This last minimum result was all that was achieved. Suchet, it is true, had an anxious time during the critical days of Wellington’s march to Vittoria, and sent no help to the King. But neither was Tarragona taken by the Anglo-Sicilians, nor Valencia by the armies of Elio and Del Parque. Both of those forces endured humiliating checks, from an enemy over whom they had every strategical advantage. And the story of Murray’s operations about Tarragona is not the story of an honest and excusable failure, but one which provokes bitter irritation over the doings of a British general who showed himself not only timid and incompetent, but shifty, mendacious, and treacherous to his allies. There is nothing in the whole history of the Peninsular War which produces such an unpleasant impression as the facts revealed by the minutes of Murray’s court-martial, supplemented by certain documents which ought to have been forthcoming at that trial, but unfortunately were not.
But to proceed to the details of this unhappy campaign. In obedience to Wellington’s orders, Murray began to draw his army in to Alicante between the 25th and 27th of May, the forward positions which the Anglo-Sicilians had held being handed over to Elio’s troops, while those of Del Parque, who had at last been brought up from the borders of Andalusia, took post on Elio’s left, about Yecla and Chinchilla. Both these armies were to move forward, as soon as Suchet should be detected in the act of detaching divisions northward to deal with Murray’s oncoming invasion. The appearance of the Spaniards on ground hitherto held by British outposts gave the Marshal warning that some new plan was developing. A raid by sea was an obvious possibility, but he could not tell whether it might not be directed on a point as far south as Valencia or as far north as Rosas. Till Murray showed his hand only precautionary movements could be made. Suchet was at this moment stronger than he had been at the time of the battle of Castalla. Warned of his danger by the results of that fight, he had strengthened his troops on the littoral at the expense of the garrisons inland. Severoli’s Italian division had been ordered down from Saragossa to Valencia[665]. This heavy draft on the northern section of his army was rendered possible by the fact that Clausel had come far forward into Aragon in pursuit of Mina, so that Saragossa and its region could be held with smaller numbers than usual. The Spanish irregular forces in this direction had full occupation found for them, by the raid of the Army of Portugal into their sphere of operations. And this suited well with Wellington’s general plan—the more that French troops were drawn down to the Mediterranean, the less would there be of them available for service in Castile, when his own blow came to be delivered.
Murray had at his disposal in the harbour of Alicante transports sufficient to carry much more than the force of 10,000 men, which Wellington had named as the minimum with which a raid on Catalonia might be attempted. He was able to embark the whole of his own army, with the exception of the regiment of Sicilian cavalry (he was short of horse-transports), and in addition nearly the whole of Whittingham’s Spaniards—all indeed save one battalion[666] and the attached squadrons. This made up a force of 14,000 infantry, 800 cavalry, and 800 artillery, with 24 field-guns and the battering train which had been sent round from Portugal. The British contingent was a little stronger than at the time of the battle of Castalla, for if one battalion of the King’s German Legion had been sent back to Sicily since that fight, Wellington had permitted Murray to draw in the 2/67th, long in garrison at Cartagena, and had sent him a Portuguese and a British company of artillery to man his battering train[667]. Moreover, two squadrons of Brunswick Hussars had arrived direct from England.
The whole force, having been swiftly embarked at Alicante, sailed on May 31st; and being favoured with a strong south-west wind came in sight of the high-lying Tarragona on June 2nd. The fleet of transports ran into the bay sheltered by Cape Salou, eight miles south of its goal. There would have been no object in risking a more difficult disembarkation on the long open beaches at the mouth of the Francoli river, closer to Tarragona. Before landing his main body Murray shipped off two battalions (2/67th and De Roll-Dillon) under Colonel Prevost, to seize the defile of the Col de Balaguer, the point twenty miles to the south of Tarragona where the coast-road from Tortosa curves round a steep headland between a precipice and the sea. There was a small French fort, San Felipe de Balaguer, blocking the Col, and Prevost was ordered to take it if he could. But its fall was not an absolutely essential condition to the success of the siege, for the road could be cut, blasted away, or blocked with entrenchments north of the fort, at several points where a thousand men could stop a whole army corps. It was desirable to take this precaution, because the Col de Balaguer road was the only route by which succours coming from Valencia could reach the plain of Tarragona, without taking an immense détour inland, by paths impracticable for artillery.
