There was nothing approaching united action, provinces and towns often vieing in more or less friendly rivalry. They did not understand, or if they understood they did not realize, that patriotic cliques do not make for strength. They fought for themselves rather than for the nation as a whole. Throughout the struggle we find a lack of cohesion.
When we come to look at the earliest available statistics[36] of the various Spanish armies which formed the front line, we find that their total strength in regulars, militia battalions, and newly-raised corps was 151,248. They were divided into five chief armies, namely, of Galicia, Aragon, Estremadura, the Centre, and Catalonia, under Generals Blake, Palafox, Galluzzo, Castaños, and Vives respectively. The troops of the second line numbered about 65,000, and included the Army of Granada, under Reding, the Army of Reserve of Madrid, commanded by San Juan, the Galician, Asturian, Estremaduran, Andalusian, Murcian and Valencian reserves, and the 3000 odd men in garrison in the Balearic Isles.
The gross total of the French Army of Spain at this period dwarfs the above figures for all their brave show; it reached 314,612. From this must be deducted 32,643 detached troops and 37,844 in hospital or missing, making the “effective” no fewer than 244,125. Of the eight corps, Victor commanded the 1st, Bessières[37] the 2nd, Moncey the 3rd, Lefebvre the 4th, Mortier the 5th, Ney the 6th, St Cyr the 7th, and Junot the 8th. There were also Reserve Cavalry and Infantry, the Imperial Guard, troops marching from Germany, and National Guards inside the French frontier.[38]
When we consider that on the 31st May 1808 Napoleon had only 116,000 men in Spain and that within six months he had found it necessary to more than double that number, the desperate nature of the undertaking becomes plain.
To enter fully into the doings of the various armies throughout the war would deflect us far out of our proper course, but we shall hear of them whenever Wellesley was involved.
If you would know the ferocious spirit of the patriots, the hate they cherished for Napoleon and the French, you have only to turn to any one of the many Memoirs of men who fought in the Peninsular War. Captain, later Sir Harry, Smith, who was with Sir John Moore in 1808 and remained with Wellesley until March 1814, gives many instances in his vivacious “Autobiography,”[39] but the following must suffice. Smith’s guide happened to be the owner of the house in which his wife and baggage were quartered in the village of Offala:
“After I had dressed myself,” he relates, “he came to me and said, ‘When you dine, I have some capital wine, as much as you and your servants like; but,’ he says, ‘come down and look at my cellar.’ The fellow had been so civil, I did not like to refuse him. We descended by a stone staircase, he carrying a light. He had upon his countenance a most sinister expression. I saw something exceedingly excited him: his look became fiend-like. He and I were alone, but such confidence had we Englishmen in a Spaniard, and with the best reason, that I apprehended no personal evil. Still his appearance was very singular. When we got to the cellar-door, he opened it, and held the light so as to show the cellar; when, in a voice of thunder, and with an expression of demoniacal hatred and antipathy, pointing to the floor, he exclaimed, ‘There lie four of the devils who thought to subjugate Spain! I am a Navarrese. I was born free from all foreign invasion, and this right hand shall plunge this stiletto in my own heart as it did into theirs, ere I and my countrymen are subjugated!’ brandishing his weapon like a demon. I see the excited patriot as I write. Horror-struck as I was, the instinct of self-preservation induced me to admire the deed exceedingly, while my very frame quivered and my blood was frozen, to see the noble science of war and the honour and chivalry of arms reduced to the practices of midnight assassins. Upon the expression of my admiration, he cooled, and while he was deliberately drawing wine for my dinner, which, however strange it may be, I drank with the gusto its flavour merited, I examined the four bodies. They were Dragoons—four athletic, healthy-looking fellows. As we ascended, he had perfectly recovered the equilibrium of his vivacity and naturally good humour. I asked him how he, single-handed, had perpetrated this deed on four armed men (for their swords were by their sides). ‘Oh, easily enough. I pretended to love a Frenchman’ (or, in his words, ‘I was an Afrancesado’), ‘and I proposed, after giving them a good dinner, we should drink to the extermination of the English.’ He then looked at me and ground his teeth. ‘The French rascals, they little guessed what I contemplated. Well, we got into the cellar, and drank away until I made them so drunk, they fell, and my purpose was easily, and as joyfully, effected.’ He again brandished his dagger, and said, ‘Thus die all enemies to Spain.’ Their horses were in his stable. When the French Regiment marched off, he gave these to some guerrillas in the neighbourhood. It is not difficult to reconcile with truth the assertion of the historian who puts down the loss of the French army, during the Spanish war, as 400,000 men, for more men fell in this midnight manner than by the broad-day sword, or the pestilence of climate, which in Spain, in the autumn, is excessive.”
Sir Harry Smith and the Spanish Patriot
Thomas Maybank