THE PURSUIT OF CLAUSEL
At ten o’clock on the morning of June 22nd Wellington moved out from Vittoria in pursuit of the French. Touch with them had been lost on the preceding night, as the divisions which had fought the battle had ceased to move on after dark, and had settled into bivouacs four or five miles beyond the city. The enemy, on the other hand, had continued his flight in the darkness, till sheer exhaustion compelled each man to throw himself down where he was, all order having been lost in most units, and only Reille’s rearguard of the Army of Portugal having kept its ranks. About midnight the majority had run to a standstill, and the hills along the Salvatierra road began to be covered with thousands of little fires, round which small groups were cooking the scanty rations that they had saved in their haversacks. ‘The impromptu illumination had a very pretty effect: if the enemy had seen it he might have thought that we had rallied and were in order. But it was only next morning that the regiments began to coalesce, and reorganization was not complete till we got back to France. Generals were seeking their divisions, colonels their regiments, officers their companies. They found them later—but one thing was never found again—the crown of Spain, fallen for ever from the brow on which it was not to be replaced[618].’ King Joseph himself, pushing on ahead of the rout, reached Salvatierra, sixteen miles from the field, before he dismounted, and shared a meagre and melancholy supper with D’Erlon and two ministers, the Irish-Spaniard O’Farrill and the Frenchman Miot de Melito. To them entered later Jourdan, who had been separated from the rest of the staff in the flight. He flung himself down to the table, saying, ‘Well, gentlemen, they would have a battle, and it is a lost battle,’ after which no one said anything more. This was the old marshal’s reflection on the generals who, all through the retreat, had been urging that it was shameful to evacuate Spain without risking a general action. After three hours’ halt, sleep for some, but the wakefulness of exhaustion for others, the King’s party got to horse at dawn, and rode on toward Pampeluna, the army straggling behind them. It was a miserable rainy day with occasional thunderstorms: every one, from Joseph to the meanest camp-follower, was in the same state of mental and physical exhaustion. But the one thing which should have finished the whole game was wanting—there was practically no pursuit.
Of Wellington’s nine brigades of cavalry only two, those of Grant and Anson, had been seriously engaged on the 21st, and had suffered appreciable losses. The other seven were intact, and had not been in action. It is obvious that they could not have been used to effect in the darkness of the night, and over rough ground and an unknown track. But why an early pursuit at dawn was not taken in hand it is difficult to make out. Even the same promptness which had been shown after Salamanca, and which had been rewarded by the lucky gleanings of Garcia Hernandez, was wanting on this occasion. There was no excuse for the late start of the cavalry, and in consequence it rode as far as Salvatierra without picking up more than a few wounded stragglers and worn-out horses and mules. The French had gone off at dawn, and were many miles ahead.
The infantry followed slowly; not only were the men tired by the late marches and their legitimate exertions in the battle, but many thousands had spent the hours of darkness in a surreptitious visit to the field of the convoy, and had come back to the regimental bivouac with plunder of all kinds bought at the cost of a sleepless night. Many had not come back at all, but were lying drunk or snoring among the débris of the French camps. Wellington wrote in high wrath to Bathurst, the Minister for War: ‘We started with the army in the highest order, and up to the day of the battle nothing could get on better. But that event has (as usual)[619] annihilated all discipline. The soldiers of the army have got among them about a million sterling in money, with the exception of about 100,000 dollars, which were got for the military chest. They are incapable of marching in pursuit of the enemy, and are totally knocked up. Rain has come and increased the fatigue, and I am quite sure that we have now out of the ranks double the amount of our loss in the battle, and that we have more stragglers in the pursuit than the enemy have, and never in one day make more than an ordinary march. This is the consequence of the state of discipline in the British army. We may gain the greatest victories, but we shall do no good till we so far alter our system as to force all ranks to do their duty. The new regiments are as usual worst of all. The —— are a disgrace to the name of soldier, in action as elsewhere: I shall take their horses from them, and send the men back to England, if I cannot get the better of them in any other manner[620].’
