It is clear that the Duke of Ragusa had drawn his conclusion that Wellington was about to retreat at once, and had argued, from partly-seen motions in his adversary’s rear, that the whole allied army was moving off. But this was not yet the case: Wellington was taking precautions, but he was still not without hope that the French would commit themselves to some unwise and premature movement. He had still every man in hand, and the supposed general retreat on Aldea Tejada, which the Marshal thought that he saw, was in reality only the shifting of reserves more to the right.
Unwitting of this, Marmont, a little before two o’clock, began his extension to the left. To the westward of the woods on whose edge the five divisions composing his main body were massed, is a long plateau facing the village of Arapiles and the heights behind it. It is about three-quarters of a mile broad and three miles long, gently undulating and well suited for marching: in 1812 it seems to have been open waste: to-day it is mainly under the plough. Its front or northern side slopes gently down, toward the bottom in which lies the village of Arapiles: at its back, which is steeper, are woods, outlying parts of the great forest which extends to Alba de Tormes. It ends suddenly in a knoll with an outcrop of rock, called the Pico de Miranda, above the hamlet of Miranda de Azan, from which it draws its name. Along this plateau was the obvious and easy route for a force marching to turn Wellington’s right. It was a very tempting piece of ground, with a glacis-like slope towards the English heights, which made it very defensible—a better artillery position against a force advancing from the village of Arapiles and the ridges behind it could not be conceived. The only danger connected with it seemed to be that it was over-long—it had more than two miles of front, and a very large force would be required to hold it securely from end to end. From the Pico de Miranda, if the French should extend so far, to Foy’s right wing by Calvarisa de Ariba was a distance of six miles in all—far too much for an army of 48,000 men in the battle-array of the Napoleonic period.
Marmont says that his first intention was only to occupy the nearer end of the plateau, that part of it which faces the village of Arapiles. In his apologetic dispatch to Berthier, he declares that he wished to get a lodgement upon it, lest Wellington might seize it before him, and so block his way westward. ‘It was indispensable to occupy it, seeing that the enemy had just strengthened his centre, from whence he could push out en masse on to this plateau, and commence an attack by taking possession of this important ground. Accordingly I ordered the 5th Division (Maucune) to move out and form up on the right end of the plateau, where his fire would link on perfectly with that from the [Great] Arapile: the 7th Division [Thomières] was to place itself in second line as a support, the 2nd Division (Clausel) to act as a reserve to the 7th. The 6th Division (Brennier) was to occupy the high ground in front of the wood, where a large number of my guns were still stationed. I ordered General Bonnet at the same time to occupy with the 122nd regiment a knoll intermediate between the plateau and the hill of the [Great] Arapile, which blocks the exit from the village of the same name. Finally, I directed General Boyer to leave only one regiment of his dragoons to watch Foy’s right, and to come round with the other three to the front of the wood, beside the 2nd Division. The object of this was that, supposing the enemy should attack the plateau, Boyer could charge in on their right flank, while my light cavalry could charge in on their left flank[526].’
All this reads very plausibly and ingeniously, but unfortunately it squares in neither with the psychology of the moment, nor with the manœuvres which Maucune, Thomières, and Clausel executed, under the Marshal’s eye and without his interference. He had forgotten when he dictated this paragraph—and not unnaturally, for he wrote sorely wounded, on his sick-bed, in pain, and with his head not too clear—that he had just before stated that Wellington was obviously retreating, and had begun to withdraw towards Aldea Tejada. If this was so, how could he possibly have conceived at the moment that his adversary, far from retreating, was preparing an offensive movement en masse against the left flank of the French position? The two conceptions cannot be reconciled. The fact was, undoubtedly, that he thought that Wellington was moving off, and pushed forward Maucune, Thomières, and Clausel, with the object of molesting and detaining what he supposed to be the rearguard of his adversary. The real idea of the moment was the one which appears in the paragraph of his Mémoires, already quoted on an [earlier page]: ‘I hoped that our respective positions would bring on not a battle but an advantageous rearguard action, in which, using my full force late in the day, with a part only of the British army left in front of me, I should probably score a point.’ Jourdan, a severe critic of his colleague, puts the matter with perfect frankness in his Guerre d’Espagne. After quoting Marmont’s insincere dispatch at length, he adds, ‘it is evident that the Marshal, in order to menace the point of retreat of the allies, extended his left much too far[527].’ Napoleon, after reading Marmont’s dispatch in a Russian bivouac[528], pronounced that all his reasons and explanations for the position into which he got himself had ‘as much complicated stuffing as the inside of a clock, and not a word of truth as to the real state of things.’
