The strength of the Alicante army had risen by January 1813 to something like 14,000 men, but it remained (as it had been from the first) a most heterogeneous force, consisting in the early spring of 1813 of six British[399], three German[400], and two foreign battalions belonging to the regular forces of the Crown[401], with four Italian units[402] of various sorts. The cavalry consisted of one British and one Sicilian regiment and an odd squadron of ‘Foreign Hussars.’ The artillery was partly British, partly Sicilian, and partly Portuguese. In addition to these troops the commander at Alicante had complete control over General Whittingham’s ‘Majorcan division,’ a Spanish corps which had been reorganized in the Balearic Islands by that officer, and which had been clothed, armed, and paid from the British subsidy. It consisted of six infantry battalions and two weak cavalry regiments, and was in the spring about 4,500 strong. They were rightly esteemed the best Spanish troops on the Eastern front, and justified their reputation in the subsequent campaign. There was a second Spanish division in the neighbourhood, that of General Roche, which, like Whittingham’s, had been taken on to the British subsidy, and re-clothed and re-armed. But this unit was not reckoned part of the Alicante force, but belonged theoretically to Elio’s Murcian army, in which it was numbered as the 4th Division. It counted only five battalions and was at this time not more than 3,500 strong. But though it was registered as part of the Army of Murcia, it often acted with Murray’s Anglo-Sicilian troops, being cantoned alongside of them in the Alicante region. When Wellington became Generalissimo of the Spanish armies, he not infrequently gave orders to Roche to join Murray rather than Elio—apparently conceiving that the fact that the division lived on the British subsidy had placed it on a somewhat different footing from the rest of the Murcians.
If we count Whittingham and Roche as attached to the Expeditionary Army at Alicante, the strength of that heterogeneous host would have been rather over 21,000 men—a total perceptibly greater than Suchet’s field-force encamped over against it on the Xucar. And in addition there lay close behind, within the borders of the kingdom of Murcia, Elio and his ‘Second Army,’ which, even after deducting Roche’s division, was a considerable accumulation of troops. But the Murcian army’s record was more unhappy than that of any other Spanish unit, and it had been dashed to pieces once more in the preceding July, at the discreditable battle of Castalla. Though it nominally counted 30,000 men in its six divisions, only three of them were available[403], for two were really no more than the old guerrillero bands of the Empecinado and Duran, who hung about in Southern Aragon, and shifted for themselves. They were both remote and disorganized. Since Roche’s division was also often out of Elio’s control, he really had no more than 13,000 infantry and 2,000 horse in hand.
There were facing Suchet, of allied troops of one sort and another, some 35,000 men, a fact which the Marshal never ceased to utilize in his correspondence with Madrid, when he wished to excuse himself from lending aid to his neighbours. But the Murcian army had still not recovered from the demoralization caused by the battle of Castalla, and the Alicante army was suffering from two evils which reduced its value as a campaigning force to a very low level. The first was a terrible deficiency of transport. When Lord William Bentinck sent out the first expeditionary force from Sicily, he intended it to equip itself with mules, horses, and carts in Spain. But in the summer of 1812 the Kingdom of Murcia was the only unoccupied region on the east side of the Peninsula, and all its not too copious resources were wanted for its own army. Successive captains-general refused, not unnaturally, to help Maitland or Murray in the task of collecting sumpter-beasts, and suggested that they ought to draw both animals and food from Sicily. Food was indeed procured from thence, and even from Algeria and the Levant, so that the army did not starve. But there was insufficient means to move that food from the water’s edge. A certain number of mules were collected by paying very heavy hire—not at all to the gratification of the Spanish authorities, who wanted them for their own use. But they were so few that the Army could make no long general marches, and could count on little more than what the men carried in their haversacks. The best that could be done was to move it forward from the immediate neighbourhood of Alicante, so that it could live upon the resources of the inland, where there were many fertile and well-peopled valleys. The main object, indeed, of James Campbell’s forward move was to get food for Whittingham’s and Roche’s divisions, which were (though paid by the British subsidy) dependent for their rations on the Spanish Government, and seldom received them. Local food for these troops had to be sought, as the only possible means of keeping them alive. In February the line of occupation reached as far as Biar, Castalla, and Xixona, all held by Whittingham’s division, while Roche and the Anglo-Sicilians were mostly in second line, at Elda, Monforte, and Alicante. But the problem of making the Anglo-Sicilian army a mobile force was not much further advanced in March 1813 than it had been in October 1812.
