The French commanders, as we have seen, made no move on the 20th, save to hurry off convoys and to throw back Reille on the north-west flank of Vittoria, to protect the royal chaussée and the two Bilbao roads. Jourdan wrote to Clarke that evening a perfectly sensible dispatch as to the difficulties of the situation, but one which showed that he was wholly unaware that he might be forced to a general action within the next twelve hours. All depended, he said, on Clausel’s prompt arrival: if he should come up on the 21st there was no danger: if he delayed, the army might have to choose between two tiresome alternatives—a retreat on the pass of Salinas and one on Pampeluna. If Wellington, as he suspected, was making a great turning movement by Orduña and Durango, the army would be forced to take the wretched road Salvatierra-Pampeluna. ‘The King does not yet know what decision he will have to make: if General Clausel delays his junction much longer, he will be forced to choose the retreat into Navarre.’ Of any idea that Wellington was about to attack next morning the dispatch shows no sign.
Jourdan had been indisposed all that day—he was laid up in bed with a feverish attack. This caused the postponement of a general reconnaissance of the position, which he and his King had intended to carry out together. They rode forth, however, at 6 a.m. on the 21st. ‘No intelligence had come to hand,’ writes Jourdan in his memoirs, ‘which could cause us to foresee an instant attack. We arrived at the position by Zuazo, from which Count Reille had been recently moved, and stopped to examine it. Its left rested on the mountain-chain in the direction of Berostigueta, its right came down to the Zadorra behind La Hermandad and Crispijana. It is dominating, yet not over steep, and has all along it good artillery emplacement for many batteries. It connected itself much better than does the Ariñez position with the ground about Aranguiz now occupied by Reille, which might be heavily attacked. Struck with the advantages of this position, the King appeared inclined to bring back the Army of the South to occupy it, and to place the Army of the Centre between it and the Army of Portugal. The three armies would have been closer together, and more able to give each other rapid assistance; and the eye of the Commander-in-Chief could have swept around the whole of this more concentrated field in one glance. This change of dispositions would probably have been carried out on the 20th if Marshal Jourdan had not been indisposed, and might perhaps have prevented the catastrophe that was to come. But the officer sent to call General Gazan to confer with the King came back to say that the general could not leave his troops, as an attack on him was developing. It was judged too late to change position. Riding to the front of Ariñez, to a long hill occupied by Leval’s division, on the right of the Army of the South, the King saw that in fact the enemy was on the move. About eight o’clock the posts on the mountain reported that the Allies had passed the Zadorra above La Puebla: a strong column was coming up the high road and the defile, a smaller one had diverged to its right and was climbing the mountain itself. General Avy, sent on reconnaissance beyond the Zadorra on the side of Mendoza, reported at the same time that a large corps was coming in on Tres Puentes behind the rear of General Leval. And he could see signs in the woods opposite, which seemed to indicate the march of other troops in the direction of the bridge of Nanclares. No news had yet come in from Reille, but we prepared ourselves to hear ere long that he, too, was attacked[557]’.
It is unnecessary to comment on the character of a Head-quarters where a passing indisposition of the Chief of the Staff causes all movements to be postponed for eighteen hours, at a moment when a general action is obviously possible. But it is necessary to point out that the existing dislocation of the troops left three miles of the Zadorra front between Reille’s left and Gazan’s right unguarded when the battle began, and that this had been the case throughout the preceding day. And during that day who was responsible for the fact that not a single one of the eleven bridges between the defile of La Puebla and Durana had been ruined and only three obstructed[558]? Gazan must take a good deal of responsibility, no less than Jourdan.
At eight o’clock on the morning of the 21st the action commenced, on a most beautiful clear day, contrasting wonderfully with the heavy rain of the 19th and intermittent showers on the 20th. Every hill-crest road and village for twenty miles was visible with surprising sharpness, so much so that incidents occurring at a great distance were easily to be followed by the naked eye, still more easily by the staff officer’s telescope.
The clash began, as Wellington had intended, on the extreme right. Here Hill’s columns crossed the Zadorra, where it broadened out below the defile of La Puebla, far outside the French line. The 2nd Division led up the high road, with Cadogan’s brigade heading the column; but before they entered the narrows, Morillo’s Spaniards were pushed forward on their right, through a wood which covered the lower slopes, to seize the spur of the Puebla heights immediately above the road. Till this was cleared, it would be impossible to move the 2nd Division forward. Eye-witnesses describe the deploying of the Spanish column as clearly visible from the high ground on the Monte Arrato heights: the first brigade appeared emerging from the woods below, then came stiffer ground, ‘so steep that while moving up it they looked as if they were lying on their faces or crawling[559]’ Then the smoke of the French skirmishing fire began to be visible on the crest, while Morillo’s second brigade, deployed behind the first, went up the heights in support. The enemy, who was not in great strength at first, gave way, and the Estremadurans won the sky-line, formed there, and began to drive up from the first summit to the next above it. This also they won, but then came to stand—Gazan had pushed up first one and then the other of the two regiments of Maransin’s brigade from his left, on the main position, to support the voltigeur companies which had been the only troops originally placed on this lofty ground. Hill, seeing the advance on the mountain stop, sent up, to help Morillo, Colonel Cadogan, with his own regiment the 71st, and all the light companies of Cadogan’s and Byng’s brigades. This turned the fight, and after a stiff struggle for the second summit, in which Morillo was severely wounded, Maransin’s brigade was turned back and flung down hill: it halted and re-formed low down on the slope, losing the crest completely.
