‘In regard to the food of the soldier, I have frequently observed and lamented in the late campaign the facility and celerity with which the French cooked in comparison with our army. The cause of this disadvantage is the same with that of every other—want of attention of the officers to the orders of the army and the conduct of their men.... Generals and field officers must get the captains and subalterns of their regiments to understand and perform the duties required of them, as the only mode by which the discipline and efficiency of the army can be restored and maintained during the next campaign.’
There was undoubtedly much to justify the strong language which Wellington used as to the grievous relaxation of discipline in some of the regiments. Unfortunately he made no exceptions to his general statement, and wrote as if the whole army had been guilty of straggling, drunkenness, and marauding in the same degree. There was not the slightest hint that there were many corps which had gone through the retreat with small loss of men and none of credit. But Wellington had seen with his own eyes the disgraceful scenes at Torquemada, had been roused from his uneasy slumbers by the sound of the pig-shooting on the night of November 17, and he had witnessed the devastation of San Muñoz and other villages by men who were tearing whole houses to pieces to get firewood. He had ordered the Provost-Marshal to hang on the spot two soldiers caught red-handed in plunder, and sent three officers whose men had pulled down cottages, when collecting fuel, to be court-martialled[217]. The figures of the ‘missing’ in some regiments had rightly provoked his indignation. But he might at the same time have noticed that there were not only battalions but whole brigades where their number was insignificant. In one division of 5,000 men there were but 170—in the five British battalions of the Light Division no more than 96. In both these cases the deficiency represented only weakly men who had fallen by the way from fatigue and disease, and cannot afford any margin for stragglers and marauders.
The general feeling in the army was that nearly all the loss and mischief had happened in the inclement days of November 15-18, previous disorders having been comparatively insignificant; and as regards those days they questioned the justice of Wellington’s indictment of the troops. To say that ‘the army had suffered no privations which but trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented’ was simply not true. What ‘trifling attention’ on the part of the regimental officers could have made up for the fact that some divisions had received absolutely no distribution of food of any sort for four continuous days, and others in the same four days nothing but two rations of beef, and no biscuit or other food at all?[218] It was useless to tell them that they had suffered no privations, or that they could by care have avoided them. As an intelligent general officer wrote on November 20: ‘During the whole of this retreat from the 15th inclusive, not only has the weather been dreadfully severe, but the commissariat arrangements having failed, the troops have been mostly without any issue of rations, and have suffered the extremity of privation, having lived upon acorns and hogs killed occasionally in the woods. The natural result of this has been great disorder and confusion, and the roads in the rear of the columns of march are covered with exhausted stragglers left to the enemy. In fact, by some inconceivable blunder, which the Quartermaster-General’s department attribute to that of the Commissary-General, and which the latter throw back on the former, the supplies of the army, which were adequate for much larger numbers, on the morning that we broke up from the Arapiles were sent down the Tormes, by Ledesma toward Almeida, while the army marched on Ciudad Rodrigo—hinc illae lachrymae[219].’
There is no doubt that sheer lack of food during inclement weather, and in a desolate and thinly peopled forest-country did most of the mischief. As an indignant subaltern writes: ‘The officers asked each other, and asked themselves, how or in what manner they were to blame for the privations of the retreat. The answer uniformly was—in no way whatever. Their business was to keep the men together, and if possible to keep up with their men themselves—and this was the most difficult duty—many of these officers were young lads badly clothed, with scarcely a shoe or a boot left—some attacked with dysentery, others with ague, more with a burning fever raging through their system; they had scarce strength to hobble along in company with their more hardy comrades, the rank and file[220].’
Wellington’s memorandum stated that the marches were short in miles, and this was generally true, though on October 23 the infantry had to do 29 miles. But mileage is not the only thing to be considered in calculating the day’s work—the time spent on the miry roads, where every step was ankle deep in slime that tore the shoes from the feet, was inordinate: several of the marches were from 4 o’clock, before dawn, to the same hour in the afternoon. This on an empty stomach and with the regulation 60 lb. of weight on the soldier’s back was no mean task. And sometimes the journey ended, as for the Light and 7th Divisions on November 17th, in the troops being deployed in battle order in the drifting rain, and kept for some hours more under arms, to resist a possible advance of the French. The strain was too much for many willing men whose constitution was not over robust. It was not only shirkers who fell out and collapsed.
As to the matter of the cooking, one capable subaltern remarked in his diary, ‘if we were allowed to tear down doors, &c., in every village, as the enemy do, without having to go miles for wood, we could cook in as short a time as they[221].’ And another remarks with justice that when the companies had to prepare their food in the vast Flanders cauldrons, carried on mules which dragged at the tail of the regimental baggage train, they could never be sure of getting them up to their bivouacs in good time. There was an immense improvement in 1813, when light tin camp-kettles carried alternately by the men of each squad, were introduced. These were always at hand, and could be got to boil ‘without needing a whole tree or half a church door to warm them.’ Wellington might have spared this criticism on his soldiers’ cooking when he had already, as his dispatches show, asked for the small kettles to be made, precisely because the cauldrons were too heavy, and seldom got up in good time[222]. He did well to lament the slow cooking, but knowing its cause, and having been in command of the army since April 1809, might he not have indented for portable kettles before May 1812?