The second weak point of the Alicante army was the extremely doubtful quality of some of its foreign elements. It is true that the German Legion battalions were as steady as those of the same corps in Wellington’s own army. But all the others were crammed with deserters from the enemy’s ranks, or prisoners of war who had enlisted in order to escape the miseries of the prison-camp or the hulks. The ‘Calabrese Free Corps’ was a trifle better than the rest, being mostly composed of genuine exiles. But the only difference between the recent recruits of Dillon’s cosmopolitan regiment in the British service and of the ‘Italian Levy’ and ‘Estero regiment’ was that the former corps contained more French and Swiss deserters, and the latter pair more Italians. All had the usual sprinkling of Poles, Dutch, Croats, and other miscellaneous adventurers. A lurid light was thrown upon their possibilities on February 11th, when 86 men of the 2nd Italian Levy deserted to the French lines, bringing over their officer as a prisoner. It was discovered that the rest of the battalion were in a plot to betray Xixona to Suchet, and with it one of Whittingham’s Spanish regiments, which was encamped beside them. There was just time to march in the 1 /27th and a second Spanish battalion, who surrounded and disarmed the Italians, before a French column appeared at dawn. It directed itself to the quarters from which the traitors had just been drawn off, was surprised to be received with a heavy fire, and rapidly withdrew [404]. Such an incident was certainly not calculated to inspire a timid general, like Sir John Murray, with any great craving for a bold offensive.
On the other hand, Murray had a formidable force on paper, and when Suchet reflected that there lay close behind him, first Elio’s army in Murcia—at least 13,000 men without counting the Empecinado’s and Duran’s bands—and farther back Del Parque’s Andalusian ‘3rd Army,’ which had also some 13,000 effectives, he could not but see that 50,000 men might march against his comparatively weak force in Valencia at any moment. His strength on the Xucar was very modest—not much over 15,000 bayonets and sabres: for though he had 60,000 men of all arms effective, and 75,000 on his rolls, including sick and detached, yet such a force was not enough to control the whole of the ancient lands of the Aragonese crown—Aragon Proper, Catalonia, and Valencia. He was in possession of all of them save the Catalan inland, where the ‘First Army’ still maintained itself, the extreme southern region of the Valencian kingdom round Alicante, and the mountains between Aragon and Castile, which were the hunting ground of the guerrilleros of Duran and the Empecinado. The garrison was small for such a widespread occupation, and the only thing that made the Marshal’s position tolerable was the fact that (unlike Catalonia) Aragon and Valencia had shown themselves very ‘quiet’ regions. Suchet’s rule had been severe, but at least orderly; there had been little of the casual plunder and requisitioning which made French rule detested under other commanders. The coast-plain of Valencia and the broad stretch of the Ebro valley in Central Aragon were districts less suitable for the operations of guerrilleros than almost any other part of Spain. On the Valencian frontier there was only one active partida, that of the ‘Fraile’ (Agostin Nebot), whose welcome gift of 60 captured French transport mules to the Alicante army is acknowledged in one of Wellington’s dispatches. It is true that the sub-Pyrenean parts of Aragon were exposed to Mina’s raids, and that the solid block of sierras round Molina and Albaracin was always the refuge of Duran and Villacampa, but these were not essential regions for the maintenance of the hold on the Mediterranean coast. With the exception of these tracts the land was fairly quiet: there was a general submission to the French yoke, and an appreciable proportion of afrancesados. The blow inflicted on public opinion by the fall of Valencia in January 1812 was still a recent thing. Wellington’s army had been heard of, but never seen; and the operations of the Alicante expeditionary force had hitherto served to depress rather than to encourage insurrection. Hence it was possible that 35,000 men could hold the broad lands that lay between Tudela and Saragossa and Lerida on the North, and Denia and Xativa on the South—though Decaen’s 28,000 had a much more precarious grip on Catalonia. But the occupation was a tour de force after all, and was liable to be upset at any moment by an active and capable enemy. Fortunately for Suchet his opponent on the East Coast during the spring of 1813 was neither active nor capable.
As long as King Joseph kept his head-quarters at Madrid and occupied the province of La Mancha, extending his line eastward to San Clemente, he had been in touch with Suchet’s front, and communications were open. Indeed Daricau’s division marched to the borders of Valencia in the end of January, and took over from the Marshal the large body of Spanish refugees and convalescents of the Army of the South, who had been under his charge since October. But the whole situation was changed when the orders of the Emperor compelled Joseph to draw back his head-quarters to Valladolid, and to hold Toledo as his extreme post towards the South. When this change was made, the touch between Valencia and Madrid was lost—the Spanish cavalry of the Army of Andalusia advanced across the Sierra Morena into La Mancha: Villacampa’s division descended from the hills to occupy the more level parts of the province of Cuenca. For the future the King and Suchet could only keep touch with each other by the circuitous route through Saragossa. The situation of the French Army of Valencia was rendered far more isolated and dangerous—it was in a very advanced position, with no communication whatever with any friendly force save through Aragon. And its inland flank was exposed to all manner of possible molestation—if Villacampa, Duran, and the Empecinado had represented a serious fighting force, capable of regular action in the field, Suchet would have been bound to retire at once to the line of the Ebro, on pain of finding himself surrounded and cut off. But these irregular ‘divisions’ of the Army of Murcia were, as a matter of fact, good for raids and the cutting of communications, but useless for battle. They were local in their operations, seldom combined, and only obeyed their nominal commander, Elio, when it pleased them. It was very hard for any one of them to move far from its accustomed ‘beat,’ because they had no magazines, and lived each on their own region.