On hearing of the arrival of the British fleet off Cape Salou, General Copons, Captain-General of Catalonia, rode down from his head-quarters at Reus, ten miles away, to report to Murray that he had received Wellington’s instructions, and had done his best to carry them out. The Spanish Army of Catalonia consisted of no more than 15,000 men, even after it had received the two battalions which Wellington had sent to it by sea during the winter[668]. Over 5,500 of them were locked up in garrisons in the interior; many of these were untrained recruits, and none were available for the field. Of the remainder, Copons had brought down twelve battalions to the neighbourhood of Tarragona, leaving only two under his second-in-command, Eroles, to watch the French garrisons in the north[669]. He had also with him his handful of cavalry—370 sabres; field-guns the army had none. Altogether there were 7,000 men ready to join Murray at once: 1,500 more might be brought in, if the French of the northern garrisons should move down to join General Decaen at Barcelona. Copons had certainly done all that was in his power to aid Wellington’s scheme. Murray asked him to lend two battalions to join the brigade that was to strike at Fort San Felipe and to block the Col de Balaguer, and to arrange the rest so as to cover at a distance the disembarkation of the Anglo-Sicilian army. Copons consented, and on the next morning the whole force came ashore, Prevost’s brigade in a creek near the Col de Balaguer, where it found the two Spanish battalions already arrived, the rest of the army at Salou Bay. The expeditionary force was little cumbered with transport, and had but a small allowance of horses and mules: the infantry and some of the field-guns with the greater part of the cavalry were ashore by the early afternoon, and marched that same night on Tarragona, which was invested from sea to sea, Mackenzie and Adam taking up their position by the mouth of the Francoli, Clinton occupying the Olivo heights, and Whittingham extending down to the shore east of the city. The French garrison kept quiet—being of no strength sufficient to justify the showing of a man outside the walls.
General Bertoletti had with him two battalions, one French and one Italian[670], a company of Juramentados, two companies of artillery, and the armed crews of three small vessels which were blockaded in the port—they were turned on to act as auxiliary gunners. The whole did not exceed 1,600 men. This was an entirely inadequate force, and the defences were in an unsatisfactory condition. After Suchet had captured the city in 1811, he had no intention of leaving locked up behind him a garrison of the size required for such a large fortress. The outer enceinte had been left in the condition of ruin consequent on the siege[671], and only the Upper City on its high cliff was occupied. Its western front, where the breaches had been, was repaired; but the Lower City and its fortifications remained practically untouched. All that had been done was to patch up two isolated strong-points, the so-called Fort Royal and Bastion of St. Carlos. These had been cut off from the mass of the ruins, and closed in at the rear: each was armed with one gun. The object of this was merely to prevent British ships from entering Tarragona roadstead and mooring there. These two outlying posts, dangerously remote from the city above, were held by no more than a company each. Bertoletti thought for a moment of abandoning them, since he dared not detach reinforcements from his inadequate garrison, and his communication with the forts was across half a mile of exposed ground: nothing was more likely than that the enemy would slip detachments among the ruined houses and walls of the Lower City, and dig himself in between the Upper City and the weak outlying posts, which must inevitably fall. But reflecting on the advantage of keeping the harbour unusable, he resolved to hold on to them till the last minute. And his policy turned out to be justified, for had they been evacuated, even the torpid and timorous Murray could hardly have avoided the temptation of closing in on the Upper City, which was in no condition to hold out for the space of nine days during which the Anglo-Sicilian army lay in front of it.
From the first moment of his landing Murray seems to have been obsessed with the idea that every disposable French soldier in Catalonia and Valencia would be on his back within a very few days. As his evidence during his court martial shows, he had a notion that Suchet would practically evacuate Valencia, and march against him with three-quarters of his available men, while at the same time Decaen would abandon all Catalonia save the largest towns and bring an even greater force to Tarragona from the north. He had made elaborate, and in part correct, calculations as to the gross force of the two French armies, by which he made out that the enemy might conceivably concentrate 25,000 men against him. For the fact that such a force would have to be scraped together from very remote points, between which communication must be very difficult, he made insufficient allowance. Still less did he calculate out the handicap on the enemy caused by the fact that Suchet and Decaen were out of touch with each other, and would obviously look upon the problem presented to them from different points of view,—all the former’s action being influenced by his wish to hold on to Valencia, all the latter’s by his anxiety not to have his communication with France cut off. Murray assumed that all roads marked on his map would be practicable to the enemy, that Suchet’s information would always be correct, that his troops would march every day the possible maximum, and that they would have no difficulties concerned with food, water, or weather. Every conceivable hazard of war was to fall luckily for the enemy, unluckily for himself. At his trial in 1814 he explained that he was never sanguine of success, and that he did not expect when he sailed that he could take Tarragona[672]. He chose to regard himself as the blind and unwilling instrument of Wellington’s orders, which he would carry out, so far as he could, with an expectation that they would lead to failure. And he observed that the dominating motive which influenced all his doings was that Wellington had written that ‘he would forgive everything excepting that the corps should be beaten or dispersed’[673]. Deducing from this phrase the general policy that he must pursue, Murray came to the conclusion ‘the first principle is the army’s safety’. He started intending to subordinate all chances of success to the remotest risk of defeat. His mind obsessed with this miserable prepossession, he was, in fact, defeated before he had ever set sail. Yet he hid his resolve from his generals, even from the senior officer, Clinton, who would have succeeded to the command if he had fallen sick or received a chance bullet. They all complained that he never gave them any hint of what were his intentions, or showed them Wellington’s orders which it was his duty to carry out. ‘We were totally uninformed,’ said Clinton at the court martial, ‘of the instructions which the Commander of the forces might have for his guidance[674]. The first that we knew of these instructions of the Commander of the forces, and then partially only, was when he produced them at a Council of War on June 17th,’ after the siege of Tarragona was over. Clinton, Mackenzie, and Adam, the three commanders of units, were all very confident in their men: ‘they were in the highest state of discipline and equipment[675],’ said Mackenzie, and spoiling for a fight. Hence their entire amazement as they discovered that Murray was intending to avoid all offensive operations: it even led to an infraction of discipline, when Mackenzie, Adam, and General Donkin[676] called together on their commander to urge on him a more active policy[677], and were chased out of the room with the words ‘it will not do’—a decision which, as Mackenzie remarked, ‘was unanswerable’. For any further urging of the point would have amounted to military disobedience. From the moment when the army landed at Cape Salou on June 3rd, down to the day of its ignominious flight on June 12th, Murray was thinking of nothing but horrible possibilities—he was what the French call a catastrophard.