The real truth with regard to much of the objurgatory language of the ‘Memorandum’ is that, loth though one may be to confess it, the staff officer—commander-in-chief or whatever his rank—who has slept under cover and had adequate food during such awful days as those of November 15 to November 19, 1812, may easily underrate the privations of the man in the ranks, who has faced the weather unsheltered and with no rations at all. This observation does not in the least affect the points on which Wellington did well to be angry—the disgraceful scenes of drunkenness at Torquemada and Valdemoro, the plundering of villages at more points than one, and the excessive straggling from some ill-commanded battalions. And, as we have had occasion to point out before, there was a residuum of bad soldiers in well-nigh every regiment—Colborne estimates it at 50 or 100 men on the average—and exceptional circumstances like the storm of Badajoz or the hardships of the Salamanca retreat brought this ruffianly element to the surface, and led to deplorable incidents. Presumably many corps got rid of the majority of their mauvais sujets by straggling and desertion on those wretched November days upon the Valmusa, the Huebra, and the Yeltes.
Here we may leave the main armies at the end of the campaign. It remains only to speak of Suchet and his opponents on the coast of the Mediterranean. After the departure of Soult and King Joseph from Valencia in the middle of October, it might have been supposed that the Duke of Albufera, now left to his own resources, would have been in some danger. For not only had he in front of him the Anglo-Sicilian troops who had landed under Maitland at Alicante, and his old adversaries of Joseph O’Donnell’s Army, but—since there were now no French left in Andalusia—all the Spanish detachments which had formerly watched the eastern flank of that kingdom were available against him. After Soult had occupied Madrid, Elio, Freire, and Bassecourt all came down to Albacete and Chinchilla, to link themselves with the Alicante troops. Leaving out the Empecinado and Duran, who did not move southward from their mountains on the borders of Aragon and Castile, there were still 25,000 Spanish troops of the ‘second’ and ‘third’ armies—the old Valencian and Murcian corps, disposable for use against Suchet in November[223]. And what was still more ominous for the French on the East Coast, a second reinforcement was getting together at Palermo to strengthen the Anglo-Sicilian corps at Alicante. General Campbell with about 4,000 men sailed on November 14th; this force consisted of two British battalions[224], a foreign battalion of light companies, 1,500 Italians, and some miscellaneous details. Though the Italians (as their conduct proved next spring[225]) were eminently untrustworthy material, the rest were an appreciable addition to the strength of the expeditionary force, which was now swelled to an army corps rather than a large division. They only came to hand on December 2, however, and the best opportunity for attacking Suchet had passed before their landing, since obviously he was most vulnerable when all the rest of the French armies had passed on to Salamanca, after November 6th, and before King Joseph had come back to Madrid and Soult to Toledo in the early days of December. The four weeks between those dates, however, were wasted by the British and Spanish generals on the East Coast.
Suchet had recognized his danger, and had taken up a defensive position in front of the Xucar, with Harispe’s division at Almanza, Fuente la Higuera, and Moxente, Habert’s at Albayda across the high-road from Valencia to Alicante, and Musnier’s in reserve, at Alcira and Xativa. Here he waited on events, having lost touch completely with Soult and the King, from whom he received no dispatch for eighty days after their departure from Albacete and Cuenca in October. It was only by way of Saragossa that he learnt, some weeks later, that they had recaptured Madrid and then marched for the Tormes[226]. He had only 15,000 men in line beyond the Xucar, and knew that in front of him there were 7,000 Anglo-Sicilians, 8,000 of Roche and Whittingham’s men, and more than that number of the Murcians, all grouped round Alicante, while Elio, Freire, and Bassecourt, with 8,000 or 9,000 men, were coming in from the direction of Madrid, and Villacampa with 3,000 more might appear from Southern Aragon. This was a formidable combination, though the Spanish troops were badly organized, and had a long record of defeat behind them. The disaster of Castalla had shown a few months before the incapacity of the leaders and the unsteadiness of the men of the Murcian army. Yet the number of troops available was large, and the 5,000 English and German Legionary infantry of the Alicante Army provided a nucleus of trustworthy material, such as in firm hands might have accomplished much.
Unity and continuity of command, however, was completely wanting. On September 25th Maitland had fallen sick, and the charge of the troops at Alicante passed to his second-in-command, General Mackenzie. This officer showed signs of wishing to adopt a timid offensive attitude against Suchet. He pushed his own and Whittingham’s divisions out as far as Alcoy, opposite Habert’s position at Albayda, and contrived some petty naval demonstration against the Valencian coast. Of these the most important was an expedition which tried on October 5th to capture the town of Denia, the southernmost place in the possession of the French. It was composed of a wing of the 1/81st, and a company each of De Roll’s regiment and of marines—about 600 men—under General Donkin. These troops, carried on the Fame and Cephalus, landed near Denia, and drove the small French garrison into the castle. This was found to be a more formidable work than had been expected, and to require battering by heavy guns. Some cannons were, with difficulty, landed from the ships, and a siege would have been commenced but for the news that Habert was sending up a relieving force. Whereupon the little expedition re-embarked, men and guns being reshipped with much difficulty under the fire of the French on a rocky beach[227]. The loss was trifling, but the whole plan was obviously feeble and useless. To have turned Suchet’s sea-ward flank with 5,000 men, while threatening his front with the rest of the British and Spanish troops available might have been a conceivable operation. But what could 600 men, entirely isolated, hope to accomplish?