As to the ‘First Army,’ now commanded by General Copons (the defender of Tarifa), this gallant remnant of the old Catalan levies could not take the field 10,000 strong, was almost destitute of cavalry and artillery, and had no large town or secure fortress in its possession[458]. It held, in a rather precarious fashion, a considerable portion of the mountainous inland of Catalonia—the head-quarters were usually at Vich—but had no safe communications with the sea, or certainty of receiving succours, though it was intermittently in touch with Captain Codrington’s cruising squadron. Copons, who took over command in March 1813, though less disliked than his arbitrary and ill-tempered predecessor Lacy, was not popular with the Catalans. They would have liked to see their local hero, the Baron de Eroles, who had been in charge of the principality for some months after Lacy’s departure, made captain-general[459]. Weak in numbers as it was, the Army of Catalonia could obviously do no more than detain and keep employed General Decaen’s French army of occupation, which had more than double its strength. The garrisons of Barcelona, Tarragona, Figueras, Lerida, and Tortosa absorbed 13,000 of Decaen’s men. But he had 15,000 more available for field service, and his flying columns often put Copons in danger, for the Catalan army had to scatter its cantonments far and wide in order to live, and a sudden hostile concentration might easily cut off some fraction of it, when one part was as far north as the Ampurdam and the passes into France, and another as far east as the Aragonese border[460]. Normally the Catalans employed themselves in cutting the communications between the great fortresses, with an occasional foray into Roussillon. Wellington thought that they could not be better employed, and that nothing more could be expected of them. He sent them a small reinforcement of 2,000 men from the suppressed third division of the Army of Galicia, and urged that munitions should be thrown in from the side of the sea whenever possible.
There was little to be expected from the exertions of the Catalan army, persevering and meritorious though they were. It remained to be seen, however, whether something could not be done in the Principality with external help. Here came in the main problem of the Eastern Coast: Suchet must be kept employed at all costs, while the main blow was being delivered by Wellington himself on the other side of the Peninsula. Murray’s and Elio’s futile operations of April had accomplished little: the Marshal, though frightened at first by their movements, and though he had suffered the bloody check of Castalla, had been able to preserve his forward position on the Xucar: he retained complete possession of the Valencian coast-land, and his army was intact as a striking force. If, during the forthcoming campaign north of the Douro, he chose to draw off his main force towards Aragon, and to come in to join the King, there was at present nothing on foot that could stop him from such a course. Wellington resolved that this possibility must be averted, by giving the Marshal a problem of his own, which should absorb all his attention, and keep him from thinking of his neighbour’s needs. And this was all the more easy because Suchet was notoriously a selfish commander, who thought more of his own viceroyalty and his own military reputation than of the general cause of France: his intercepted dispatches, of which Wellington had a fair selection in his file of cyphers, showed that he was always ready to find plausible excuses for keeping to his own side of the Peninsula.
The plan which Wellington formulated for the use of Sir John Murray, in two dispatches dated on the 14th and 16th of April, was one which depended entirely on the judicious use of naval power. The British fleet being completely dominant in the Mediterranean, and Murray having at his disposition the large squadron of transports which had brought his troops from Sicily, it was clearly possible to land as many men as the transports could carry, at any point on the immensely long coast-line of Valencia and Catalonia that might be selected. They would have a local superiority on the selected point until the French troops, dispersed in many garrisons and cantonments, could mass in sufficient strength to attack them: and meanwhile the Catalan army would join Murray. If the French should draw together in overwhelming power, the expedition could, if proper precautions were taken, re-embark before its position became dangerous. The farther north that the landing took place, the more inconvenient would it be for Suchet, who would obviously have to draw on his field army in Valencia for numbers that would enable him to deal with the Anglo-Sicilian force. But the moment that Suchet should be forced to deplete his field army in the South, which was already too weak for the task set it, the Spaniards could advance on the line of the Xucar, and make a dash at Valencia during the Marshal’s absence. In order to give them an irresistible numerical preponderance over the divisions that Suchet might leave behind him, Del Parque should bring up the Andalusian army to reinforce Elio’s Murcians. Between them they would have some 30,000 regular troops, besides the bands of the Empecinado and Duran, who would operate on the side of the mountains against the French rear. It would be hard if such an accumulation of force could not thrust back the thinned line of the enemy on to and beyond Valencia.
