On the evening of the 2nd orders were issued that all the impedimenta of the Army of Spain should move off northward at once. The Grand Park and other transport, the Spanish refugees with all their carriages and lumber, the French civil administrators, the King’s ministers with his private baggage and treasure, and much miscellaneous stuff from the royal palaces—pictures, books, and antiquities—were to start off at once on the road to Burgos. One great convoy was dispatched that night, a second and still larger one the following morning. Escort was found for them from the King’s Spanish troops, the so-called ‘division’ of Casa Palacios, and other detachments, making up 4,000 men in all. On the afternoon of the 3rd the army executed a general movement of retreat, leaving only a cavalry screen behind, to observe Wellington’s advance. The Army of the South came back through Valladolid, after blowing up all the bridges on the lower Pisuerga and the neighbouring streams, and then marched up its western bank to Cabezon. Reille evacuated Medina de Rio Seco and fell back on Palencia, where he picked up Maucune. Head-quarters and the King’s guard moved to Magaz, just south of Palencia. D’Erlon marched from Valladolid to Dueñas, ten miles farther south than Magaz, and made ready to blow up the bridge there and cross to the other side of the Pisuerga. The whole army was collected in a space of 15 miles, and halted for two days, in a safe position for retreat on Burgos, when it should be pressed. For Joseph and Jourdan naturally wished to gain time—every day that passed made it more likely that the missing divisions from the North would be heard of, or even be reported as approaching. Yet it would seem that even yet no direct and peremptory orders had been sent to Clausel, for Jourdan writes in his Memoirs that ‘the King suspended the retrograde movement because he thought to gain time, and hoped that the Minister of War would have given orders to General Clauzel to come down on Burgos[492].’ Again the wretched system of double-command and constant reference to Paris was working! If it be remembered that it was only on the 18th of May that the King had made his final appeal to the minister to let loose Clausel from the northern operations, and that the news of Wellington’s actual advance had only been sent to France on the 24th, when could it be expected that the directions from Paris would reach the scattered columns lost in the mountains of Navarre? And was there any certainty that Clarke would visualize the full danger of the position, and give at once the kind of orders that the King desired? He might send instead a lecture on the Emperor’s intentions, if past experience was to be trusted, and some suggestions which the events of the last ten days would have put completely out of date.
SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER V
THE OPERATIONS AROUND BURGOS:
JUNE 4-14, 1813
On June 3rd Wellington had halted the infantry of Graham’s column at Toro, in order to allow the whole of Hill’s column to cross the bridge and fords, and to complete the junction of the army. He gave as his reasons that he expected to meet Gazan, D’Erlon, and the King, on the Hormija river, when he should have debouched from Toro, and that he intended to fight them with his whole force, not with the northern column only. ‘I do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that we are so close up or so well concentrated as we ought to be, to meet the enemy in the strength in which he will appear on the Hormija, probably to-morrow; and therefore I propose to halt the heads of the different columns to-morrow, and close up the rear of each, moving Hill in this direction preparatory to our further movement[493].’ Only the cavalry continued to press forward on the 3rd; they found no signs of resistance, but only vedettes, which retired cautiously on their approach. Wellington was so far right in his apprehension, that the idea of fighting in front of Valladolid had been one of the three plans which the French Head-quarters Staff had considered on June 2. But, as we have already seen, that scheme had been rejected as rash, and during Wellington’s halt upon June 3 the enemy were evacuating Valladolid and all its neighbourhood, and commencing their retreat behind the Pisuerga. By eight o’clock on the evening of that day the cavalry reports, all along the front, showed that the enemy was retiring on every road, and it appeared certain that they did not intend to fight; the army therefore advanced in three main columns, Wellington himself with the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions, followed by Hill, by the high road on Valladolid through La Mota: Graham with the 1st and 5th Divisions, Pack and Bradford, by the more northern parallel road, by Villavelid and Villar de Frades, on Medina de Rio Seco. The Galicians were converging on the same point as Graham, by the high road from Villalpando and Villafrechos, but were directed not to approach too close to Medina till further notice. The reason for their delay was a curious one—Giron had just written on the previous day to say that he had no reserve of infantry cartridges, and only 60 rounds a man in the soldiers’ pouches. He wanted to borrow a supply from the British army. Wellington replied in considerable heat: when he was on the move he could not give away his own reserve ammunition: no doubt Giron was not personally to blame—nor his men—but the administration in Galicia. Yet the unfortunate result would be that the Galicians must never be put in a position where there would be a heavy consumption of cartridges, i. e. must be held in reserve, or used for subsidiary operations only. Giron was directed to make small regimental reserves, by taking away a proportion of the cartridges from each man and carrying them on mules. The general got off easily—but Wellington thundered that night on the War Minister O’Donoju, ‘Here is an army which is clothed, armed, and disciplined, but cannot be brought into action with the enemy: I am obliged to keep it in the rear. How can troops march without provisions, or fight without ammunition? The cause of the country may be lost unless the Government establish in the provinces some authority to which the people will pay obedience, and which will insure their resources for the purposes of the war[494].’ It will be noted that all through the rest of the campaign Giron’s corps was used for flanking movements, and never put in the forefront of the fighting—though the other Spanish troops with the army, Morillo’s and later Longa’s divisions, were used freely.