What happened under the eyes of Marmont, as he took a long-delayed lunch on the top of the Greater Arapile[529], was as follows. Maucune, with his strong division of nine battalions or 5,200 men, after breaking out from the position in front of the woods where the French main body was massed, marched across the open ground for about a mile or more, till he had got well on to the central part of the plateau which he was directed to occupy. He then drew up opposite the village of Arapiles, and sent out his voltigeur companies to work down the slope toward that place, which lay well in front of the British line. The position which he took up was on that part of the plateau which sweeps forward nearest to the opposite heights, and is little more than half a mile from them. A fierce artillery engagement then set in: Maucune’s divisional battery began to shell the village of Arapiles. Sympher’s battery, belonging to the 4th Division, replied from the slope behind the village and from two guns on the Lesser Arapile. The French pieces which had been dragged up on to the Greater Arapile then started shelling the Lesser, and silenced the two guns there, which were drawn off, and sent to rejoin the rest of the battery, on a less exposed position. The 3/27th on the hilltop had to take cover behind rocks as best it could. Soon after at least two more French batteries, from the artillery reserve, took ground to the right of Maucune, and joined in the shelling of the village of Arapiles. Wellington presently supported Sympher’s battery with that of Lawson, belonging to the 5th Division, which turned on to shell Maucune’s supporting columns from ground on the lower slopes, not far to the right of Sympher’s position. The effect was good, and the columns shifted sideways to get out of range. But one [or perhaps two] of the French batteries then shifted their position, and began to play upon Lawson diagonally from the left, so enfilading him that he was ordered to limber up and move higher on the hill behind the village, from whence he resumed his fire. Wellington also, a little later, brought up the horse-artillery troop belonging to the 7th Division [’E’, Macdonald’s troop] and placed it on the Lesser Arapile—two guns on the summit, four on the lower slopes near the 1/40th of W. Anson’s brigade. The British fire all along the heights was effective and accurate, but quite unable to cope with that of the French, who had apparently six batteries in action against three. Marmont, indeed, had all along his line an immense superiority of guns, having 78 pieces with him against Wellington’s 54. His artillery-reserve consisted of four batteries—that of his adversary of one only—Arriaga’s Portuguese 24-pounder howitzers[530].
While Maucune and the French artillery were making a very noisy demonstration against the British line between the Lesser Arapile and the village of the same name, which looked like the preliminaries of a serious attack, more troops emerged from the woods of Marmont’s centre, and began to file along the plateau, under cover of Maucune’s deployed line. These were Thomières’s division, succeeded after a long interval by that of Clausel. ‘During the cannonade column followed column in quick and continued succession along the heights occupied by the enemy: Marmont was moving his army in battle-order along his position, and gaining ground rapidly to his left[531].’ According to the Marshal’s own account of his intentions, he had proposed to place Maucune on the (French) right end of the plateau, Thomières and Clausel in support of him. What happened, however, was that Maucune went well forward on to the right-centre of the plateau, and that Thomières marched along past Maucune’s rear, and continued moving in a westerly direction along the summit of the plateau, though Clausel soon halted: before Thomières stopped he had gone nearly three miles. It is clear that if Marmont had chosen, he could have checked the manœuvres of his subordinates, the moment that they passed the limit which he alleges that he had set them. An aide-de-camp sent down from the back of the Greater Arapile could have told Maucune not to press forward toward the English position, or Thomières to stop his march, within a matter of twenty minutes or half an hour. No such counterorders were sent—and the reason clearly was that Marmont was satisfied with the movements that he saw proceeding before him, until the moment when he suddenly realized with dismay that Wellington was about to deliver a counter-stroke in full force.
We must now turn to the movements of the allied army. The instant that Maucune deployed on the plateau in front of the village of Arapiles, and that the cannonade began, Wellington judged that he was about to be attacked—the thing that he most desired. A very few orders put his army in a defensive battle-position. The 5th Division was sent from the rear side of the heights to occupy the crest, continuing the line of the 4th Division. The 6th Division was brought up from the rear to a position behind the 4th. The 7th Division, abandoning the long bickering with Foy in which its light troops had been engaged, was drawn back from the left wing, and took post in second line parallel to the 6th and in rear of the 5th Division. The place of its skirmishers on the slopes in front of Nuestra Señora de la Peña was taken by some companies of the 95th, sent out from the Light Division. That unit and the 1st Division now formed the total of the allied left wing, with Bock’s heavy dragoons covering their flank. They were ‘containing’ an equivalent French force—Foy’s and Ferey’s infantry divisions, and the single regiment of Boyer’s dragoons which Marmont had left in this quarter.
There still remained in reserve, near the village of Las Torres, Bradford’s Portuguese and España’s Spanish battalions, with the bulk of the allied cavalry—all Anson’s and Le Marchant’s and the greater part of Arentschildt’s squadrons, and in addition Pakenham and D’Urban were available a little farther to the right, near Aldea Tejada. If the French were going to attack the heights on each side of the village of Arapiles, as seemed probable at the moment, all these remoter reserves could be used as should seem most profitable.
But the battle did not go exactly as Wellington expected. The cannonade continued, and Maucune’s skirmishing line pushed very boldly forward, and actually attacked the village of Arapiles, which was defended by the light companies of the Guards’ brigade of the 1st Division and of the Fusilier brigade of the 4th Division. The voltigeurs twice seized the southern outlying houses of the straggling village, and were twice driven out. But the battalions in support of them did not come forward, nor did Bonnet attack on the right of them, nor Thomières on the left. The former remained stationary, on and about the Great Arapile: the latter continued to march westward along the plateau: a perceptible gap began to appear between him and Maucune.
Wellington at this moment was toward the right rear of his own line—occupied according to some authorities in snatching a late and hasty lunch[532] while matters were developing, but not yet developed—according to others in giving orders concerning the cavalry to Stapleton Cotton, near Las Torres—when he received an urgent message from Leith. It said that Maucune had ceased to advance, but that the French extreme left was still in march westward. ‘On being made acquainted with the posture of affairs,’ writes the officer who bore Leith’s report[533], ‘Lord Wellington declared his intention of riding to the spot and directed me to accompany him. When he arrived at the ground of the 5th Division—now under arms and perfectly prepared to receive the attack, his Lordship found the enemy still in the same formation, but not displaying any intention of trying his fortune, by crossing the valley at that point. He soon became satisfied that no operation of consequence was intended against this part of the line. He again galloped off toward the right, which at this time became the most interesting and important scene of action.’