Since the 26th Clausel had been practically out of danger, for he had the Ebro, whose bridges at Lodosa and Tudela he had destroyed, between him and Wellington’s columns. There was no force which could have stopped him, for there are 20 miles less of road between Lodosa and Tudela than between Pampeluna and Tudela. Wellington had hoped for a moment that Mina might have intercepted the French column at Tudela, and have held it in check long enough to allow the British to come up. But though Mina was, so far as mere distances went, capable of striking at Tudela, two things prevented him from being able to do so—the first was the obstacle of the Ebro, the second the fact that Tudela was a fortified place with a competent garrison. Even if the great guerrillero had got his men across the river, he certainly could not have captured Tudela, and equally certainly would have been beaten by Clausel, when the French column—double his available force in numbers—came up, if he had dared to offer battle in the open near the town.
During the night of the 27th Wellington heard that Clausel had slipped past Tudela in haste, and that Mina, quite unable to stop him, was only able to follow him with his cavalry—to which Julian Sanchez’s Lancers had joined themselves. At a very early hour on the 28th—before 5 o’clock in the morning—the British Commander-in-Chief issued a fresh set of orders in view of this untoward news[638]. They are a little difficult to understand, but internal evidence seems to show that Wellington must have received some sort of report tending to make him think it possible that Clausel, instead of falling back on Saragossa and joining Suchet’s army, might march across country by the road Tauste-Exea-Un Castillo-Jaca, or the alternative road Exea-Luna-Murillo-Jaca, in order to cross the Pyrenees by the pass of Canfranc and join the King’s army in Bearn. Or he might march through Saragossa in haste, and make for Jaca by the Gallego river[639]. There was a bare possibility of intercepting him by turning the whole pursuing column eastward, and taking it into the valley of the river Aragon, from which it would march by Sanguesa and Berdun on Jaca. The weak point of the scheme was that there was no certainty that Clausel would march on Jaca at all: he might stop in Aragon and combine his operations with those of Suchet. Or even if he did start for Jaca, when he heard that his road was intercepted by British troops, he would naturally turn back and cast in his lot with the French Army of Aragon, rather than with the King.
It is therefore rather surprising to find that Wellington imposed two days of heavy marching on his left wing, on the bare possibility that Clausel might be intercepted at or near Jaca. The orders for the 28th June were for the cavalry at the head of the column to make the long march Olite-Caparrosa-Caseda, by the good but circuitous road along the valley of the Aragon, taking in charge the artillery belonging to the infantry divisions. The latter were to cut across from the Pampeluna to the Sanguesa roads by country tracks in the hills—the Light Division by Olite-Beyre-Gallipienzo, the 4th Division by Tafalla-St. Martin de Unx-Gallipienzo. The 3rd and 7th Divisions, farther behind, went from Mendavil by Olleta to Caseda. This move concentrated 30,000 men in a solid body on a decent road—but left a very long gap between them and the troops blockading Pampeluna—and the gap would grow longer each day that the marching force pushed north-eastward up the course of the Aragon on its way to Jaca[640].
On the following day (June 29th) the column, now with the 3rd Division at its head and the 4th Division at its tail, had moved along the river till its head reached Sanguesa, when Wellington suddenly made up his mind to relinquish the scheme, which (as he himself owned) had never been a very promising one. He wrote to Castaños that Clausel, having passed Tudela marching hard for Saragossa, had got too long a start, and could not be caught. The plan of intercepting him at Jaca had been given up, firstly because it would probably have failed, and secondly because, if it had succeeded, it would only have forced Clausel to join Suchet—which was not a thing to be desired[641]. A third reason, which he did not cite to Castaños but reserved for Lord Bathurst’s private eye, was that the Army was marching very badly, with many stragglers, and many marauders. ‘The British on the 17th June were 41,547 rank and file: on the 29th, 35,650 rank and file—diminution, 5,897. Now the loss in the battle was 3,164—so that the diminution from irregularities, straggling, &c., for plunder, is 2,733.’ The Portuguese before the battle were 25,489—their present strength is 23,044. As they lost only 1,022 in the battle, they show an extra diminution of another 1,423 rank and file, from the same causes as the British. ‘There are only 160 men in the hospital which I established—the others are plundering the country in different directions.’ The truth was, that the Army was sulky—the men had not got over the effects of the looting at Vittoria, the weather had been bad, and the hunt after Clausel had been regarded by officers and men alike as a wild-goose chase.
The French General gave his men three days’ rest at Saragossa (June 30-July 2) and then started to march up the Gallego river to Jaca, where the head of his column arrived on July 6th: he then halted his divisions for some days, stopping in a position where he could either cross the pass of Canfranc into France, for he had no field-guns or wheeled transport with him, to impede his passage by that steep defile, or else return into the plains of Aragon. If Suchet should come to Saragossa with the Army of Valencia, he could drop back to meet him. But on the 11th arrived the news that Saragossa had been evacuated on the preceding day, after some indecisive fighting between General Paris’s garrison and the bands of Mina and Duran, who had beset the city on both sides of the Ebro. All chance of a junction with Suchet having vanished, Clausel crossed the Pyrenees next day, after leaving a garrison in Jaca. He came down into the Val d’Aspe on the French side, with 11,000 infantry, 500 horse, and six mountain guns packed on mules—his sole artillery. He had lost somewhere about 1,500 men in his long march—some broken-down stragglers, others sick left in hospital at Tudela and Saragossa. All these fell into the hands of Mina, but the casualties in actual fighting had been practically nil. By July 15th the whole column, marching over the Pyrenean foot-hills, had reached St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, and come into touch with the Armies of the South and Centre, who had so long and vainly desired to see Clausel.
Meanwhile Wellington, having stopped his eastward march on June 29th, had given his troops one day’s rest, and then drawn them back toward Pampeluna by the road through Monreal. He was now about to take up the pursuit of the King’s troops, which had been abandoned on the 25th while he went off on his fruitless hunt after Clausel—an enterprise which would have been far better left to Mina and the guerrilleros, for there never had been much probability of its succeeding. But the new move required several days of preparation, since four divisions had to be brought back from the valley of the Aragon, and one more, the 6th, to come up from Lerin via Puente La Reyna. And it was necessary to provide a considerable force for the blockade of Pampeluna. The instructions for July 1 were that Hill was to make the first move, by marching northward with the 2nd Division, handing over the investment of Pampeluna to Silveira’s Portuguese and Morillo’s Spaniards[642], to whose assistance there would come up in 24 hours the 7th Division, and a little later the 3rd Division. Hill was to march by the Col de Velate and Santesteban into the Bastan, from which it was intended that he should drive out D’Erlon’s divisions.
But these operations belong to the fighting of July, and before dealing with them it is necessary to go back to June 22nd, in order to follow the fortunes of the other large French force, which might have been present at the battle of Vittoria, but was not.
SECTION XXXVII: CHAPTER II
THE PURSUIT OF FOY
We left General Foy at the decisive moment when he received the dispatch forwarded by Thouvenot from Vittoria, which informed him of the King’s retreat beyond the Ebro, and suggested that he might come in to join the main army, but left him the fatal choice of deciding whether his own immediate operations were or were not of such paramount importance that they could not be abandoned[643]. Foy decided, and many other generals have made a similar error in all ages, that his own job was the really important thing. The dispatch reached him on the 19th, when he had his division concentrated at Bergara, and could have brought it to Vittoria in time for the battle. Probably the brigade of Berlier, belonging to the Army of the North, which was under his orders, could also have been brought in from Villafranca to Vittoria by the 21st.