The victory of Salamanca was certainly an astonishing feat of rapid decision and instantaneous action. The epigrammatic description of it as ‘the beating of 40,000 men in forty minutes’ hardly over-states its triumphant celerity: before that time had elapsed, from the moment when Pakenham and Leith struck the French left, the battle was undoubtedly in such a condition that the enemy had no chance left—he could only settle whether his retreat should be more or less prompt. Clausel chose to make a hopeless counter-offensive move, and so prolonged the fight till dark—he would probably have been wiser to break off at once, and to retreat at six o’clock, covering his routed left with his intact reserve divisions. He would certainly have lost several thousand men less if he had retired after repulsing Cole and Pack, and had made no attempt to press the advantage that he had gained over them. It may be argued in his defence that the last hour of battle, costly though it proved to him, prevented Wellington’s pursuit from commencing in the daylight, an undoubted boon to the defeated army. But at the most the victor would have had only one hour at his disposition before dusk; the French were taking refuge in a forest, where orderly pursuit would have been difficult; and looking at Wellington’s usual methods of utilizing a victory (e. g. Vittoria) we may feel doubtful whether the beaten enemy—if covered by Sarrut, Ferey, and Foy, as a regular rearguard, would have suffered more than he actually did. For Wellington’s whole idea of pursuit turned on the false notion that the castle, bridge, and ford of Alba de Tormes were still blocked by the Spaniards whom he had left there. By the time that he had discovered that the enemy was not retreating towards Huerta and Villa Gonzalo, but escaping over the Tormes in some other way, the hour would have been late.
Undoubtedly the best summary and encomium of Wellington’s tactics on this eventful day is that of an honest enemy, the very capable and clear-sighted Foy, who wrote in his diary six days after the fight[600]:
‘The battle of Salamanca is the most masterly in its management, the most considerable in the number of troops engaged, and the most important in results of all the victories that the English have gained in these latter days. It raises Lord Wellington almost to the level of Marlborough. Hitherto we had been aware of his prudence, his eye for choosing a position, and his skill in utilizing it. At Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manœuvres. He kept his dispositions concealed for almost the whole day: he waited till we were committed to our movement before he developed his own: he played a safe game[601]: he fought in the oblique order—it was a battle in the style of Frederic the Great. As for ourselves, we had no definite intention of bringing on a battle, so that we found ourselves let in for it without any preliminary arrangements having been made. The army was moving without much impulse or supervision, and what little there was stopped with the wounding of the Marshal.’ In another note he adds: ‘The Duke of Ragusa committed us to the action—he brought it on contrary to Clausel’s advice. The left was already checked when he received his wound: after that moment it was impossible either to refuse to fight, or to give the fight a good direction: all that could be done was to attenuate the sum of the disaster—that Clausel did. There was no gap in the command—we should have been no better off if the Marshal had never been hurt. He is not quite honest on that point in his dispatch[602].’
With this criticism we may undoubtedly agree. Foy has hit upon the main points in which Salamanca was a startling revelation to the contemporary observer—no one on the French side, and but few upon the British, had yet realized that Wellington on the offensive could be no less formidable and efficient than Wellington on the defensive. After July 22, 1812, no opponent could dare to take liberties with him, as Soult, Masséna, and Marmont, each in his turn, had done up till that date. The possible penalty was now seen to be too great. Moreover, the prestige of the British general was so much enhanced that he could safely count upon it as not the least of his military assets—as we shall see him do in the Pyrenees, a little more than a year after Salamanca had been won. To the other thesis that Foy lays down—the statement that Marmont had, by his initial movement, made disaster inevitable before he was wounded—we may also give our assent. Jourdan came to the same conclusion—the Emperor Napoleon also fixed the responsibility in the same way. The Marshal’s ingenious special pleading, to the effect that but for his personal misadventure he would yet have won the day, will convince none but blind enemies of Wellington. Of some of the charges which Napoleon laid to his charge he must be acquitted: he did not know in the least that King Joseph was on his way to join him from Madrid with 15,000 men. The dispatches sent to warn him of this fact had all miscarried, and the last news from the Army of the Centre which had reached him had intimated that no immediate help was to be expected from that quarter. Nor was he wrong in not waiting for the succours from Caffarelli: these were so trifling—800 sabres and one horse battery—that their presence or absence could make little difference in the battle.
