It must have been long after this fruitless demonstration that Mackenzie received a formal order from Wellington dated from before Burgos on October 13th[228], bidding him attack Valencia, either by land or by sea, if Soult and King Joseph should have marched their armies against Madrid. He was instructed not to accept a general action with Suchet, unless he was very superior in numbers, and to beware of fighting in ground favourable to cavalry. His own mounted force consisted only of 230 sabres[229], and 500 belonging to Whittingham and to the Murcian army were of doubtful efficiency. But it was thought that Suchet was very weak, and a little while later Wellington received false information that the Marshal had lent a considerable part of his army to King Joseph for the march on Madrid[230]. He therefore hoped that a bold advance against Valencia might shake the hold of the French on the Mediterranean coast.
The letter directed to Mackenzie was received not by him but by General William Clinton (the brother of H. Clinton of the 6th Division), who had arrived at Alicante and taken command—superseding Mackenzie—on October 25th. Lord William Bentinck had sent him out from Palermo on hearing of Maitland’s illness. The change of generals had no good results—Clinton fell at once into a fierce quarrel with Cruz the Spanish governor of Alicante. He opined that he ought not to start to attack Suchet without receiving over control of the Alicante forts, and placing them in the charge of a British garrison. The Governor refused to give up the keys, and much friction ensued, causing an angry interchange of letters which wasted many days. Wellington, when he heard of it, declared that Clinton seemed to have been wholly unreasonable in his demand[231]. Meanwhile Clinton drew in Mackenzie’s troops from the front, instead of making an advance toward Valencia. Suchet, hearing that there were no red-coated battalions left opposite Habert, resolved to try the effect of a reconnaissance in force, and moved forward against Roche and Whittingham, who still lay at Alcoy. The English and Spanish divisions at once drew back to Xixona, twenty miles nearer to Alicante. Impressed by this activity on the part of the enemy, Clinton wrote to Wellington that Suchet was too strong to be meddled with, and that he dared attempt no offensive move toward Valencia[232]. Yet counting Roche, Whittingham, and the Murcian troops at Alicante, he must have outnumbered the French by nearly two to one. And on November 22 the Governor of Alicante actually surrendered the keys of the citadel—the point on which Clinton had insisted as the necessary preliminary for active operations.
Nothing had yet been done on the East Coast when on December 2 General Campbell landed at Alicante with the 4,000 Sicilian troops already mentioned a few pages back. He was senior to Clinton, and relieved him of the command. Thus in the 70 days since September 23rd there had been four general officers in successive charge of the force which was intended to keep Suchet in check. It would have been difficult to contrive a more inconvenient arrangement—both Clinton and Campbell were new to the army and the district, and each took many days to make out his situation, and arrive at a conclusion as to what could and what could not be done. Campbell, immediately on his arrival, was solicited by Elio to attack Suchet, in combination with his own army, which should strike in from Albacete on the Marshal’s flank. He offered to bring up 10,000 men of his own (Freire, Bassecourt, and Villacampa) and said—apparently without authorization—that Del Parque would assist, at the head of the Army of Andalusia. But Campbell refused to stir, and possibly was right, when such cases as Barrosa and Talavera are taken into consideration. Yet Wellington, his commander-in-chief, had ordered the offensive to be taken in no hesitating terms, and the force available was undoubtedly too large to be wasted. As Wellington himself remarked, most British generals of that day, though bold enough in action, and capable of acting as efficient lieutenants, seemed stricken with a mental paralysis when placed in an independent position, where the responsibility of taking the initiative was thrown upon them. It was only exceptional men like Craufurd and Graham who welcomed it. The general effect of the Anglo-Sicilian expedition was disappointing in the extreme. Suchet had thought, and with reason, that it would be ruinous to him, both in July and again in November. It turned out to be a negligible quantity in the game, except so far as it prevented the French Army of Valencia from moving any of its 15,000 men to co-operate with Soult or King Joseph. Wellington had hoped for much greater profit from the diversion.
