What happened at this rearguard action, whose details Soult slurs over, was that the Light Division, suddenly attacked by the French infantry as it was about to cross the Huebra, had to throw out a strong skirmishing line to its rear, while the main column plunged down the ravine and over the fords. Three companies of the 43rd and one of the 95th[201] held back Daricau’s voltigeurs till their comrades had waded across the water, and then had the dangerous task of withdrawing from the woodside and rushing down to the fords sharply pursued. Soult showed at first every sign of desiring to cross the Huebra in their wake, brought up four batteries to his side of the ravine, and began to play upon the Light and 7th Divisions, which had formed up to defend the passage. His skirmishers swarmed down to the river bank, under cover of the fire of the guns, engaged in a lively tiraillade across the rapid stream, and would certainly have attempted to cross if the return fire had not been as strong and rapid as their own. The 7th Division, drawn up in three lines of brigades on the higher slopes, was much shelled by the French artillery, and would have suffered severely but for the fact that the rain-sodden ground ‘swallowed the shot and smothered the shells[202].’ It is an extraordinary fact that after ‘four hours of standing up to the ankles in mud and water, completely exposed, having nothing to shelter us[203]’ the regiments in the front brigade were hardly touched at all: the 68th had no loss whatever, the 51st had one officer killed and eight men wounded, and the total casualties in the division were under 30. Soult’s report that ‘notre feu d’artillerie a été très meurtrier pour l’ennemi’ was plausible enough to any French officer watching the artillery practice, which was good—but happened to be incorrect.
At dusk the firing ceased, and the French drew off from the river and encamped in the woods behind them, as did the Light and 7th Divisions on the opposite bank. The losses on both sides in this skirmish—sometimes called the combat of San Muñoz, sometimes the combat of the Huebra—were very moderate. Daricau’s division had 226 casualties (mostly in the 21st Léger and 100th Line), and the French cavalry a few more. On the British side the Light and 7th Divisions and the cavalry of the rearguard lost 365 men—but this included 178 prisoners not taken in action but individually as stragglers during the long retreat through the woods since dawn[204]. In the actual fighting the loss was only 2 officers and 9 men killed, and 4 officers and 90 men wounded in the British brigades, with 1 officer and 36 men killed and 2 officers and 43 men wounded in the Portuguese—a total of 187. Next morning it was expected that the French, having now several more infantry divisions at the front, would make an attempt to force the line of the Huebra at dawn. Nothing of the kind happened. ‘Daylight came at last,’ writes the cavalry officer in charge of the line of vedettes along the river, ‘the French drums beat, and the troops stood to arms. I took my place to observe their movements, and expected every moment to see the columns leaving the camp for the different fords. But no! after having had a good opportunity to observe their strength, and to see their cavalry water their horses, I witnessed with no small satisfaction the whole, after remaining under arms about two hours, disperse to their respective bivouacks[205].’ The pursuit was over.
Wellington, in short, had offered battle on the Huebra, on the evening of the 17th, and Soult had refused it, seeing that the bulk of the allied army was concentrated close behind that river, while his own infantry divisions were still straggling up from the rear. Nor had he any intention of following next day—he wrote to King Joseph that ‘I told your Majesty that seeing the retreat of the enemy upon the Agueda well pronounced, and having no hope of being able to engage him in a general action before he has terminated his movement, I should put a limit to my pursuit after passing the Huebra, and should move off towards the upper Tormes, to enable the army to collect the food which it lacks.’ The regret expressed at being unable to force on a battle was of course insincere. All that Soult did was to wait till the British rearguard had abandoned the line of the Huebra, and then move his advanced cavalry to Cabrillas, from which some small reconnoitring parties pushed as far as the Yeltes river[206], and then came back, reporting that it was impossible to pass that flooded stream without bridges, and that the British were all across it. On the morning of the 19th the whole French army retired eastward, marching by Tamames and Linares towards Salvatierra. The truth was that the French were by now suffering almost as much from fatigue and want of food as the British. They could not ‘live on the country’, and the diet of acorns, of which several diarists speak, was as repugnant to the pursuers as to the pursued.
On the 18th the British Army had an unmolested retreat. This did not prevent many losses of men who dropped to the rear and died of fatigue and starvation. The carcasses of dead horses all along the road had been hacked up for food. One observer saw thirteen corpses lying round a single fire: another counted so many as fifty men sitting in a clump, who declared their absolute incapacity to march a foot farther, and could not be induced to move. But the stragglers who did not perish hobbled on to the camps in the evening for the most part. The cavalry swept up large numbers of them into safety. That night the column of Hill reached Tenebron and Moras Verdes: the centre column lodged about Santi Espiritus and Alba de Yeltes. The Galicians, forming the northern column, were about Castillo de Yeltes and Fuenteroble. The march of the centre column was accompanied by the curious case of insubordination by three divisional generals (those commanding the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions[207]) of which Napier makes such scathing notice. Their orders gave an itinerary involving a march over fords in flooded fields; they consulted together, judged the route hopeless, and turned off towards the bridge of Castillo de Yeltes, which they found blocked by the Army of Galicia. Wellington, failing to find them on the prescribed path, set out to seek them, and came upon them waiting miserably in the mud. He is said to have given them no more rebuke than a sarcastic ‘You see, gentlemen, I know my own business best’ and allowed them to cross after the Spaniards, many hours late[208]. The insubordination was inexcusable—yet perhaps it would not have been beneath Wellington’s dignity to have prefaced his original order with an explanatory note such as ‘the main road by Castillo bridge being reserved for the Spanish divisions.’ But this would not have been in his normal style. Like Stonewall Jackson fifty years after, he was not prone to give his reasons to subordinates, even when his orders would appear to them very inexplicable.
