The calculations—miscalculations rather—which kept the main Army in front of Burgos to such a late day in the season as October 20th, have been dealt with in a previous chapter. The united force of Souham and Caffarelli was undervalued; it was not till Wellington saw their two armies deployed that he recognized that they had 20,000 men more in hand than he had supposed. And on the other front he relied too much on the strength of the line of the Tagus for defence. We must concede that if the weather had been the same in New Castile as it was in Wellington’s own region, if the Tagus had been in flood like the Arlanzon and the Pisuerga, and the desperate rains that prevailed at Burgos had prevailed also at Toledo and Aranjuez, his plan would probably have been successful. But who dares make the weather a fixed point in military calculations? The season disappointed him, and Soult was lucky enough to find bright days and hard roads and streams half dry as he advanced on Madrid[248], though Wellington was almost embogged and moved among perpetual fogs in the North.
Still, the cardinal fact at the bottom of the unfortunate Burgos campaign was that the Anglo-Portuguese Army was not strong enough for the task in hand, when Soult’s whole force, and great part of the Army of the North also, came into the field to aid the armies of Portugal and the Centre. The permanent evacuation of Andalusia and the temporary evacuation of Biscay put into movement 60,000 men who had hitherto been for the most part locked up in the occupation of those regions. When they became an ‘operating army’ Wellington was hopelessly outnumbered. He himself thought that he might yet have pulled through the crisis, without being compelled to evacuate Madrid and the two Castiles, if only Ballasteros had obeyed orders, and distracted Soult by an irruption into La Mancha against the flank of the advancing enemy. Undoubtedly that General was most perverse and disloyal; but it seems quite possible that if he had advanced, as ordered, he would only have let himself in for one of those crushing defeats which commanders of his type so often suffered during the war. The fact was that the French armies, when once concentrated, were too numerous to be held in check. Wellington’s only real chance of success would have been to concentrate every man either against Souham and Caffarelli on the one side, or against Soult and the King on the other. This was made difficult by the initial division of his army into two nearly equal halves—which resulted in his own force being too weak to deal with the French Northern Army, and Hill’s similarly too weak to deal with the Southern Army. He had intended, when he left Madrid on August 31st, to return thither with the bulk of his marching force, after disposing of the northern enemy, and (as we have seen) this idea was still in his head even as late as early October. But he failed to carry out his intention, partly because he had allowed himself to get entangled in the siege of Burgos, partly because the French army in front of him proved much stronger than he had originally calculated.
The only occasion on which it was actually in his power for a few days to combine Hill’s force and his own for a blow at one of the two hostile armies, while the other was still far off, was on the 3rd-5th of November. He saw the chance, but deliberately refused to take it, for reasons which we have seen set forth[249], and which were perfectly convincing. If he had concentrated against either of the French armies, it might have refused to fight and drawn back, while the other was in a position to cut off his line of communication with Salamanca and Portugal.
He resolved, and at this moment the resolve was wise, not to attempt any such blow, but to fall back on the well-known and formidable positions round Salamanca. Here he thought that he could defend the line of the Tormes, even against a combined force that outnumbered him by 25,000 men. Probably he would have succeeded if the enemy had delivered a frontal attack, as Jourdan and the majority of the French generals desired. But Soult’s safe but indecisive policy of refusing to make such an attack, and turning the Allied flank by the fords of the upper Tormes, was adopted. The only counter to this move would have been to assail the French while they were in the midst of their manœuvre, even as Marmont had been assailed at the battle of the Arapiles. But the disparity of numbers was on this occasion too great for such a stroke to be prudent, and Wellington was forced, most unwillingly, to retreat to the frontier of Portugal.
But for two mishaps—the coming on of absolutely abominable weather and the misdirection of the food-supplies by Colonel Gordon—this retreat would have been uneventful, and would have been attended with little or no loss. For the French pursuit was timid and ineffective, and only carried out by a fraction of the enemy’s army—nearly half of it halted at Salamanca, and the remaining part was not strong enough to attack Wellington. As it chanced, Gordon’s errors and the plague of immoderate rains not only cost Wellington several thousand men, but produced an impression of disaster both on the minds of those who took part in the miserable march and on those of the captious critics in London. What should have been ‘a good clean retreat’ became a rather disastrous affair. But this was not due to the enemy, and the French observers got small comfort from it—as we have already shown by quoting Foy’s perspicuous and angry comments on the operations around Salamanca[250]. Wellington got off with ‘an army in being,’ and if it was tired out, so was that of his opponents. A hundred thousand men had been scraped together from every corner of the Peninsula to overwhelm him, but had failed to do so. Meanwhile he had cleared all Spain south of the Tagus valley from the enemy, had broken their prestige, and had shaken to pieces the pretension of King Joseph to be taken seriously as the monarch of the greatest vassal-kingdom of his brother’s empire.
SECTION XXXV
CHAPTER I
WINTER QUARTERS.
DECEMBER 1812-JANUARY 1813
When the Anglo-Portuguese Army halted at Ciudad Rodrigo, and came back once more to regular rations and marches that were no longer forced, it was of course in very bad condition. The cold and wet of the last ten days’ retreat from Salamanca had caused many a man to drop dead by the way, and had sent thousands of sick to the hospitals, riddled with dysentery and rheumatism. And the hospitals and dépôts were even before this last influx loaded up with convalescents not fit for service, from the casualties of Salamanca and Burgos. The December morning states were enough to fill Wellington with dismay; of his 64[251] British battalions there were only 30,397 men present with the colours—an average of much less than 500 bayonets to the battalion. There were no less than 18,000 men in hospital—more than a third of the total strength of the infantry arm. Thirteen regiments had more men ‘sick’ than ‘effective’; twelve were down to under 300 strong[252]. The cavalry had not lost so many in proportion—they had 5,700 present under arms to 1,436 sick, but could not mount more than 5,000, owing to the loss of horses during the retreat, and the surviving horses were for the most part in bad condition.
The first thing necessary was to get the troops under cover and well fed: a very long rest was obviously necessary to allow the way-worn and exhausted men time to recover their strength, and the convalescents to rejoin from the hospitals. With the winter drafts known to be ready and starting from England, to the number of some 5,000[253], beside one or two more complete battalions promised for the Peninsula, there might be an army in April 1813 no less strong than that which had opened the campaign of 1812. But clearly the only movement to be thought of at present was that of getting the divisions into comfortable winter quarters. Accordingly the army broke up a few days after reaching Ciudad Rodrigo, and spread itself out in dispositions not unlike those of the December previous, save that nothing was left so far to the South as had been the custom in other years. For Soult was no longer in Andalusia, and the right wing of the Allied army had no reason to descend as far as the Guadiana.