Finally, the point at which the expeditionary force was to make its thrust was to be Tarragona, which was known to be in a state of bad repair, and thinly garrisoned, while it had also the advantage of being a very isolated post, and remote both from Decaen’s head-quarters at Gerona, and from Suchet’s at Valencia. Moreover, it was conveniently placed for communication with the Catalan army, but separated by difficult defiles both from Tortosa southward and Barcelona northward, at which French relieving forces would have to gather.
If the whole plan worked, and Tarragona were to fall in a few days, the Catalan army would once more have a safe debouch to the sea, and the Allies would gain a foothold such as they had never owned north of the Ebro since 1811, while at the same time Valencia ought to fall into the hands of Elio and Del Parque during Suchet’s enforced absence. But supposing that Tarragona held out firmly, and Decaen and Suchet united to relieve it, the expeditionary force could get away unharmed, and meanwhile Valencia ought to have been taken. And even if the blow at Valencia failed also, yet at least the whole French army on the East Coast would be occupied for a month or more, and would certainly not be able to spare a single man to help King Joseph or Jourdan.
As we shall see, a long series of blunders, for which Murray was mainly responsible, though Elio and Del Parque each took his share in the muddle, prevented all Wellington’s schemes for active profit from coming to a successful end. Nevertheless, the main purpose was achieved—not a Frenchman from the East Coast took any share in the campaign of Vittoria.
To descend to details. Murray was directed to ship off every man of the Alicante army for whom he could find transport, provided that the total of infantry and artillery embarked should not fall short of 10,000 of all ranks. He was to take with him both the Anglo-Sicilians and as many of Whittingham’s Spaniards as could be carried: if the ships sufficed, he might take all or some of Roche’s Spaniards also. Less than 10,000 men must not sail—the force would then be too small to cause Suchet to detach troops from Valencia. Elio and Del Parque would remain behind, with such (if any) of Roche’s and Whittingham’s battalions as could not be shipped. They were to keep quiet, till they should learn that Suchet had weakened his forces in Valencia. When it became certain that the French opposite them were much reduced in numbers, they were to advance, always taking care to turn the enemy’s positions rather than to make frontal attacks upon them.
If, which was quite possible, Murray should fail to take Tarragona, and should find very large French forces gathering around him, such as he and Copons could not reasonably hope to hold in check, he was to re-embark, and bring the Expeditionary Force back to the kingdom of Valencia, landing it at such a point on the coast as should put him in line with the front reached by Elio and Del Parque in their advance.
There was a subsidiary set of directions for a policy to be carried out if the transports available at Alicante should be found insufficient to move so many as 10,000 men. But as the shipping proved enough to carry 14,000, these directions have only an academic interest. In this case Murray and Elio were to threaten the line of the Xucar frontally, while Del Parque turned it on the side of the mountains of the interior. Duran and Villacampa were to devote themselves to cutting the line of communications between Suchet and the King. In this way employment would be found for all the French on the East Coast, for Copons was to receive a reinforcement of 3,000 men, and was to keep Decaen on the move by raids and forays.
Finally, and this clause governed the whole of the instructions, ‘the General Officers at the head of the troops must understand that the success of all our endeavours in the ensuing campaign depends on none of the corps being beaten. They must not attack the enemy in strong positions: I shall forgive anything excepting that one of the corps should be beaten and dispersed.’ Wellington afterwards said that this warning was intended for Elio and Del Parque only, but it had a deleterious effect during the ensuing operations on all the actions of the timid and wavering Murray. To say to such an officer that it would be a sin not to be forgiven if he let his corps get beaten under any circumstances, was to drive him to a policy of absolute cowardice. Wellington was an austere master, and the mental effect of such a threat was to make Murray resolve that he would not take even small and pardonable risks. The main idea that he had in his head in May and June 1813 was that he ‘must not allow his corps to be beaten and dispersed.’ Hence, like the unprofitable servant in the parable, he was resolved to wrap it up in a napkin, and have it ready to return to his master intact—though thereby he might condemn himself to make no worthy use of it whatever while it was in his hands. The threat of the Commander-in-Chief might have been addressed profitably to Robert Craufurd; when administered to John Murray it produced terror and a sort of mental paralysis.