On the 19th a march of a few miles brought all the columns within a short distance of Ciudad Rodrigo, and the commissariat transport having reached that place on the preceding day, quite unmolested, arrangements had already been made to send out food to meet the approaching columns. ‘About dusk we took up our ground on the face of the hill near Rodrigo—the weather now changing to a severe frost was intensely cold. We had not long been halted when the well-known summons of “turn out for biscuit” rang in our ears. The strongest went for it, and received two days’ rations for every man. It was customary to make an orderly division, but that night it was dispensed with, each man eagerly seized what he could get, and endeavoured to allay the dreadful gnawing which had tormented us during four days of unexampled cold and fatigue. In a short time two more rations were delivered, and the inordinate eating that ensued threatened to do more mischief than the former want[209].’
On the 20th the army was distributed in quarters around and behind Rodrigo—Hill’s column about Martiago, Zamorra, Robledo, Cespedosa, and other villages on the Upper Agueda; the centre column about Gallegos, Carpio, Pastores, El Bodon, Campillo, and other cantonments well known from the long tarrying of the army there in 1811. The Galicians were left out in the direction of San Felices and the Lower Agueda. Every one was now under cover, and food was abundant—almost too abundant at first. Rest, warmth, and regular rations were indeed necessary. ‘Scarcely a man had shoes—not that they had not been properly supplied with them before the retreat began, but the state of the roads had been such that as soon as a shoe fell off or stuck in the mud, in place of picking it up, the man kicked its fellow-companion after it. Yet the infantry was still efficient and fit to do its duty. But the cavalry and artillery were in a wretched state: the batteries of the 3rd, 6th, and 7th Divisions, the heavy cavalry, with the 11th and 12th Light Dragoons were nearly a wreck—the artillery of the 3rd Division lost 70 horses between Salamanca and Rodrigo.... The cavalry was half dismounted, the artillery without the proper number of horses to draw the guns, much less the ammunition cars—many died from cold and famine under the harness of the artillery and the saddles of the dragoons.... The batteries could with difficulty show three horses in place of eight to a gun[210].’
Stragglers continued to come in for several days. Julian Sanchez was sent out with his lancers to search the woods for them, and brought in 800 mounted on the horses of his men. But when the divisional returns were prepared on November 29th, it was found that besides killed and wounded in action and sick in hospital, there was a melancholy deficit of 4921 ‘missing’ since October 23rd. The killed and wounded in action, as opposed to the missing, were very few considering the dangers which the Army had gone through: some 160 at Villadrigo, 440 at Villamuriel and Palencia, 70 at the Puente Larga, 113 at Alba de Tormes, 187 at the combat of the Huebra—smaller fights such as the skirmishes at Tordesillas, Aldea Lengua, and Matilla can hardly account for 200 more between them—the total cannot have exceeded 1,200 casualties in action. But nearly 5,000 missing was a sad record. How many of them were dead, how many had deserted, and how many were prisoners in the hands of the French, it is hard to determine. The losses in missing before Salamanca had been insignificant—perhaps 500 in each of the two columns of Wellington and Hill—there had been many drunkards and malingerers taken both at Torquemada and at Valdemoro. But the main loss was suffered between the 16th and the 18th of November, in the woods and mires between Salamanca and the Yeltes river. Soult, in his daily letters to King Joseph, claims to have taken 600 prisoners on the 16th, 1,000 to 1,200 on the 17th, and 100 on the 18th. These figures do not appear incredible, and would allow in addition for well over a thousand men dead, and some hundreds of deserters. The latter were certainly numerous in the foreign corps—the Brunswick-Oels and Chasseurs Britanniques show losses in ‘missing’ out of proportion to all the other regiments[211]. It is noteworthy, when comparing the lists of the ‘missing’ in the various divisions, to see that the Portuguese units suffered far more severely in proportion to their numbers than the British. They showed the total of 2,469 as against 2,477, but this was out of 22,000 men only, while the similar British figure was out of a total of 32,000 or thereabouts—i. e. their loss was about 10·8 per cent. as against about 8 per cent. Several observers of the retreat note that the cold and perpetual rain told much more heavily upon the stamina of the Portuguese, whose native climate is far more mild than that of the plateaux of Leon. They simply sank by the wayside, and died, or suffered themselves to be taken prisoners without attempting to get away. The unit in the whole army which suffered most heavily in the way of ‘missing’ was Bradford’s Portuguese brigade, which lost 514 men out of 1,645. In the Light and 3rd Divisions the Portuguese battalions were little more than a third of the British in numbers, but had more missing than their comrades in the proportion of 163 to 92 in one case and 230 to 184 in the other. The worst divisional records were those of the 5th and 7th Divisions, which lost 800 and 600 men respectively: the best those of the 1st, 6th, and Light Divisions with only 283, 170, and 255. Individual British regiments differed much: the most unsatisfactory figures were those of a battalion which had only landed at Lisbon that summer, and had not been present at Salamanca. The 1/82nd distinguished itself by leaving more drunken stragglers at Valdemoro than any other corps, and had dropped a terrible proportion of its men between Salamanca and Rodrigo. Wellington put the colonel under arrest, and proposed to try him before a court martial for ‘gross neglect of duty,’ but in the end did not press matters to a formal prosecution[212].
