After the fall of Badajoz Wellington had his choice between the invasion of Andalusia and that of the valley of the Douro. It can hardly be doubted that he was right in choosing the latter, not only on the ground which he himself stated, that Marmont’s was the ‘operating army’[245] and the more dangerous of the two, but because (as Marmont put it) a disaster in the North would compel the French to evacuate the South, while a disaster in the South would have no such effect in the North. The victory of Salamanca liberated Andalusia and Madrid as well as the Douro valley—a similar victory somewhere in front of Seville would have cleared Andalusia, no doubt, but would not have sufficed to deliver the Castiles and Leon. The Northern operation was the most decisive. The well-timed storm of the Almaraz forts secured for that operation a reasonable amount of time, during which it could not be disturbed by the appearance of reinforcements for the Army of Portugal.
The irruption into Leon in June, for which such careful subsidiary operations had been made on all sides—in Andalusia and Catalonia, on the Bay of Biscay and in Navarre—had at first all the results that could have been expected. But it can hardly be denied that a grave mistake was made when no adequate preparations were made for the siege of the Salamanca forts—and this was a mistake that was to be repeated under very similar circumstances before Burgos in September. There was nothing to prevent a proper battering-train from being brought out from Rodrigo or Almeida. Yet a worse slip, most certainly, was made when on June 21st Wellington refused the battle that Marmont most rashly offered. He could have fought with the advantage of numbers, position, and superiority in cavalry, in a measure that he was not to enjoy again during the Salamanca campaign. Why he held back we now know—he thought (and not without good reason) that if he did not attack Marmont, the presumptuous Marshal would attack him. Such a project indeed was in his adversary’s mind, and if it had been carried out the result would undoubtedly have been a second Bussaco. But Marmont hesitated—and was saved for the moment. That he was able to retire with an intact army behind the Douro was a terrible disappointment to Wellington; for, during the deadlock that ensued for nearly three weeks, the French Armies of the North, South, and Centre might have spared reinforcements for the Army of Portugal. Soult’s perversity, Caffarelli’s want of perception of the relative importance of things, and King Joseph’s tardiness prevented these possible reinforcements from getting up in time. But this Wellington could not foresee, and he was under the impression that nothing was more possible than the arrival of Marmont’s expected succours. If the French should play the right game, Wellington thought it probable that he might have had to evacuate Salamanca and his other recent conquests, and to retire to the Agueda and the protection of Ciudad Rodrigo. Fortunately there turned out to be no necessity for this heart-breaking move. Marmont came forward on July 15th, without having received any of the assistance that he had expected from the other armies, and involved himself in the manœuvres that were to end in complete disaster. By his first movement, the ingenious demonstration on the side of Toro, ending by the passage of the whole French army over the Douro at the distant Tordesillas, he distinctly scored a point over his adversary. Wellington was only prepared to fight a defensive battle at this moment; and when the Duke of Ragusa refused, on the Guarena (July 18), to indulge him in such a fashion, and continued to turn his right flank on several successive days, he always gave back, awaiting an opportunity that seemed never about to arrive. The head-quarters staff of the allied army marvelled at their leader’s caution, on the days (July 19-20) when the two armies were executing their parallel marches about Vallesa and Cantalapiedra. At any moment a battle on equal terms could have been brought about, but it was refused. Yet Wellington had recently acquired the knowledge that King Joseph was just starting from Madrid to join Marmont with 15,000 men; and a victory over the Army of Portugal before it should be reinforced was the only way out of the dangerous situation. He would not commit himself to the chance of an offensive battle, and—as his dispatches show—made up his mind to abandon Salamanca and fall back upon the Agueda, unless his adversary should oblige him by making some obvious blunder.
The psychology of the moment—as has been shown above—was that he considered that an indecisive victory, entailing heavy loss in his own ranks, would have availed him little. Unless he could put Marmont completely out of action by a very crushing blow, the Marshal would be joined by the Army of the Centre and other reinforcements, and would still be able to make head against him. At the bottom of his mind, it is clear, lay the consideration that he had in his hands the only field-army that Great Britain possessed, that in risking it he would risk everything—even the loss of Portugal,—and that the total force of the French in the Peninsula was so great that he must not fight save at a marked advantage. His own 50,000 men were the sole hope of the allied cause—Marmont’s Army was but one of several bodies whose existence he had to bear in mind. As long as he kept his army intact, the enemy could do no more than push him back to the Agueda: when they had got him thus far, they would have to disperse again, for they could not feed on the countryside, nor invade Portugal with less than 100,000 men. But if he were to wreck his army by suffering a check, or even by winning a bloody and indecisive success, he could not calculate where his retreat might end, or how great the disaster might be.
Wellington’s caution was rewarded on the 22nd July, when his adversary at last fell into reckless over-confidence, and invited defeat, by stringing out his army along an arc of six miles opposite the strong and concentrated line of the Allies. The punishment was prompt and crushing—the sudden advance of Wellington was a beautiful piece of tactics, ‘a battle in the style of Frederic the Great’ as the sagacious Foy observed, in a fit of enthusiasm wherein the admiration of the skilled soldier prevailed over the national pride of the Frenchman. Marmont’s host was not merely beaten, but scattered and demoralized: it was put out of action for some time, and if Carlos de España had only maintained the castle of Alba de Tormes there would have been nothing left worth mentioning of the Army of Portugal. Even as things actually fell out, the victory was absolutely complete, and placed all the valley of the Douro and Central Spain in Wellington’s hands.