This, of course, is one of Wellington’s periodical explosions of general indiscriminating rage against the army which, as he confessed on other occasions, had brought him out of many a dangerous scrape by its sheer hard fighting. He went on a few days later with language that can hardly be forgiven: ‘We have in the Service the scum of the earth as common soldiers, and of late years have been doing everything in our power, both by law and by publication, to relax the discipline by which alone such men can be kept in order. The officers of the lower ranks will not perform the duty required from them to keep the soldiers in order. The non-commissioned officers are (as I have repeatedly stated) as bad as the men. It is really a disgrace to have anything to say to such men as some of our soldiers are[621].’ The Commander-in-Chief’s own panacea was more shooting, and much more flogging. All this language is comprehensible in a moment of irritation, but was cruelly unjust to many corps which kept their discipline intact, never straggled, and needed no cat-o’-nine-tails: there were battalions where the lash was unknown for months at a time. But Wellington usually ignored the moral side of things: he seldom spoke to his men about honour or patriotism or esprit de corps, and long years afterwards officially informed a Royal Commission on the Army that ‘he had no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers by anything but the immediate fear of corporal punishment.’ It is sad to find such mentality in a man of strict honour and high military genius. On this particular occasion he, no doubt, did well to be angry: but were there no regiments which could have marched at dawn to keep up the pursuit? Undoubtedly there were many: Ponsonby’s heavy dragoons had ridden through the chaos of plunder without a man leaving the ranks, and had bivouacked five miles to the front of Vittoria. There were several infantry brigades which had been so far to the left or the right in the action that they never came near the temptation, and only remembered the night of the 21st as one of short commons and hard lying[622]. Perhaps the sight of the disgraceful confusion in and about Vittoria gave the Commander-in-Chief an exaggerated impression of the general condition of the army. And undoubtedly he had an absorbing night’s task before him, when he sat down to work out the entire recasting of his operations which the victory had made necessary.
His main design, as expressed in the order for the 22nd, was to send Giron and Longa into Biscay by the great Bayonne chaussée, to pursue Maucune’s convoy and to cut off, if possible, Foy and the garrison of Bilbao, while the Anglo-Portuguese army marched in pursuit of the French main army on Pampeluna. Clausel had been heard of in the direction of Logroño; a zealous and patriotic innkeeper had ridden 40 miles on the night of the 20th to report to Wellington the position of the head of his column; and it was the knowledge that he was more than a full day’s march from Vittoria which had enabled the arrangements for the battle to be made with complete security against any intervention on his part[623]. But, though it was most probable that he would have heard of the disaster to the King’s army, and have turned back to Pampeluna or Saragossa, there was a chance that the news might not have reached him. If so, he could be at Vittoria by the afternoon of the 22nd, and his appearance there might prove very tiresome, as the British hospitals and the whole spoil of the battle would have been at his mercy. Wherefore Wellington, who somewhat underrated Clausel’s strength[624], left behind at Vittoria the 5th Division and R. Hill’s cavalry brigade to guard the place: the 6th Division was due to arrive at noon, or not much later, from Medina de Pomar, so that 12,000 men would be available if the possible but improbable event of a raid on Vittoria should come to pass.
These precautions having been taken, the army marched off at ten o’clock, in three columns, the ‘Centre Column’ of previous days with head-quarters and the bulk of the cavalry sticking to the main Salvatierra-Pampeluna road, while Hill and Graham kept to side-tracks[625], which were available so long as the march lay in the plain of Vittoria, but converged on Salvatierra, where the watershed comes, and the mountains of Navarre block the way. Here all the roads met, and there was a steep rise and a defile, before the head-waters of the Araquil, the main river of north-western Navarre, were reached.