Probably his most disastrous resolve of all was that which he came to when first he surveyed Tarragona, on the evening of his disembarkation. Though he noted the half-ruinous condition of the two outworks, on which the enemy was working to the last moment, their isolated position, and the fact that they were surrounded by all sorts of cover easily to be seized, he resolved to lay formal siege to them, as if they were the solid front of a regular line of defence. As Napier remarks with perfect good sense, they should have been dealt with as Wellington dealt with the Redoute Renaud at Rodrigo, or Hill with the forts of Almaraz, which were far more formidable works than the Fuerte Real or San Carlos[678]. They should have been taken by force, escaladed, on the night of the formation of the blockade. And being incomplete, ill-flanked, and without palisades or ditch, and under-manned, they undoubtedly could have been rushed. But Murray, instead of trying to gain time for the prompt attack on the main fortress and its badly-stopped breaches, proceeded to lay out approaches and commence batteries on the low ground by the mouth of the Francoli river, with the object of reducing the two outworks by regular operations. On June 4th one battery was commenced near the sea, 600 yards from San Carlos, another farther inland, 900 yards from the Fuerte Real. Their construction was covered by a naval bombardment: Admiral Hallowell moved into the roadstead a brig, three bomb-vessels, and two gunboats, which shelled the Upper City freely, in order to distract the attention of the garrison from the work on the batteries by the Francoli. The fire was kept up from dusk till dawn on the 4th-5th, and repeated on the 6th-7th during the same hours—throughout the day the workers in the trenches kept low. This bombardment had the desired result of permitting the batteries to be finished without molestation, but inflicted no great damage on the city, though it set fire to some houses, and caused casualties both among the garrison and the inhabitants. But unaimed night-fire had of course no effect on the walls of the enceinte.
By dawn on the 6th the two batteries were ready and opened on the outworks with six guns: they kept up the fire all day, and with some effect, suffering themselves very little from the distant counter-fire of the Upper City. At dark, according to the French narrative of the defence, parties of skirmishers came out of the trenches, took cover in the ruins of the lower city and kept up a persistent tiraillade against the outworks[679]. It was expected that they would try to rush them at some chosen hour—and this would undoubtedly have been the right policy. But nothing of the kind happened; the British parties withdrew at dawn, and Bertoletti began to ask himself whether the whole of these feeble operations were not a mere demonstration, intended to draw the French armies of Valencia and Catalonia toward Tarragona, while the real blow was being delivered in some other quarter.
During the second night of naval bombardment, that of the 6th-7th, Murray had ordered a third breaching battery to be built, near the bridge of the Francoli, 300 yards closer to the Fuerte Real than the original battery, No. 2. On the morning of the 7th all three batteries were hard at work, and with good effect; the gorge of the Fuerte Real was blown to bits by flank fire from the new battery, its one gun silenced, its parapet levelled for a long space: the garrison had to keep under cover. At dusk Major Thackeray, the senior engineer of the army, reported that the work could be stormed at any moment. According to Murray’s narrative Thackeray made at the same moment the curious comment, that if the fort were escaladed and occupied, the ground gained would be of no immediate use for the attack on the Upper City, whose most accessible front—the bastions of San Juan and San Pablo—might be much more easily battered from the slopes of the Olivo hill, farther inland, than from the low-lying site of the Fuerte Real. To storm the outworks would cost men—to build new advanced batteries on or near them would cost many more, since they were completely commanded by the Upper City. ‘As the state of the fort was now such that it could be taken whenever convenient,’ wrote Murray, ‘I consented to defer the attack, and directed that the fire upon it should continue only sufficiently to prevent its being re-established[680].’