On the 4th June Wellington moved with the ‘Head-Quarters Column’ as far as La Mota, Hill getting no farther than Morales. At La Mota the information received showed that the French were in general retreat—the cavalry advance got into Valladolid and found some undestroyed stores of ammunition there. Julian Sanchez, scouting far towards the south, discovered a considerable magazine of grain at Arevalo, where Gazan’s head-quarters had been. In view of the new situation it was necessary to recast the movements of the army—there was to be no fight on the Hormija, or for the possession of Valladolid. The initial strategical success of the passage of the Esla had settled the event of the first phase of the campaign, and cleared the French not only out of New Castile, but out of the kingdom of Leon and great part of Old Castile. The fact that the enemy had abandoned Valladolid and the lower crossings of the Pisuerga, would seem to show that he intended to fall back on the Burgos country: he could hardly be intending to defend a position behind the middle Pisuerga and the Carrion, since he had surrendered the passages at and about Valladolid, by which the southern flank of such a position could be turned.
Now nine months ago Wellington had been in these same regions, with the army of Clausel retreating before him from Valladolid on Burgos. On that occasion he had followed the enemy in a straightforward pursuit along the great high road, by Cabezon and Torquemada. On this occasion his strategy was entirely different. Leaving only a cavalry screen between himself and the enemy, he proceeded to move his whole army towards the north-west by secondary roads, marching in four parallel columns not on Burgos but on the upper Pisuerga north-west of that fortress, so as to turn entirely any position that the enemy might take up on the Hormaza, the Arlanzon, or the Urbel. It can hardly be doubted that he had already in his mind the great manœuvre which he was to accomplish during the next fortnight—that of outflanking the French right wing by a wide sweeping movement, which would not only force Joseph and Jourdan to evacuate Burgos and its neighbourhood, but would cut them off from the royal road to Bayonne and their main communication with France. The first order in his dispatch book which definitely reveals this intention does not appear till June 10[495], but the facts which it contains prove that the plan must have been laid long ere Wellington started from Portugal.
This plan was no less a scheme than the transference of the base of the British army from the port of Lisbon to the Bay of Biscay, so that when, in its wide turning movement, it should have passed the Ebro and neared the Cantabrian coast, it should find stores and munitions awaiting it, and be no longer tied to the long line of communication with Portugal, which it had always used hitherto. It was an astonishing example of the strategical use of sea-power, to which there had hitherto been no parallel in the Napoleonic wars. The only manœuvre at all resembling it was that by which Sir John Moore in December 1808 had changed his line of communication from Lisbon to Corunna. But this was for a sudden hasty retreat, made by a small army—a very different thing from an advance made by a large army. For Moore had only wanted transports on which to abscond from the Peninsula; Wellington had planned the arrival of a fleet of supply vessels, on whose contents he was to rely for the future sustenance of his army during a long campaign.
Their existence was his second great secret in 1813—the first had been his plan for the crossing of the Esla. But the latter might have been guessed at as a possibility by any intelligent French general: the former, it is safe to say, had never been dreamed of as a conceivable move. Santander is so remote from Portugal, and the French were so firmly rooted in Northern Spain in the spring of 1813, that it could never enter into the head of any of Napoleon’s subordinates that the British Commander-in-Chief was planning such an elaborate surprise. They were bound to believe that all Wellington’s operations would be founded on, and circumscribed by, the basic fact that his line of communication was on Lisbon. A manœuvre which presupposed the complete abandonment of that line was not conceivable by officers reared in Continental campaigns, and unused to contemplating the correlation of land operations and naval strategy. Yet the fact that the supply fleet had been gathered at Corunna long weeks before, and kept there till the conquest of Northern Spain was well on its way to completion, is conclusive evidence as to Wellington’s intentions. The crucial dispatch of June 10 ran as follows—it was addressed to Colonel Bourke in charge of the British dépôts in Galicia:
‘There are at Corunna certain ships loaded with biscuit and flour, and certain others loaded with a train of heavy artillery and its ammunition, and some with musket ammunition, and I shall be much obliged if you will request any officer of the navy who may be at Corunna, when you receive this letter, to take under his convoy all the vessels loaded as above mentioned, and to proceed with them to Santander. If he should find Santander occupied by the enemy, I beg him to remain off the port till the operations of this army have obliged the enemy to abandon it.
‘If the enemy is not occupying Santander, I beg him to enter the port, but to be in readiness to quit it again if the enemy should approach the place, until I shall communicate with him[496]’.