CHAPTER I
THE SIEGE OF ST. SEBASTIAN. FIRST PERIOD
Having pushed his whole front line up to the French border, from Giron at Irun, hard by the ocean, to Byng, far inland on the watershed of the historic Pass of Roncesvalles, Wellington turned his attention to the siege of St. Sebastian, on which he intended to press hard and rapidly, while Pampeluna was to be left for the present to the slower process of blockade and starvation. He had no intention of pushing forward into France till the result of the negotiations in Germany should be known. He was kept informed of the doings at Dresden from time to time, but occasionally bad weather in the Bay of Biscay delayed the courier from Downing Street, and there was an interval of many days, during which the absence of political information began to cause him anxiety. On the whole, as he was informed, it was probable that the war would be renewed; but the intentions of Austria were still suspect, and the danger of a separate peace in the North never ceased to disturb him until hostilities actually recommenced in the middle of August. On July 10th he had still many weeks to wait, before the news arrived that Metternich had broken with Napoleon—after a certain famous and stormy interview—and that Austria had come into the Grand Alliance. Meanwhile he intended to make his defensive position on the Pyrenean frontier sure, by the capture of the fortresses. It is curious to note that Napoleon understood and approved from the military point of view of this policy. On Aug. 5 he wrote to his minister Maret from Dresden, ‘it is certain that Lord Wellington had a very sensible scheme: he wished to take St. Sebastian and Pampeluna before the French Army could be reorganized. He supposed that it had suffered more heavily than was actually the case, and thought that more than a month would be required to refurnish it with artillery[772].’ This was a guess that came very near the truth, though the Emperor could not know that the cause of the British general’s delay was mainly political and not military.
It was fortunate for Wellington that the astounding triumph of Vittoria had put him in a position to dictate his own policy to the Ministry at home. For Lord Bathurst and Lord Liverpool had been sending him suggestions which filled him with grave apprehensions. Before the news of Vittoria reached London, the War Minister had ‘thrown out for consideration’ two most inept projects. If the French in Spain had been driven beyond the Ebro, would it not be possible to ‘contain’ them for the future by Spanish and Portuguese armies, and to bring round Wellington himself and the bulk of his British troops to Germany, leaving only a small nucleus to serve as a backbone for the native levies of the Peninsula? The appearance of Wellington with 40,000 of his veterans on the Elbe would probably induce the Allies to appoint him Generalissimo against Napoleon, and if Great Britain had the chief command in Germany she could dictate the policy of the Coalition. But supposing that the war was not resumed in Central Europe, and that a general peace was negotiated, would it be possible or expedient to allow the Emperor to retain the boundary of the Ebro for the French Empire, on condition that he yielded to the demands of the Allies in other parts of the Continent? Or would Wellington guarantee that in the event of a Peace from which Great Britain stood out, he would be able to maintain himself in Spain and Portugal, as in 1810 and 1811, even though Napoleon had no other enemies left, and could send what reinforcements he pleased across the Pyrenees?[773]
Even after the great event of June 21st had become known in London, we find the Prime Minister repeating some of Lord Bathurst’s most absurd suggestions. He wrote in a tentative and deferential style, to set forth the hypothesis that it might be possible to so fortify the Spanish frontier that it might be held by a small British force aided by Spanish levies, ‘applying the principle upon which the Lines before Lisbon were formed to the passes of the Pyrenees’; and he inquired whether the warlike Navarrese and Biscayans could not defend this new Torres Vedras, if backed by a small force—20,000 or at most 30,000—veteran Anglo-Portuguese troops[774]. If this could be done Lord Liverpool obviously hoped great things from the effect of the appearance of Wellington, with his new prestige and the bulk of his victorious battalions, in Central Europe.