After all, a much larger body of French troops than Suchet’s field force in front of Valencia was being at this time kept completely employed, by enemies who owned a far less numerous following than Campbell or Elio. The little Army of Catalonia, not 8,000 strong, was finding employment all through the autumn and winter for Decaen’s 20,000 men; and Duran and Villacampa in Aragon—aided occasionally by Mina from the side of Navarre, and Sarsfield from the side of Catalonia—were keeping the strong force under Reille, Severoli, and Caffarelli in constant movement, and occasionally inflicting severe loss on its flying columns. Their co-operation in the general cause was useful and effective—that of the Alicante Army was not. To sum up all the operations on the eastern side of Spain we may say that there had been practically no change in the situation of the adversaries since February. The amount of territory occupied by the French was unchanged—they had made no progress in the pacification of Aragon or Catalonia; but on the other hand Suchet’s hold on Valencia still remained entirely unshaken.
SECTION XXXIV: CHAPTER VII
CRITICAL SUMMARY OF THE CAMPAIGNS OF 1812
Though Wellington’s divisions took up in December 1812 almost the same cantonments that they had occupied in December 1811, ere they marched out at midwinter to the leaguer of Ciudad Rodrigo, the aspect of affairs in the Peninsula had been completely transformed during the intervening twelve months. It was not merely that Andalusia, Estremadura, and Asturias had been freed from the presence of the French armies, who were never to return. Nor was it merely that—to use Wellington’s own words[233]—‘we have sent to England little less than 20,000 prisoners,[234] have taken and destroyed, or have now ourselves the use of, the enemy’s arsenals in Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, Valladolid, Madrid, Astorga, Seville, and the lines before Cadiz, and upon the whole have taken or destroyed, or now possess, little short of 3,000 pieces of their cannon[235].’ Nor was it the all-important thing that the Armies of Portugal, the Centre, and the South, Wellington’s immediate enemies, were in November weaker by 30,000 men than they had been in March, and this though they had received 10,000 men in drafts since the summer ended. The fact that really counted was that the whole French system in Spain had been shaken to its foundations. It was useless to pretend any longer that King Joseph was a legitimate sovereign, and the Cadiz government a mere knot of rebels driven into their last and remotest place of refuge. The dream of complete conquest, which had lingered on down to the moment of Suchet’s capture of Valencia, was gone for ever. The prestige of the French arms was shattered: the confidence of the officers in the marshals, that of the men in their officers, had disappeared. As Foy, the most intelligent of the French observers, sums up the matter, what hope was there for the future when the whole available field force of the French armies of Spain, superior in number by a third to Wellington’s army, had been collected on a single field, and had allowed the enemy to march away practically unmolested? ‘Wellington goes off unbeaten, with the glory of his laurels of the Arapiles untarnished, after having restored to the Spaniards all the lands south of the Tagus, after having forced us to destroy our own magazines and fortifications, and deprived us of all the resources that resulted from our former conquests and ought to have secured their retention[236].’ There was a profound dissatisfaction throughout the French Army; and as the winter drew on, and the ill news from Russia began slowly to drift in, it became evident that the old remedy for all ills so often suggested in 1810-11—the personal appearance of the Emperor in Spain with large reinforcements—was never likely to come to pass. Indeed, troops would probably be withdrawn from Spain rather than sent thither, and the extra subsidies in money, for which King Joseph was always clamouring, were never likely to be forthcoming from the Imperial Exchequer.