Having his flank now reasonably safe, Hill turned off the other two battalions of Cadogan’s brigade to follow the 71st, and then pushed his second British brigade (O’Callaghan’s) up the defile of La Puebla, and deployed it on the open ground opposite the village of Subijana de Alava, which lay near the high road, and was the first obstacle to be carried if the whole corps was to issue forth and attack the French left. One battery moved up with the brigade, and got into action on a slope to its right. The rest of the 2nd Division and Silveira’s Portuguese issued from the defile, ready to act as reserve either to Morillo on the heights or O’Callaghan in the open ground. Meanwhile the enemy could be seen dispatching troops from his reserves, to attack the spurs of the mountain which had been won by Morillo and Cadogan. For the heights of Puebla commanded all the left flank of the main French position, and, if Allied troops pushed along them any further, Gazan’s line would be completely turned. Jourdan says that his orders were that Maransin’s brigade should have attacked, with a whole division in support, but that Gazan took upon him the responsibility of sending in Maransin alone, and only later, when the latter had been beaten down from the crest, first Rey’s brigade of Conroux’s division and then St. Pol’s reserve brigade of Daricau’s division, from the hill on the right behind Leval. It would seem that Daricau’s two regiments took post on the slopes behind Subijana, where there was a gap in the line, owing to Maransin’s departure, while Rey and his brigade went up the Puebla heights, to try to head off Morillo’s and Cadogan’s attack.
In this it was wholly unsuccessful: after a severe struggle on the crest, in which Cadogan was mortally wounded[560], the French reinforcements were checked and routed: the Allied troops began to push forward again on the heights, and were getting right round the flank of Gazan’s left wing, while Maransin’s troops on the lower slopes were being contained by the 92nd and 50th, the rear regiments of Cadogan’s brigade, and Daricau’s were hotly engaged with O’Callaghan’s three battalions, which occupied Subijana and then attacked the hillside above it, but failed for some time to secure a lodgement there.
Jourdan was by this time growing anxious, and not without reason, at the rapid progress of the Allies on the Puebla heights. He ordered Gazan to send up at once his only remaining reserve, Villatte’s division from the height behind Ariñez, to gain the crest at a point farther east than any that the enemy could reach, and to attack in mass along it. In order that he might not be forestalled on the summit, Villatte was told to march by a long détour, through the village of Esquivel far to the east, where there was a country road debouching from the chaussée. Indeed so perturbed was the Marshal by the threat to his left, that he suspected further turning movements in this quarter, and sent orders for Tilly’s dragoons, from the cavalry reserve, to ride out by Berostigueta to the Trevino road, to see if there were no British columns pressing in from that quarter. He also directed D’Erlon to move one of his two infantry divisions, Cassagne’s, in the same direction, to support Tilly if necessary. Gazan, if we may credit his long and contentious report on the battle, suggested to Jourdan that it was dangerous to disgarnish his centre, and to push so many troops to his left, while it was still uncertain whether Wellington’s column-heads, visible on the other side of the Zadorra, were not about to move. Might not Hill’s attack be a feint, intended to draw off the French reserves in an eccentric direction? The Marshal, says Gazan, then declared in a loud voice, so that all around could hear ‘that the enemy’s movements opposite our right are mere demonstrations, to which no attention should be paid, and that if the battle were lost it would be because the heights oi the left of Subijana remained in the enemy’s power[561].’ Then lay the real danger.
Orders were given that when Villatte should have got on the crest of the mountain, and should be delivering his attack, a simultaneous move forward was to be made by Conroux, and the brigades of Maransin and St. Pol, to cast the enemy out of Subijana, as well as off the heights of Puebla. It is interesting to note that Hill had as yet only engaged two British brigades, and one small Spanish division, and had succeeded in attracting against himself a much larger force—the whole of Conroux’s and Villatte’s divisions, and the two brigades of Maransin and St. Pol. In the French centre and right there remained now only Leval’s division and the remaining brigade of Daricau’s, and in reserve there was only one of D’Erlon’s divisions, since the other had gone off on a wild goose chase toward the Trevino road. Wellington could have wished for nothing better.
But by the time that the French counter-attack on Hill’s corps was developing, matters were beginning to look lively all along the line of the Zadorra, and the combat on the heights was growing into a general action. It was now about eleven o’clock, and Wellington had been for some time established on a high bank above the river, facing the centre of the French position, to the left of the village and bridges of Nanclares, from which he could sweep with his glass the whole landscape from the heights of La Puebla to the bridge of Mendoza. To his left and right the Light and 4th Divisions lay in two masses, a mile or more back from the river, and hidden very carefully in folds of the Monte Arrato, the battalions in contiguous close column lying down in hollow roads or behind outcrops of rock, and showing as little as possible. The great mass of cavalry in reserve, four brigades, had not been brought over the sky-line yet, and lay some distance to the rear. Only Grant’s hussars were near the Light Division, dismounted and standing to their horses in covered ground. The French lines were perfectly visible, ‘unmasked, without a bush to prevent the sweeping of their artillery, the charging of their cavalry, or the fire of their musketry acting with full effect on those who should attempt to cross the bridges in their front, which it was necessary to carry before we could begin the attack on their centre[562],’ King Joseph and his staff were conspicuous on the round hill before Ariñez.