The recipient of these ill-advised suggestions would have nothing to do with them. When on July 12th he got Bathurst’s dispatch of June 23rd, he replied that, being the servant of the State, he must obey any orders given him by the Prince Regent and the Ministry, but that he saw no profit in going to Germany, which he did not know, and where he was not known, whereas in Spain he had a unique advantage in ‘the confidence that everybody feels that what I do is right’. ‘Nobody could enjoy that same advantage here—while I should be no better than another in Germany. If any British army should be left in the Peninsula, therefore, it is best that I should remain with it.’ As to making any general peace which left the French the line of the Ebro as a frontier, that problem had been settled by the battle of Vittoria. ‘I recommend you not to give up an inch of Spanish territory; I think I can hold the Pyrenees as easily as I can Portugal.’ It would really be better to have Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain (considering how ready all Bonapartes are to break away from their brother), than to have Ferdinand back with the Ebro as his frontier. ‘In the latter case Spain would inevitably belong to the French[775].’
As to the ridiculous idea of fortifying the Pyrenean passes in the style of the Lines of Torres Vedras, Wellington speaks with no uncertain sound. ‘I do not think we could successfully apply to the frontier of Spain the system on which we fortified the country between Lisbon and the sea. That line was a short one, and the communications easiest and shortest on our side. The Pyrenees are a very long line; there are not fewer than seventy passes through these mountains, and the better communications, so far as I have been able to learn, are on the side of the enemy. We may facilitate defence by fortifying some of the passes: but we can never make in the Pyrenees what we made between the Tagus and the sea[776].’
It looks as if Lord Liverpool, in serene ignorance of local geography, imagined the Pyrenees to be a simple line of precipices, pierced by a limited number of passes, which could be sealed up with walls, in the style in which Alexander the Great in the mediaeval romance dealt with the ‘Caucasian Gates’. For we cannot suppose that even the most unmilitary of politicians could have conceived it possible to build something like the Great Wall of China for several hundred miles, along the whole frontier from Fuenterrabia to Figueras. Yet this is what his proposal, if taken literally, would have meant; and Wellington, to show its absurdity, gave the total number of passes available for mules or pedestrians between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean. Those by which guns or wheeled transport could pass were (of course) no more than five or six—but there would be no finality in sealing up these few: for the enemy could turn the flanks of any of them with infantry scrambling up accessible slopes—as Soult indeed did during the battles of the Pyrenees, only a month after Lord Liverpool had made his egregious suggestion—or as Napoleon had done at the Somosierra in the winter of 1808.
Lastly, as to the Prime Minister’s proposal to hand over the defence of the Pyrenees to Spanish armies backed by a mere 20,000 Anglo-Portuguese, Wellington replied that the Spanish Government had shown itself most consistently unable to feed, pay, and clothe its armies, or to provide the transport which would make them mobile. In June 1813 there were 160,000 men on the Spanish muster rolls, but only a third of that number at the front and actively engaged with the French, even when all troops in the Pyrenees, Aragon, and Catalonia were reckoned up. To trust the defence of the frontier to a government which could not move or feed more than a third of its own troops, would be to invite disaster. The best way to help the Spaniards was not to ask for more men, but to improve their finances, so that they should be able to employ a greater proportion of their already existing troops. As things stood at present, it would be insane to request them to take over the main burden of the war. ‘It is my opinion that you ought not to have less than 60,000 British troops in the field, let the Spaniards have what numbers they may[777].’
Wellington had by this time established himself in such a commanding position that the ministers had to accept his decision—however much they would have liked to move him round to Germany, and to press for his appointment to the unenviable position which Prince Schwarzenberg occupied during the second campaign of 1813. The best proof of the wisdom of his determination to remain in the Peninsula was that the French, far from adopting a defensive policy, resumed the offensive under Soult within a few weeks. It would be an unprofitable, as also a dismal, task to consider what would have happened during the battles of the Pyrenees had Soult been opposed, not by Wellington and his old army, but by a Spanish host under O’Donnell or Freire, backed by two or three Anglo-Portuguese divisions.