For the first few days after the arrival of the army at Ciudad Rodrigo Wellington was not quite certain that the enemy, after resting on the Tormes for a few days, might not resume his advance[213]. This was unlikely, owing to the weather and the obvious difficulty of finding food for 90,000 men in a devastated countryside. Still, it was conceivable, and a further advance on Soult’s part would have been very tiresome, when the allied troops so much required rest, and when some dangerous cracks seemed to threaten the stability of parts of the newly repaired sections of the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo[214]. For six days the army was held together, till on November 26th arrived certain news that Soult was on his way to the province of Avila, and that the greater part of the Army of Portugal was leaving Salamanca for the rear, and distributing itself in its old cantonments in the direction of Toro and Valladolid[215], while King Joseph with the Army of the Centre was on his march for Madrid. Since the French were certainly dispersing, there was no longer any necessity for keeping the allied army concentrated. On the 27th Wellington ordered a general dislocation of the divisions into winter quarters. Only the Light Division and Victor Alten’s cavalry remained about Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. Of the rest of the army, Hill, with his old corps—the 2nd Division, Hamilton’s Portuguese and Erskine’s cavalry—marched for Coria and Zarza, being directed to canton themselves in the valley of the Alagon with an advanced post at Bejar. Campbell’s Portuguese cavalry went to their old haunts about Elvas in the Alemtejo, and Penne Villemur and Morillo, with the Estremaduran Divisions, returned to their native regions. Castaños and the Galician army retired also to their own province, marching through the Tras-os-Montes by way of Braganza. D’Urban’s Portuguese horse were cantoned for the winter north of the Douro, but the rest of the allied cavalry (Bock, Ponsonby, and Anson) were sent far to the rear, to look for comfortable quarters in the Mondego valley and the villages south of Oporto. The remaining British infantry divisions (the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th) were distributed about the province of Beira, in various quarters from Lamego to Guarda, at distances of thirty or fifty miles from the frontier[216]. The general disposition of the cantonments of the army was not much different from what it had been in the first days of 1812, before the long eleven months’ campaign began. Only Hill was no longer on the Guadiana, but north of the Tagus, since there was no enemy left in Andalusia to require his attention.
While the dispersion was in progress Wellington issued (November 28) the Memorandum to Officers commanding Divisions and Brigades which caused so many heart-burnings among his subordinates. It was intended to go no further than those officers; but some of them dispatched copies to the colonels of the regiments under their charge, and so it became public property. Written in a moment of intense irritation, it contained much rebuke that was merited, but was unjust from the sweeping and general character of the blame that it distributed to the whole army, and most certainly failed to take account of the exceptional conditions of the 15th to the 19th of November. Wellington wrote:
‘I am concerned to have to observe that the army under my command has fallen off in the respect of discipline in the late campaign, to a greater degree than any army with which I have ever served, or of which I have ever read. Yet this army has met with no disaster: it has suffered no privations which but trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented, and for which there existed no reason in the nature of the service. Nor has it suffered any hardships, excepting those resulting from the necessity of being exposed to the inclemencies of the weather at a time when they were most severe. It must be obvious to every officer that from the moment the troops commenced their retreat from the neighbourhood of Burgos on the one hand, and of Madrid on the other, the officers lost all control over their men. Irregularities and outrages were committed with impunity. Yet the necessity for retreat existing, none was ever made on which the troops had such short marches; none on which they made such long and repeated halts; and none on which the retreating army was so little pressed on their rear by the enemy.... I have no hesitation in attributing these evils to the habitual inattention of the officers of the regiments to their duty, as prescribed by the standing regulations of the service, and the orders of this army.... The commanding officers of regiments must enforce the order of the army regarding the constant inspection and superintendence of the officers over the conduct of the men in their companies, and they must endeavour to inspire the non-commissioned officers with a sense of their situation and authority. By these means the frequent and discreditable resort to the authority of the Provost, and to punishments by courts martial, will be prevented, and the soldiers will not dare to commit the offences and outrages of which there are so many complaints, when they well know that their officers and non-commissioned officers have their eyes on them.