt at Valladolid. In the French, as in the British, Peninsular army it had become common for many of the junior officers of the infantry to provide themselves with a riding-horse; most captains and many lieutenants had them. And their seniors, chefs de bataillon and colonels, habitually had several horses more than they were entitled to. Marmont took the heroic measure of proclaiming that he should enforce the regulations, and that all unauthorized horses were confiscated. He paid, however, a valuation for each beast on a moderate scale—otherwise the act would have been intolerable. In this way, including some mounts requisitioned from doctors, commissaries, and suttlers, about 1,000 horses in all were procured. The number of cavalry fit for the field had gone up by July 15th from about 2,200 to 3,200—a total which was only 300 less than Wellington’s full strength of British sabres. It occurs to the casual observer that the horses, having never been trained to squadron drill or to act in mass, must have been difficult to manage, even though the riders were competent horsemen. This may have something to do with the very ineffective part played by the French cavalry in the next fortnight’s campaigning.
A quaint anecdote of the time shows us General Taupin, an old Revolutionary veteran, with all the officers of his brigade called together in a village church. ‘He ascended the pulpit and thundered against the abuse of horses in the infantry: he would make an end of all baggage carried on mules or asses, but most especially of the officers’ riding-horses. “Gentlemen,” he cried, “in 1793 we were allowed a haversack as our only baggage, a stone as our only pillow.” Well—it was a long time since 1793: we were in 1812, and the speaker, this old and gallant soldier, had six baggage mules himself[465].’
During the first ten days after the deadlock on the Douro began, the French were much puzzled by Wellington’s refusal to continue his advance. Foy, the ablest of them, noted in his diary that he must conclude either that the enemy was not numerous enough to take the offensive—his strength might have been over-valued—or else that he was waiting for Hill to bring up his corps from Estremadura. This last idea, indeed, was running in the brains of many French strategists: it obsessed Jourdan and King Joseph at Madrid, who were well aware that Hill, marching by Alcantara and the passes of the Sierra de Gata, could have got to the Douro in half the time that it would have taken his opponent, D’Erlon, who would have had to move by Toledo, Madrid, and Segovia. But the simple explanation is to be found in Wellington’s dispatch to Lord Bathurst of July 13. ‘It is obvious that we could not cross the Douro without sustaining great loss, and could not fight a general action under circumstances of greater disadvantage.... The enemy’s numbers are equal, if not superior, to ours: they have in their position thrice the amount of artillery that we have, and we are superior in cavalry alone—which arm (it is probable) could not be used in the sort of attack we should have to make[466].’ He then proceeds to demonstrate the absolute necessity of bringing forward the Army of Galicia against Marmont’s rear. Its absence was the real cause of the deadlock in which he found himself involved. All offensive operations were postponed—meanwhile the enemy might receive reinforcements and attack, since he had not been attacked. ‘But I still hope that I shall be able to retain, at the close of this campaign, those acquisitions which we made at its commencement.’
Meanwhile Marmont, having had a fortnight to take stock of his position, and having received reinforcements which very nearly reached the figure that he had named to King Joseph as the minimum which would enable him to take the offensive, was beginning to get restless. He had now realized that he would get no practical assistance from Caffarelli, who still kept sending him letters exaggerating the terrors of Sir Home Popham’s raid on Biscay. They said that there were six ships of the line engaged in it, and that there was a landing-force of British regulars: Bonnet’s evacuation of the Asturias had allowed all the bands of Cantabria to turn themselves loose on Biscay—Bilbao was being attacked—and so forth. This being so, it was only possible to send a brigade of cavalry and a horse artillery battery—anything more was useless to ask[467]. This was written on June 26th, but by July 11th not even the cavalry brigade had started from Vittoria, as was explained by a subsequent letter, which only reached Marmont after he had already started on an offensive campaign[468]. As a matter of fact, Caffarelli’s meagre contribution of 750 sabres[469] and one battery actually got off on July 16th[470]. Marmont may be pardoned for having believed that it would never start at all, when it is remembered that a month had elapsed since he first asked for aid, and that every two days he had been receiving dispatches of excuse, but no reinforcements. He had no adequate reason for thinking that even the trifling force which did in the end start out would ever arrive.
Nor, as he demonstrates clearly enough in his defence of his operations, had he any more ground for believing that Joseph and Jourdan would bring him help from Madrid. They resolved to do so in the end, and made a vigorous effort to collect as large a force as was possible. But the announcement of their intention was made too late to profit Marmont. The dispatch conveying it was sent off from Madrid only on July 9th[471], and never reached the Marshal at all, for the two copies of it, sent by separate messengers, were both captured by guerrilleros between Madrid and Valladolid, and came into Wellington’s instead of into Marmont’s hands. This was a consequence of the insecurity of the communication via Segovia, the only one route open when the Army of Portugal retired behind the Douro. On July 12th the last piece of intelligence from Madrid which Marmont had received was a dispatch from Jourdan dated June 30th—it had taken twelve days to get 150 miles, which shows the shifts to which its bearer had been exposed. This letter is so important, as showing what the King and Jourdan opined at the moment, that its gist is worth giving.