But the Marshal’s flagrant and irreparable fault was that, having made up his mind that Wellington would not fight under any provocation—a conclusion for which the earlier episodes of the campaign gave him some justification—he got his army into a position in which he had battle suddenly forced upon him, at a moment when he was not in a position to accept it with advantage. The attempt to turn Wellington’s right wing on the afternoon of July 22nd was an unpardonable liberty, only taken because the Marshal had come to despise his opponent. The liberty was resented in the most forcible way—and there was no means of avoiding disaster when Thomières and Maucune had once started out on their rash turning movement.
SECTION XXXIII: CHAPTER VIII
THE CONSEQUENCES OF SALAMANCA
The dawn of July 23rd revealed to Wellington that the French army had passed the Tormes at the bridge and forts of Alba, and that nothing remained on the western bank of the river save small parties of fugitives and wounded, who had lost their way in the forest. Some of these were gleaned up by Anson’s and Bock’s brigades of cavalry, who were pushed forward to search the woods and seek for the enemy. Anson’s patrols reached the bridge, and found a French rearguard watching it. This was composed of Foy’s division, to whom Clausel had committed the covering of his retreat. It cleared off, after firing a few shots. Foy had been told to block the passage till 9 o’clock, but went off long before, when the disordered main body had got a good start. On the report that he was gone, Wellington sent Anson’s squadrons across the bridge of Alba de Tormes, while Bock forded the river lower down at La Encina. The state of the roads, strewn with baggage and wounded men, showed that the French had used all the three roads leading east from Alba[603], and were on their way to Arevalo, not towards their base at Valladolid: to have marched in that direction would have brought them right across the front of the advancing British army. Wellington sent out detachments on all the roads which the enemy had taken, but urged the main pursuit by the central and most important road, that by Garcia Hernandez on Peñaranda. Contrary to his wont, he pushed on this day with great celerity, riding himself with the head of the column formed by the main body of Anson’s light dragoons. This vanguard was followed, at some distance, by the 1st and Light Divisions. Those infantry units which had fought hard on the previous day were allowed a rest. About seven miles beyond Alba de Tormes Anson’s patrols came upon a regular rearguard of the enemy, behind the Caballero brook (a tributary of the Almar), in and about the village of Garcia Hernandez. This was, of course, Foy and the French 1st Division, the only troops in Clausel’s army which had not been seriously engaged in the battle. They were accompanied by a battery and a brigade of Curto’s chasseurs. Around and about the formed troops scattered parties were visible—the village was full of men drawing water from the wells. On the approach of the British cavalry column—the infantry were still miles behind—Foy prepared to resume his retreat, the cavalry drew up on a rising ground, to the north of Garcia Hernandez, to cover the movement: the leading regiments of the foot started off at once along the high-road, the others halted for a space, to the right of the chasseurs, out of sight of the British, whose view of them was intercepted by the slope on which the French cavalry were drawn up.
Wellington, as it seems, saw only the hostile squadrons, and resolved to drive them off without delay, in order to be able to press in upon the infantry columns which were retiring farther away. He directed Anson to attack the chasseurs with so much of his brigade as was up at the front: several squadrons were absent, some guarding the prisoners of yesterday, others exploring on distant roads. Two squadrons each of the 11th and 16th Light Dragoons delivered the frontal attack on the French brigade, while the leading squadrons of Bock’s brigade, which was coming up rapidly from the flank, and was not yet formed in line, were to turn its right wing.