As to the infantry, the Duke repeating his general precept that depleted battalions must come home, but not giving definite orders for them by name and number, a curious compromise took place. Wellington sent back to England the two weakest units, which were still in April well under 300 bayonets apiece[349]: he had already drafted a third into the senior battalion of its own regiment, which was also in the Peninsula. Four more of the war-worn battalions had been worked up to about 400 of all ranks, by the return of convalescents and the arrival of small drafts—Wellington ventured to keep them, and to report them as efficient battalions, if small ones[350]. The challenge to Home authority lay with the remaining six[351]: though five of them were well under 400 strong he nevertheless stuck to his original plan and formed three provisional battalions out of them. If the Duke of York wanted them, he must ask for them by name: he did not, and they kept the field till the end of the war, and were repeatedly mentioned by Wellington as among the most efficient units that he owned. Presumably Vittoria put his arrangements beyond criticism—at any rate, the controversy was dropped at the Duke’s end. The net result was that Wellington lost three depleted infantry units and four depleted cavalry units of the old stock—about 2,000 veteran sabres and bayonets. In return he received before or during the campaign of 1813 four new cavalry regiments—all hussars[352]—and six new infantry battalions[353] all much stronger than the units they replaced, and making up about 1,600 sabres and 3,000 bayonets. He would probably have said that his real strength was not appreciably changed by getting 4,500 new hands instead of 2,000 old ones. Certainly, considering the effort that was required from the Peninsula Army in 1813, it is sufficiently surprising that its strength was, on balance, only four infantry units to the good—the cavalry regiments remaining the same in number as in 1812.
There were plenty of small administrative problems to be settled during the winter-rest of 1812-13, which worried Wellington but need not worry the modern student of history, being in themselves trivial. It is well, however, to note that in the spring of 1813 his old complaint about the impossibility of extracting hard cash from the Government, instead of the bank-notes and bills which the Spanish and Portuguese peasantry refused to regard as real money, came practically to an end. By heroic exertions the Chancellor of the Exchequer was scraping together gold enough to send £100,000 a month to Lisbon. A large sum in pagodas had been brought all the way from Madras, and the Mint was busy all the year in melting them down and recoining them as guineas. It was the first time since the ‘Suspension of Cash Payments Act’ of 1797 that any gold of this size had been struck and issued. As the whole output went straight to the Peninsula for the Army, the new coin was generally known as the ‘military guinea.’ Considering that gold was so much sought for in England at the time that a guinea could command 27s. in paper, it was no small feat to procure the Indian gold, and to see that the much wanted commodity went abroad without diminution. Wellington could have done with much more gold—six times as much he once observed—but at least he was no longer in the state of absolute bankruptcy in which he had opened the campaign of the preceding year—nor obliged to depend for a few thousand dollars on profits to be made on Egyptian corn which he sold in Lisbon, or impositions of doubtful legality made upon speculators in Commissariat Bonds. The Portuguese troops had their pay still in arrears—but that was not Wellington’s responsibility. The muleteers of the transport train were suffering from being paid in vales, which they sold to Lisbon sharks, rather than in the cruzados novos or Pillar Dollars which they craved, and sometimes deserted in not unnatural disgust. But, at the worst, it could not be denied that finance looked a good deal more promising than it had in 1812[354].
There had been much reorganization since the end of the Burgos retreat. In uniforms especially the change was greater than in any other year of the war: this was the first campaign in which the British heavy cavalry showed the new brass helmet, discarding the antiquated cocked hat—the light dragoons had gone into shakos, relinquishing the black japanned leather helmet with bearskin crest. Infantry officers for the first time appeared in shakos resembling those of the rank and file—the unwise custom by which they had up till now worn cocked hats, which made them easy marks for the enemy’s snipers, being at last officially condemned. Another much needed improvement was the substitution of small tin camp kettles, to be carried by the men, for the large iron Flanders cooking-pots, four to each company and carried on mules, which had hitherto been employed. They had always been a nuisance; partly because the mules could never be relied upon to keep up with the unit, partly because their capacity was so large that it took much firewood and a long space of time to cook their contents. Nothing is more common in personal diaries of 1808-12 than complaints about rations that had to be eaten half-cooked, or were not eaten at all, because the order to move on arrived before the cauldrons had even begun to get warm.