That afternoon Wellington’s quartermaster-general, George Murray—about the only man who ever dared to make a suggestion to his chief—asked him whether it might not be worth while to send a detachment northward, by the mountain road which goes from Salvatierra to Villafranca on the great Bayonne chaussée. For Giron and Longa might have been detained by the French forts at the defile of Salinas, at Mondragon and elsewhere, and so have failed to get forward in their pursuit of Maucune’s convoy and the Bilbao garrison. But a force sent across the hills from Salvatierra would cut in to the chaussée behind the fortified posts; and, if the convoy were moving slowly, might catch it as it passed through Villafranca, or at any rate intercept other stray bodies of French troops[626]. Wellington approved the idea at once, and ordered Graham to take the greater part of his own column—the 1st Division, Pack’s, and Bradford’s Portuguese, and Anson’s cavalry brigade,—to leave the pursuit of the King’s army, and to march to co-operate with the Spanish troops who had already been detached to press the retreat of the French garrisons of Biscay. The road Salvatierra-Villafranca turned out practicable for all arms, but very trying both to cavalry and artillery, its first stage being a long uphill pull, over a road of the most stony kind—on the watershed at the Puerto de San Adrian it was taken through a tunnel cut in the solid rock. The diversion of Graham’s column being an afterthought—the orders for it were only issued at 3 p.m.—there was some delay in finding the troops in an afternoon of blinding rain, and turning them on to the new direction. The general himself, as his dispatch shows, was not reached by Wellington’s orders till next morning[627]. Only the light brigade of the German Legion got well forward on the 22nd,—the rest of the 1st Division and Bradford’s Portuguese hardly got started. Anson’s Light Dragoons and Pack’s Portuguese, like Graham himself, never received their orders at all that night, having pushed on beyond Salvatierra for two leagues or more, where the officers sent in search of them failed to catch them up. They had actually gone forward some miles farther towards Navarre, on the morning of the 23rd, before they were found and set right. This caused a tiresome counter-march of some miles to get back to Salvatierra and the cross-roads. Wellington was much vexed with the bad staff-work, but vented his wrath, unfortunately, not on his own aides-de-camp but on a meritorious officer whom they had failed to find or warn. Captain Norman Ramsay, the hero of the ‘artillery charge’ at Fuentes de Oñoro[628], was attached with his battery to Anson’s cavalry brigade. He was still moving eastward, on the night of the 22nd, when the Commander-in-Chief chanced to come upon him. Wellington at once ordered him to halt, billet his men in a neighbouring village, and wait for new directions. According to Ramsay’s version of the words used, they were that ‘if there were any orders for the troop in the course of the night, he would send them[629].’ But Wellington was under the impression that the phrase used was that Ramsay was not to move until he had direct orders from Head-Quarters as to his route. Next morning about 6 a.m. an assistant quartermaster-general (Captain Campbell) came to the village, and asked Ramsay if he had yet received his directions. On hearing that he had not, the staff-officer told him to follow Anson’s brigade, who (as Ramsay supposed) were still moving eastward; for no hint of the change of route had been given him on the previous night. The battery was started off again on the road towards Pampeluna, and its commander rode on ahead to seek for the cavalry to whom he was attached. At this moment Wellington came up, expressed high wrath at finding the guns on the move in the wrong direction, and asked for Ramsay, who was not forthcoming for some time. Whereupon the angry general ordered him to be put under arrest for flagrant disobedience, and spoke of trying him by court martial. His version of the offence was that ‘Captain Ramsay disobeyed a positive order given him verbally by me, in expectation of a circumstance which occurred, namely that he might receive orders, from someone else to move as I did not wish him to move[630].’ It is easy to see how the vagueness in the wording of the order, or even a misconception of the stress laid upon one of its clauses, brought about Ramsay’s mistake. He understood that he was to halt till he got orders, and took Campbell’s message to be the orders meant. It is pretty clear from Wellington’s own language that Ramsay was not warned that he might receive orders not directly proceeding from G.H.Q., which he was to disregard entirely. Explanation of that kind would not have been in the Wellingtonian manner.
The unfortunate battery-commander, who had done splendid service on the 21st, and had a brilliant record behind him, gained the sympathy of the whole army, and such senior officers as dared continued to make intercession for his pardon. After keeping him for some weeks under arrest, Wellington resolved not to try him, and to send him back to his battery. But he was cut out of the reward which he had earned at Vittoria, and did not receive the brevet advance in rank or the decorations given to the other battery-commanders, so that he practically lost ground in comparison with his equals and fell to the bottom of the list. This was a deadly blow to Ramsay, who was sensitive and full of professional pride: he kept silence—not so his comrades, who filed the incident as another flagrant example of Wellington’s dislike for and injustice to the artillery arm[631]. He fell, still only a battery-commander, at Waterloo.
The result of the miscarriage of orders on the night of the 22nd and the morning of the 23rd was that Graham’s turning column was late in its movement. The general himself was one of the last to get the new direction—the cavalry which should have been at the head of the march was at its tail. The German Light Battalions were very far ahead of all the other units, and had to hold back in order to let the rest come up. Hence the attack on Villafranca was not delivered on the evening of the 23rd, as it might have been, but on the afternoon of the 24th, and in the intervening twenty-four hours the greater part of the French troops whom Graham might have cut off filed through Villafranca on their way to Tolosa and the frontier, and only a flank-guard was brought to action. Of this more in its proper place.