As to the past campaign, belated recriminations continued to fly about: Clarke—the Minister of War at Paris—was the central point round which they revolved, since it was through him that the reports went to the Emperor from Spain, and to him that the rare answers came back from some Russian bivouac, when the master had a moment’s leisure from his own troubles. Generally he wrote in a very discouraging strain: ‘vous sentez qu’éloigné comme je suis, je ne puis rien faire pour les armées d’Espagne[237].’ His occasional comments were scathing—Marmont’s reports were all lies, he was to be interrogated in a formal series of questions, as to why he had dared to fight at Salamanca. The quarrels of Joseph and Soult were unworthy of serious attention: ‘il ne pouvait pas s’occuper de semblables pauvretés dans un moment où il était à la tête de 500,000 hommes, et faisait des choses immenses.’ Considering the way in which Soult had wrecked all the plans of the King and Joseph in June-July, by deliberate disobedience to a long series of orders sent by his hierarchic superior, it was poor comfort to Joseph to be told that he must continue to put up with him. ‘Le Maréchal Soult est la seule tête militaire qu’il y eût en Espagne: on ne pouvait l’en retirer sans compromettre l’armée[238].’ ‘Why had the King ever returned to Spain in 1811?’ said the Emperor—though a reference to the correspondence between them in that year tends to show that Joseph had offered to abdicate, or take any other step prescribed to him, and that it was his brother who preferred to keep him at Madrid as a figure-head. Napoleon, it is clear, was vexed at being worried by the affairs of the Peninsula at a moment when he required all his time for the contemplation of his own problems, and discharged his wrath, deserved or undeserved, in all directions. It may be doubted whether he ever thought of himself as perhaps the greatest offender of all; but it was—as we have already shown at great length[239]—precisely his own elaborate orders which led first to the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo and then to that of Badajoz. But for these initial strokes Wellington’s task in the later spring would have been far more difficult. And it is certainly the fact that if Marmont had been allowed to follow his own inspiration in February and March, Badajoz at least might have been saved. As to what followed in June and July, Soult must take the main share of the blame. Wellington’s game would have been far harder if the Army of the South had obeyed the King’s orders, and come up to the Tagus in June. Soult would have had to evacuate Andalusia, it is true; but he none the less had to abandon it in the end, and it would have made all the difference in the world to the fate of the campaign if he had come northward while Marmont’s Army was still intact, and not after it had received the crushing blow of July 22nd at Salamanca. No rational student of the events of that summer can fail to recognize that Jourdan and the King had found the right conclusion, and issued the right orders, and that Soult’s determination to hang on to Andalusia till the last moment showed as much mental perversity as military insubordination. His counter-plan for inducing the King to come to Seville, abandoning Madrid before Marmont had even tried the fortune of battle, was simply the wild project of a viceroy loth to abandon his realm, and convinced that every one else ought to give way for his own personal profit[240]. To surrender Central and Northern Spain to Wellington, and to allow all communications between Andalusia and France to be cut would have been insane. The King would only have brought 15,000 men with him: Soult could not have added a greater field force than 25,000 men more—as was repeatedly shown when he tried to concentrate in Estremadura. Their joint 40,000 would have neither been enough to face Wellington nor to threaten Portugal. Meanwhile Spain from the Ebro to the Sierra Morena would have passed into the hands of the Allies. It is unnecessary to dilate further on the topic.
A more interesting problem, and one into which Napier went at great length, is the criticism of the campaigns of 1812 from the other point of view, that of Wellington. It is clear that there is nothing but praise to be bestowed on the masterly strategical combination of January and March, which brought about the captures of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. Each fell before a blow delivered at the precise moment when it must be most effective. The position of the enemy had been carefully calculated, and every adverse possibility taken into consideration. It is obvious that Rodrigo was doomed without fail from the first, because Wellington had realized and demonstrated to himself the inability of the French to hinder his enterprise, after the Imperial orders had sent Montbrun off to the borders of Valencia. And Badajoz was destined to fall also, unless Marmont should help Soult at the earliest possible moment and with the greatest possible force. There was in this case an adverse chance, though not a very great one: that it never came near to occurring was due to the Emperor’s removal of Marmont’s southern divisions from the Tagus valley. But even if this fortunate intervention of Napoleon had not simplified the task of the Allied Army, it was still improbable that Marmont would appear in time; and the improbability had been ascertained by careful study of the state of the magazines and the distribution of the cantonments of the Army of Portugal. Soult without Marmont could accomplish nothing, and on this fact Wellington based his plan. If the Duke of Dalmatia had brought up 10,000 men more than he actually did, his advance would still have been insufficient to save Badajoz.
As to the details of the siege of that fortress, we have seen that things by no means went as Wellington desired. He himself threw the blame on the want of trained sappers, and the inexpertness of his engineer officers[241]. The engineers’ reply was that they were directed to work ‘against time’, and not given sufficient days or means to carry out their operations according to the regular methods of their craft. ‘The project of attack adopted would not stand the test of criticism as a scientific operation, but possessed merit as a bold experiment to reduce in an unusually short time a considerable fortress, well armed and well countermined, by the agency of unskilled sappers, no miners, and insufficient ordnance[242].’ Probably the verdict of the historian must be that the time-problem was the dominating fact, and that had there been no relieving armies in the field other methods would have been pursued[243]. It is at least certain that the rapidity with which the place was taken disconcerted Soult[244], and upset all the plans of the French in Spain.