A more doubtful expedient was that of putting the great-coats of the whole of the infantry into store before the march began. Wellington opined that the weight of coat and blanket combined was more than the soldier could be expected to carry. One or other must be abandoned, and after much consideration it was concluded that the blanket was more essential. ‘Soldiers while in exercise during the day seldom wear their great-coats, which are worn by them only at night, together with the blanket: but as the Commander of the forces has now caused the army to be provided with tents, the necessity for the great-coat for night use is superseded[355].’ And tents, as a matter of fact, were provided for the first time during this campaign. The expedient worked well enough during the summer and autumn, when the weather was usually fine, in spite of some spells of rainy weather in June. But in the Pyrenees, from October onward, the tents proved inadequate protection both from sudden hurricanes and from continuous snowfall. And bad though the plight of men huddled in tents frozen stiff by the north wind might be, it was nothing to that of the sentry on some mountain defile, trying to keep a blanket round his shoulders in December blizzards. Yet the tents, with all their defects, were a decided boon—it would have been impossible indeed to hold the Pyrenean passes at all, if some shelter had not been provided for the battalions of the front line. Villages available for billeting were few and always in the hollows to the rear, not on the crests where the line of defence lay. It would seem that the experiment of dispensing with the great-coats was dropped, and that they were brought round by sea to Pasages or St. Sebastian, for personal diaries mention them as in use again, in at least some regiments, by December. Oddly enough, there appears to be no official record of the revocation of the order given in May.
Another innovation of the period was the introduction of a new unit into the British Army—called (after the idiotic system of nomenclature used at the Horse Guards) the ‘Staff Corps Cavalry.’ They were really military mounted police, picked from the best and steadiest men in the cavalry regiments, and placed under the command of Major Scovell, the cypher-secretary on Wellington’s head-quarters staff, of whose activities much has been said in the last volume. There were two troops of them, soon raised to four, with a total strength of about 300 of all ranks[356]. The object of the creation of the corps was to make more effectual the restraint on marauding, and other crimes with which the Provost-Marshal and his assistants were too few to deal. Wellington had railed with almost exaggerated emphasis on the straggling, disorder, and looting which had distinguished the Burgos retreat, and the Duke of York had licensed the formation of this police-cavalry as the best remedy for the disease. They had plenty to do after Vittoria, when the British Army had the greatest orgy of plunder that ever fell to its lot during the war. Wellington’s own view was that the slackness of discipline in certain regiments, rather than privations or casual opportunity, was the main source of all evil. But he welcomed any machinery that would deal with the symptoms of indiscipline, even if it did not strike at the roots of the disease. Over-leniency by courts martial was another cause of misconduct according to his theory—with this he strove to cope by getting from home a civilian Judge-Advocate-General, whose task was to revise the proceedings of such bodies, and disallow illegal proceedings and decisions. The first and only holder of this office, Francis Larpent, has left an interesting and not always discreet account of his busy life at Head-Quarters, which included a strange episode of captivity in the French lines on the Bidassoa[357].
SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER IV
THE PERPLEXITIES OF KING JOSEPH.
FEBRUARY-MARCH 1813
We have seen, when dealing with the last month of 1812 and the distribution of the French army into winter quarters, that all the arrangements made by King Joseph, Jourdan, and Soult were settled before any knowledge of the meaning of the Moscow Retreat had come to hand. The famous ‘29th Bulletin’ did not reach Madrid till January 6th, 1813; this was a long delay: but the Emperor’s return to Paris on December 16th, though he arrived at the Tuileries only thirty-six hours after the Bulletin had come to hand, was not known to Joseph or Jourdan till February 14th—which was a vastly longer delay. The road had been blocked between Vittoria and Burgos for over five weeks—and couriers and dispatches were accumulating at both these places—one set unable to get south, the other to get north. The Minister of War at Paris received Joseph’s dispatches of the 9th, 20th, and 24th of December all in one delivery on January 29th[358]. The King, still more unlucky, got the Paris dispatches of all the dates between December 18th and January 4th on February 14th to 16th by several couriers who came through almost simultaneously[359]. It was not till Palombini’s Italian division—in a series of fights lasting from January 25 to February 13—had cleared away Longa and Mendizabal from the high-road between Burgos and Vittoria, that quicker communication between those cities became possible.
Long as it had taken in 1812 to get a letter from Paris to Madrid, there had never been such a monstrous gap in correspondence as that which took place in January 1813. Hence came the strange fact that when Napoleon had returned to France, and started on his old system of giving strategical orders for the Army of Spain once more, these orders[360]—one on top of another—accumulated at Vittoria, and came in one overwhelming mass, to upset all the plans which Joseph and Jourdan had been carrying out since the New Year.
The King had received the 29th Bulletin on January 6th: he had gathered from it that matters were going badly with the army in Russia, but had no conception of the absolute ruin that had befallen his brother’s host. Hence he had kept his troops spread in the wide cantonments taken in December, and had sent Daricau’s to the province of Cuenca, to reopen the way to Suchet at Valencia. The great convoy of Spanish and French administrators, courtiers, and refugees, which had been left in Suchet’s care, retraced its way to Madrid under escort of some of Daricau’s troops in the last days of January. Meanwhile Pierre Soult’s cavalry continued to sweep La Mancha, imposing contributions and shooting guerrilleros, and the Army of the Centre cleared the greater part of the country east and north of Madrid of strong parties of the Medico’s and the Empecinado’s men. Caffarelli, as Jourdan complained, ought to have been making more head in the North—but his dispatches were so infrequent that his position could not be fully judged—it was only certain that he could not keep the Burgos-Bayonne road open for couriers.