Suchet accordingly resolved to try the hazardous experiment of preserving his old positions, even when communication with Madrid had been cut off. He left on his inland flank only a flying brigade or two, and the normal garrisons of the small fortified towns of upper Aragon, and kept his main striking force still concentrated on the line of the Xucar, in order to cover the plain of Valencia from the one serious enemy, the Alicante army. The available troops consisted of the three small infantry divisions of Habert, Harispe, and Musnier (this last temporarily under Robert), and the cavalry division of Boussard, the whole amounting to about 12,500 foot and 1,500 horse, or a gross total of all arms of some 15,000 men. They were disposed so as to cover the front of 50 miles from Moxente, at the foot of the Murcian mountains, to the mouth of the Xucar, and were not scattered in small parties, but concentrated in four groups which could easily unite. The right wing was covered by an entrenched camp at Moxente, the centre by another at San Felipe de Xativa. Denia on the sea-coast was held as a cover to the left wing. Cavalry was out in front, and in a rather exposed position a brigade of Habert’s division held Alcoy, a considerable town in a fertile upland valley, whose resources Suchet was anxious to retain as long as possible.
Soon after he had taken over command at Alicante on February 25th, Murray obtained accurate local information as to the exact distribution and numbers of the French, and noting the very exposed position of the brigade at Alcoy, made an attempt to cut it off by the concentric advance of four columns. The scheme failed, partly because of the late arrival of the right-hand column (a brigade of Whittingham’s division), partly because Murray, having got engaged with the French in front, refused to support his advanced troops until the flanking detachments should appear, and so allowed the enemy to slip away (March 6th)[405]. He then halted, though his movement must obviously have roused Suchet’s attention, and rendered a counter-attack possible. But after a week, finding the enemy still passive, he sent forward Whittingham to drive the French outposts from Consentaina, and the pass of Albeyda, in the mountain range which separates the valley of Alcoy from the lowland. This was to ask for trouble, and should only have been done if Murray was proposing to challenge Suchet to a decisive general action: Whittingham indeed thought that this was the object of his commanding officer[406]. At the same time two British battalions under General Donkin made a demonstration against the French right, ten miles farther east, in the direction of Onteniente. Habert, whose whole division was holding the line of hills, gave way after a sharp skirmish, and allowed Whittingham to seize the pass of Albeyda (March 15th). Every one supposed that the Alicante army was now about to attack the French main position between Moxente and Xativa.
But Murray’s plan was different: having, as he supposed, attracted Suchet’s full notice, by his forward movement, he was proposing to send out an expedition by sea, to make a dash at the town of Valencia, which (as he calculated) must be under-garrisoned when heavy fighting was expected on the Xucar. He told off for the purpose Roche’s Spanish division, strengthened by the British provisional battalion of grenadier companies and a regiment borrowed from Elio. The orders were to land on the beach south of the city, make a dash for it, and if that failed to seize Cullera at the mouth of the Xucar, or Denia, farther down the coast. The project looked hazardous, for to throw 5,000 men ashore in the enemy’s country, far from their own main body, was to risk their being cut up, or forced to a re-embarkation on a bare beach, which could not fail to be costly. Unless Murray at the same moment attacked Suchet, so that he should not be able to send a man to the rear towards Valencia, the force embarked was altogether too small. Murray’s calculation was that the Marshal would make a heavy detachment, and that he would then attack the line of the Xucar himself. With this object he invited Elio to co-operate, by turning the French right on the inland on the side of Almanza. The Spanish General, though he had been quarrelling with Murray of late, was now in an obliging frame of mind[407] and so far consented that he brought up one infantry division to Yecla, a place which would make a good starting-point for a flank march round the extreme right of Suchet’s positions.
Meanwhile, for ten days after the combat of Albeyda nothing happened on the main front. Whittingham was still left in an advanced position north of Alcoy, while the rest of the Alicante army was concentrated at Castalla fifteen miles farther back. The marvel is that Suchet did not make a pounce upon the isolated Spanish division pushed up so close to his front. He had not yet taken the measure of his opponent, whose failing (as the whole campaign shows) was to start schemes, and then to abandon them from irresolution, at the critical moment when a decisive move became necessary.