The fundamental error in all this is that, underrating Wellington’s strength, Napoleon judged that the Armies of the South and Centre could keep him in check. They were at this moment under 60,000 of all arms: if the Army of Portugal were out of the way, they were absolutely insufficient for the task set them. As to their menacing Lisbon, Wellington would have liked nothing better than an advance by them into Portugal, where he would have outnumbered them hopelessly. The hypothesis that Wellington was about to send 25,000 men by sea for a landing inside the French Empire, on which Napoleon lays so much stress, seems to have been formed on erroneous information from French spies in London, who had heard the rumour that a raid on Holland or Hanover was likely, or perhaps even one aimed at La Vendée. For the royalist émigrés in England had certainly been talking of such a plan, and pressing it upon Lord Liverpool, as the dispatches of the latter to Wellington show[378]. The Emperor did not know that all such schemes would be scouted by the British Commander in Spain, and that he now possessed influence enough with the Cabinet to stop them.
It would appear that the Emperor’s intelligence from England misled him in other ways: he was duly informed of the departure from Lisbon of the depleted cavalry and infantry units, about which Wellington disputed so much with the Duke of York, and the deduction drawn was that the Peninsular Army was being decreased. The exaggerated impression of the losses in the Burgos retreat, which could be gathered from the Whig newspapers, led to an underrating of the strength that the British Army would have in the spring. Traitors from Cadiz wrote to Madrid that the friction between the Regency and Wellington was so great, that it was doubtful whether the new Generalissimo would have any real control over the Spanish armies. And the sickness in both the British and the Portuguese armies—bad as it was—was exaggerated by spies, so wildly that the Emperor was under the delusion that Wellington could not count on more than 30,000 British or 20,000 Portuguese troops in the coming campaign. It may be worth while to quote at this point the official view at Paris of the British army in Portugal, though the words were written some time later, and only just before the news of Wellington’s sudden advance on the Douro had come to hand:
‘In the position in which the enemy found himself there was no reason to fear that he would take the offensive: his remoteness, his lack of transport, his constant and timid caution in all operations out of the ordinary line, all announced that we had complete liberty to act as suited us best, without worry or inconvenience. I may add that the ill feeling between English and Spaniards, the voyage of Lord Wellington to Cadiz, the changes in his army, of which many regiments have been sent back to England, were all favourable circumstances allowing us to carry out fearlessly every movement that the Emperor’s orders might dictate[379].’
It is only necessary to observe that Wellington was not more remote from the French than they were from him: that he had excellent transport—far better than his enemies ever enjoyed: that timid caution was hardly the policy which stormed Badajoz or won Salamanca: that his rapid and triumphant offensive was just starting when the Minister of War wrote the egregious paragraph which we have just cited. Persistent undervaluing of the resources and energy of Wellington by Head-quarters at Paris—i.e. by the Emperor when present, by the Minister of War in his absence—was at the roots of the impending disaster.
Leaving the King newly established at Valladolid, the Army of the South redistributing itself between Madrid and the Douro, the Army of the Centre turning back from its projected march to Burgos in order to reoccupy the province of Segovia, and the Army of Portugal beginning to draw off from in front of Wellington troops to be sent to the North, we must turn for a moment to explain the crisis in Navarre and Biscay which was engrossing so much of Napoleon’s attention.
SECTION XXXV: CHAPTER V
THE NORTHERN INSURRECTION.
FEBRUARY-MAY 1813
It has been explained in an earlier chapter that ever since General Caffarelli concentrated all the available troops of the Army of the North, in order to join Souham in driving away Wellington from the siege of Burgos, the three Basque provinces, Navarre, and the coast-land of Santander had been out of hand[380]. The outward and visible sign of that fact was the intermittent stoppage of communication between Bayonne and Madrid, which had so much irritated Napoleon on his return from Russia. It was undoubtedly a just cause of anger that important dispatches should be hung up at Tolosa, or Vittoria, or Burgos, because the bands of Mina or Mendizabal or Longa were holding the defile of Salinas—the grave of so many convoy-escorts—or the pass of Pancorbo. It had been calculated in 1811 that it might often require a small column of 250 men to bring an imperial courier safely through either of those perilous narrows. But in the winter of 1812-13 things had grown far worse. ‘The insurgents of Guipuzcoa, Navarre, and Aragon,’ as Clarke wrote to Jourdan with perfect truth[381], ‘have had six months to organize and train themselves: their progress has been prodigious: they have formed many formidable corps, which no longer fear to face our troops when numbers are equal. They have called in the English, and receive every day arms, munitions, and even cannon on the coast. They have actually begun to conduct regular sieges.’ Yet it was three months and more since the King had sent back Caffarelli and the field-force of the Army of the North from Valladolid, to restore order in the regions which had slipped out of hand during the great concentration of the French armies in November.
