“At this moment of painful expectation the English line would make a quarter-turn—the muskets were going up to the ‘ready.’ An indefinable sensation nailed to the spot many of our men, who halted and opened a wavering fire. The enemy’s return, a volley of simultaneous precision and deadly effect, crashed in upon us like a thunderbolt. Decimated by it we reeled together, staggering under the blow and trying to recover our equilibrium. Then three formidable Hurrahs termined the long silence of our adversaries. With the third they were down upon us, pressing us into a disorderly retreat. But to our great surprise, they did not pursue their advantage for more than some hundred yards, and went back with calm to their former lines, to await another attack. We rarely failed to deliver it when our reinforcements came up—with the same want of success and heavier losses.”[96]
Helplessness of the Column
This is the picture that we need to complete our study of the conflict of column with line. The psychology of the huddled mass going forward to inevitable defeat could not be better portrayed. The only thing that is hard for us to understand is the reason which induced capable men like Soult, D’Erlon, or Foy to continue to use the columnar formation all through the dark days of 1813–14, and even in the final campaign of Waterloo. All honour must be paid, however, to the rank and file who, with five years of such experience behind them, were still steadfast and courageous enough to put up a good fight even in their last offensive battles in the Pyrenees, as well as in the defensive actions of Orthez and Toulouse.
CHAPTER V
WELLINGTON’S TACTICS—THE CAVALRY AND ARTILLERY
Hitherto we have been confining our outlook on Wellington’s tactics to his use of infantry. But a few words must be added as to his methods of handling the other two arms—cavalry and artillery. There are fortunately one or two memoranda of his own which enable us to interpret his views on the use of these arms, which were to him mainly auxiliary; for the epigram that he was “essentially an infantry general” is in the main correct, though it needs some comment and explanation. In the early part of his Peninsular campaigning he was forced to be an “infantry general,” since the home government kept him unreasonably short in the matter of horsemen and guns till the year 1811 was far spent. Moreover, the ground over which he had to fight in 1809–10–11 must be considered.
The Iberian Peninsula may from the point of view of the cavalry tactician be divided into two sets of regions, in the one of which the mounted arm is all-important, while in the other it may, almost without exaggeration, be described as well-nigh negligible as an element of military strength, being only usable on a small scale, for exploration and observation, and not being able to be employed effectively in mass.
To the first-named class of regions, the tracts eminently suitable for the employment of cavalry, belong the great plateau of Central Spain, the broad arable plains of Old Castile and Leon, from Burgos to Ciudad Rodrigo and from Astorga to Aranda. Here, in a gently undulating upland, little enclosed, and mainly laid out in great common-fields, cavalry has one of the suitable terrains that can be found for it in Europe—as favourable as Champagne, or the lowlands of Northern Germany. This is also, almost to the same extent, the case with the loftier and less cultivated plateau of New Castile, and with the melancholy thinly peopled moors of La Mancha and Estremadura, where the horseman may ride ahead for twenty or thirty miles without meeting any serious natural obstacle, save at long intervals the steep cleft of a ravine, dry in summer, full of a fierce stream in winter. Nor are the great central uplands the only tracts of Spain where cavalry finds an admirable field for operations: the central valley of the Ebro in Aragon, and the whole of the broad plain of the Guadalquivir in Andalusia, are equally suited for the employment of the mounted arm, on the largest scale. Napoleon, therefore, was entirely justified when he attached a very large proportion of horse to his Army of Spain, and when he uttered his dictum that great portions of it must inevitably be the possession of the general who owned the larger and the more efficient mass of squadrons.
On the other hand, there are large tracts of the Peninsula where cavalry is almost as useless as in Switzerland or Calabria. Such are the whole Pyrenean tract on the north, extending from Catalonia, by Aragon and Navarre, to the Asturian and Galician lands along the southern shore of the Bay of Biscay. It will be remembered that, during the Pyrenean Campaign of 1813, Wellington sent back very nearly all his cavalry to the plain of the Ebro, while Soult left his in the plain of the Adour. Sir John Moore’s small but fine cavalry force was useless to him in the Corunna retreat, when once Astorga had been passed, and the Galician mountains entered. He sent it on before him, with the exception of a squadron or two kept with the rear-guard. Soult’s more numerous mounted force, in that same campaign, was only useful in picking up Moore’s stragglers, and keeping the British continuously on the march—it was brought to a dead stop every time that the retreating army showed an infantry rear-guard, and stood at bay in one of the innumerable Galician defiles.
There is another tract of the Peninsula almost as unsuited as the Pyrenean and Galician highlands for the use of cavalry—and that is Portugal, where so much of Wellington’s earlier campaigning took place. Deducting some coast plains of comparatively small extent, all Northern and Central Portugal is mountainous—not for the most part mountainous on a large scale, with high summits and broad valleys, but mountainous on a small scale with rugged hills of 2000 or 3000 feet, between which flow deeply-sunk torrents in narrow ravines—where roads are all uphill and downhill and a defile occurs every few miles. It was the character of this countryside which made Wellington’s army of 1810–11, with its very small cavalry force—only seven British and four or five Portuguese regiments—safe against Masséna’s immensely preponderant number of squadrons. All through the long retreat from Almeida to the lines of Torres Vedras the allied army could never be caught, turned, or molested; the cavalry on both sides was only employed in petty rear-guard actions, in which the small force brought the larger to a check in defiles, and generally gave back only when the invader brought up infantry to support his attack. For all the good that it did him, Masséna might have left his 7000 cavalry behind him when he entered Portugal—a few squadrons for exploration was all that he needed. Jammed in narrow defiles, where they were helpless, his mounted men were often more of an incumbrance than a help to him.