After Salamanca he had it in his power to choose between thrusting Clausel and the battered Army of Portugal behind the Ebro, and marching on Madrid to deal with King Joseph and Soult. His choice of the second alternative has often been criticized, and ascribed to motives which were far from his mind. The real cause of his turn to the South was his belief that Soult must now evacuate Andalusia, and that he would therefore have all his army concentrated, and no longer frittered away in garrisons, as it had been for the last two years. Instead of being able to collect 25,000 men only for the field, the Duke of Dalmatia would have 50,000 available, and when joined by the King and perhaps by Suchet, he would need to be faced by the whole allied army. Wellington therefore intended that Hill should join him; together they could deal with the largest block of French troops still left in the Peninsula. His intention was to force matters to a decision in the South, and he thought it likely that he might find Soult already marching upon Toledo with his whole army. In this expectation he was entirely disappointed; the Marshal—as we have seen—refused for a month to evacuate his viceroyalty, and stayed there so long that Wellington began to think that he would have to go down to Andalusia to evict him. ‘I suspect,’ he wrote at last on August 18, ‘that he will not stir, till I force him out, by a direct movement upon him, and I think of making that movement as soon as I can take the troops to the South without injuring their health.’
This was an unexpected development: ‘any other but a modern French Army would now leave the province (Andalusia), as they have absolutely no communication of any kind with France, or with any other French army, and are pressed on all sides,’ wrote Wellington. Yet Soult lingered, and meanwhile the Army of Portugal, rallied in a shorter time than could have been expected, returned to Valladolid, and assumed the offensive in the valley of the Douro. The trouble in that direction became so acute that Wellington resolved to march against Clausel, with a force sufficient to drive him back to the Ebro, intending afterwards to return to Madrid to pick up the other half of his own army, to join with Hill, and then to deal with Soult, whose tardy resolve to evacuate Andalusia was only just becoming evident.
The march against Clausel was necessary; and it seems a misfortune that Wellington left three of his best divisions at Madrid—which was obviously in no danger for the present, and where Hill was expected to arrive ere long. It turned out that the force put in motion against Valladolid and Burgos was too small—even after it had been joined by Clinton and the Galicians—to secure the complete predominance in the North which was necessary. Clausel retreated, but was pursued in a somewhat cautious fashion, and only as far as Burgos. It would appear that if Wellington had brought 10,000 men more with him from Madrid, and if he had invested Burgos with the Galician Army, and followed hard upon Clausel with all his Anglo-Portuguese, he might have driven the French not only beyond the Ebro, but as much farther as he pleased. For Clausel could not have stood for a moment if Wellington’s power had been a little greater, and Caffarelli was in September so entirely taken up with the operations of Home Popham, Mina, and Mendizabal that he had not a man to spare.
But Wellington advanced no farther than Burgos, and allowed Clausel to lie opposite him at Briviesca unmolested, till he had drawn great reinforcements from France, and had at last induced Caffarelli to come to his aid with 10,000 men. Meanwhile, he was devoting himself to the siege of Burgos, where, by his own fault, he had no sufficient artillery resources to subdue an improvised fortress of the third class. The fault was exactly the same as that which had been committed before the Salamanca Forts in June. And—as has been demonstrated above—Wellington had been pressed to take more heavy guns with him, both by Sir Home Popham and by officers at Madrid. And if he had called for them, even after the siege began, they could have reached him in time. His own curious comments on the facts are not convincing:
‘I see that a disposition exists to blame the Government for the failure of the siege of Burgos. The Government had nothing to say to the siege: it was entirely my own act. In regard to means, there were ample means, both at Madrid and at Santander, for the siege of the strongest fortress. That which was wanting at both places was the means of transporting ordnance and military stores.... I could not find means for moving even one gun from Madrid. Popham is a gentleman who picques himself on overcoming all difficulties. He knows the time it took to find transport even for about 100 barrels of powder and a few hundred thousand rounds of musket ammunition that he sent me. As for the two guns that he endeavoured to send me, I was obliged to send my own cattle to draw them, and felt great inconvenience from the want of those cattle in subsequent movements of the Army[246].’
The answer that must be made to these allegations is that when matters came to a crisis at Madrid, on Soult’s approach, enough transport was found there to send off to Ciudad Rodrigo great part of the Retiro stores—though much of the material there had to be blown up. If there were not draught animals for even half a dozen guns to be got at Madrid, why did Wellington write on August 31st that ‘if the enemy shall advance, all arrangements must be made for the evacuation of Madrid, such as sending away sick, stores, &c., and eventually for the destruction of what cannot be carried off[247].’ Considerable convoys marched with Hill when the Spanish capital was evacuated, and it is impossible to believe that the 322 draught mules which, by Dickson’s estimate, were the proper allowance for a 24-pound battery of six guns with 180 rounds per gun, could not have been procured at Madrid in September. A requisition on the batteries and transport train of the four divisions left round Madrid could have been made to supplement local resources. But Wellington had made up his mind to risk the Burgos campaign with no more than Dickson’s trifling ‘artillery reserve’—of which the only efficient part was precisely three iron 18-pounders. As to the allusions to Home Popham, they must—with all regret—be described as ungrateful. And they conceal the fact that the two heavy ship-guns which Popham had sent forward were only brought from Reynosa by Wellington’s own draught beasts. Popham got them across the mountains from Santander by his own exertions, and would have sent them some weeks earlier but for Wellington’s refusal to ask for them. And it was the ammunition sent by Popham which alone enabled the siege to go on for as long as it did.