If it be asked why the North had become so far more unquiet than it had been in previous years, the answer must be that the cause was moral and not material. It was not merely that many small places had been evacuated for a time by the French during the Burgos campaign, nor that the British fleet was throwing in arms and supplies at Castro-Urdiales or Santander. The important thing was that for the first time since 1808 the whole people had got a glimpse of hope: the French had been driven out of Madrid; they had evacuated Biscay; Old Castile and Leon had been in the power of Wellington for several months. It was true that Madrid had been recovered, that Wellington had been forced to retreat. But it was well known that the general result of the campaign of 1812 had been to free all Southern Spain, and that the French had been on the verge of ruin in the early autumn. The prestige of the Imperial armies had received at Salamanca a blow from which it never recovered. Wherefore the insurgents of the North put forth during the winter of 1812-13 an energy such as they had never before displayed, and the French generals gradually discovered that they had no longer to do with mere guerrillero bands, half-armed, half-fed wanderers in the hills, recruited only from the desperate and the reckless, but with a whole people in arms. When Caffarelli returned from Burgos, he found that the Spanish authorities had re-established themselves in every town which had been left ungarrisoned, that taxes and requisitions were being levied in a regular fashion, and that new regiments were being formed and trained in Biscay and Guipuzcoa. The nominal Spanish commander in this region was Mendizabal, theoretically Chief of the ‘Seventh Army’—but he was an officer of little resource and no authority. The real fighting man was Longa, originally a guerrillero chief, but now gazetted a colonel in the regular army. He was a gunsmith from the Rioja, a very resolute and persistent man, who had taken to the hills early, and had outlived most of his rivals and colleagues—a clear instance of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ His useful co-operation with Sir Home Popham in the last autumn has been mentioned above: his band, now reorganized as four infantry battalions, was raised from the mountaineers of the province of Santander and the region of the upper Ebro. His usual beat lay between the sea and Burgos, and he was as frequently to be found on the Cantabrian coast as at the defile of Pancorbo, where the great Bayonne chaussée crosses from the watershed of the Ebro to that of the Douro. His force never much exceeded 3,000 men, but they were tough material—great marchers and (as they proved when serving under Wellington) very staunch fighters on their own ground. West of Longa’s hunting grounds were those of Porlier, in the Eastern Asturias: the star of the ‘Marquesito,’ as he was called, had paled somewhat of late, as the reputation of Longa had increased. He had never had again such a stroke of luck as his celebrated surprise of Santander in 1811[382], and the long French occupation of the Asturias in the days of Bonnet had worn down his band to little over 2,000 men. At this moment he was mainly engaged, under the nominal command of Mendizabal, in keeping Santoña blockaded. To besiege it in form he had neither enough men nor a battering train: but if driven away once and again by Caffarelli, he never allowed himself to be caught, and was back again to stop the roads, the moment that the relieving column had marched off. In Biscay the leading spirit was Jauregui (El Pastor), another old ally of Sir Home Popham, but in addition to his band there was now on foot a new organization of a more regular sort, three Biscayan and three Guipuzcoan battalions, who had received arms from the English cruisers. They held all the interior of the country, had fortified the old citadel of Castro-Urdiales on the coast, with guns lent them from the fleet, and co-operated with Mendizabal and Longa whenever occasion offered. They had held Bilbao for a time in the autumn, but were chased out of it when Caffarelli returned from Burgos. In January they made another attempt upon it, but were repulsed by General Rouget, in command of the garrison.
Between the fields of operation of the Biscayans and Longa and that of the Navarrese insurgents, there was the line of the great Bayonne chaussée, held by a series of French garrisons at Tolosa, Bergara, Mondragon, Vittoria, Miranda del Ebro, and the castle of Pancorbo. This line of fortified places was a sore hindrance to the Spaniards, but on many occasions they crossed it. Mina’s raiding battalions from Navarre were frequently seen in the Basque provinces. And they had made communication between one garrison and another so dangerous that the post-commanders often refused to risk men on escorts between one place and the next, and had long ceased to attempt requisitions on the countryside. They were fed by convoys pushed up the high road, with heavy forces to guard them, at infrequent intervals. In Navarre, as has been already explained, Mina held the whole countryside, and had set up an orderly form of government. He had at the most 8,000 or 9,000 men, but they spread everywhere, sometimes operating in one column, sometimes in many, seldom to be caught when sought after, and capable of turning on any rash pursuing force and overwhelming it, if its strength was seen to be over-small. Mina’s sphere of action extended far into Aragon, as far as Huesca, so that he was as much a plague to Paris, the Governor of Saragossa, as to Thouvenot, Governor of Vittoria, or Abbé, Governor of Pampeluna. His strategical purpose, if we may ascribe such a thing to one who was, after all, but a guerrillero of special talent and energy, was to break the line of communication down the Ebro from Miranda to Saragossa, the route by which the King and the Army of the North kept up their touch with Suchet’s troops in Aragon. It was a tempting objective, since all down the river there were French garrisons at short distances in Haro, Logroño, Viana, Calahorra, Milagro, Tudela, and other places, none of them very large, and each capable of being isolated, and attacked for some days, before the Governor of Navarre could come to its aid with a strong relieving column. And there were other garrisons, such as those at Tafalla and Huesca, covering outlying road-centres, which were far from succour and liable to surprise-attacks at any moment.