Four days after the murder of San Juan, and the dispersion of his army, two divisions of French cavalry, under Milhaud and Lasalle, entered Talavera. They found the body of the Spanish General still on the gibbet, and this murder furnished Buonaparte with a new subject of invective against the Spaniards; though this, and the thousand deaths, and all the untold crimes, and all the unutterable miseries with which the peninsula was filled, were the consequences of his own single conduct, the fruits of his individual wickedness. Lasalle fell in with sixteen Englishmen upon the road, stragglers from General Hope’s detachment, and it was related in the bulletins[39] of Buonaparte, as an exploit worthy of remembrance and commendation, that a division of French cavalry, falling in with sixteen Englishmen who had lost their way, put them to the sword. This was but a small part of the force which was destined to proceed in this direction. As soon as Madrid had been delivered up, Lefebvre was ordered to advance from Valladolid towards Lisbon. First he advanced to Segovia, which he entered unresisted. The people were dispirited by the panic and flight of their armies; but it should not be forgotten for their exculpation, that the more generous and heroic spirits, having flocked to their country’s standard among the foremost levies, had already received their crown of martyrdom, or were clinging to the wreck of the two great armies of the north and the centre, or were consummating the sacrifice of duty in Zaragoza. In one place only between Valladolid and the capital did this part of the French army experience any opposition. The pass of Guadarrama was open to them: General Hope had been stationed there, but was recalled by Sir John Moore, and there were no native troops to supply his place. But when the enemy descended ♦The French take possession of the Escurial.♦ upon the Escurial, and proceeded to take possession of that palace, the magnificent monument of a victory which Spain had achieved over France in open, honourable war, and in a fair field, they found the peasantry assembled to defend the seat and sepulchres of their kings. Undisciplined as they were, ill-armed, and with none to direct their efforts, they stood their ground till they were overpowered by practised troops, superior in numbers as well as in arms; and the French, after the slaughter of these brave peasants before the gates, took up their quarters in the palace of the Philips. He who founded that stately pile, could he then have beheld from his grave what was passing around him, would have seen the consequences of that despotic system which he and his father established upon the ruins of the old free constitution of Spain.
It was a noble feeling which led these peasants to sacrifice themselves in defence of the Escurial, and the action did not pass unnoticed by those able and enlightened Spaniards whose patriotic writings at this time did honour to themselves and to their country. “Nothing,” said Don Isidro de Antillon, “is more worthy of public interest, and nothing will more excite the admiration of posterity, than a deed like this. If indeed we had only armies to oppose to Buonaparte, infallibly we should become his slaves; the victory would be the usurper’s beyond all resource. But it is the collective strength of our inhabited places, the defence of our walls, the obstinate and repeated resistance of the people in the streets and gateways, along the roads and upon the heights, wherever they can cut off or annoy the detachments of the enemy, ... the universal spirit of insurrection, now become as it were the very element of our existence; this it is which disconcerts his plans, which renders his victories useless, and after a thousand vicissitudes and disasters, will finally establish the independence and the glory of Spain.”
♦Excesses of the French.♦
Lefebvre entered Madrid on the 8th of December. Buonaparte reviewed his division in the Prado, and dispatched it to Toledo, while Sebastiani with another division marched for Talavera. In that city, by the 19th, about 25,000 French were assembled, including 5000 cavalry. The wiser inhabitants fled before their arrival, preferring the miseries of emigration to the insults and atrocities which they must otherwise have endured: for the exaction of heavy contributions, which reduced half the people to beggary, was the least evil those towns endured that fell under the yoke of the French. Every where the soldiers were permitted to plunder; no asylum could secure the women from their unrestrained brutality; churches and convents were profaned with as little compunction as dwelling-houses were broken open; and in many instances, the victims were exposed naked in the streets. The Spanish government exclaimed loudly against these enormities. “In other times,” they said, “war was carried on between army and army, soldier and soldier; their fury spent itself upon the field of battle; and when courage, combined with fortune, had decided the victory, the conquerors behaved to the conquered like men of honour, and the defenceless people were respected. The progress of civilization had tempered the evils of hostility, till a nation which so lately boasted that it was the most polished in the world, renewed, in the 19th century, the cruelty of the worst savages, and all the horrors which make us tremble in perusing the history of the irruptions of the barbarians of old. Like tygers, these enemies make no distinction in their carnage, ... the aged, the infants, the women, ... all are alike to them, wherever they can find blood to shed.”
This appeal could be of no avail against a tyrant who, in the very origin of the war, had shown himself dead to all sense of justice, humanity, and even of honour, which sometimes supplies their place; nor against generals and officers who could serve him in such a cause. Such men could be taught humanity only by the severest retaliation. The language which the government addressed to their own subjects might be more effectual. “What resource have you,” said they, “in submission and in cowardice? If by this abasement you could purchase a miserable existence, that perhaps with base minds might exculpate you. But you fly to your houses to perish in them, or to be idle spectators of the horrors which these ruffian soldiers are preparing for you! Yes! wait for them there, and they will not tarry long ere they come and shed before your eyes the blood of the innocent victims whom you will not defend. Old fathers, wretched mothers, prepare to receive your daughters released from the arms of an hundred barbarians only when they are in the act of death! or if they recover life, to curse it in the bitterness of unextinguishable shame; tell them to reproach those cowardly husbands, those base lovers, who are content to live, and see them plunged in this abominable infamy. But they will not be suffered to live; hand-cuffed and haltered, they will be dragged out of their country; they will be made soldiers by force, though they would not become so from honour and a sense of duty; there they will be exposed in the foremost ranks to the fire of the enemy; there they will not be able to fly; ... the toil, the danger, and death will be theirs; the glory and the spoil will be their conquerors’, and the crowns which they win will be for the tyrant, the cause of all this misery.”
♦Galluzo collects the fugitives in Extremadura.♦
It had been happy for Spain if the government had always acted as energetically as it wrote; but it should be remembered in justice to the Spaniards, that the dispersion of the troops was in many instances an act of self-preservation, so utterly were they left without supplies of food or clothing, by the inexperience and incompetence of every military department. Even against the testimony and the reproaches of its own government, the Spanish nation stands acquitted. Never did men suffer more patiently, or fight more bravely, than Blake’s army. There was no want of courage at Tudela; and of the remains of the army which fought there, a large proportion was at this very time defending Zaragoza with a heroism unexampled in modern times, upon any other soil. Wherever, indeed, a new army was to be collected, soldiers were not wanting. After San Juan’s death, Galluzo was appointed to the command; he took his post at the bridge of Almaraz to defend the left bank of the Tagus; and in a few days had collected about 8000 soldiers, ... many of them were without arms, ... most of them barefooted, and now unhappily accustomed to flight and desertion. Nevertheless they assembled; for every man felt individually brave, and it was only the want of discipline, which, by preventing them from feeling confidence collectively, made panic contagious in the moment of danger. The province of Extremadura immediately provided money for these troops; this province, though the least populous in the peninsula, had particularly distinguished itself by its exertions; it had raised and equipped, wholly at its own expense, 24,000 men, and had supplied ammunition and arms of every kind from Badajoz to the other provinces.
♦He prepares for the defence of the Tagus.♦
There are four bridges between Talavera and the confluence of the Tietar with the Tagus; the Puente del Arzobispo, or the Archbishop’s, the Puente del Conde, or the Count’s, the bridge of Almaraz, and the Puente del Cardinal, or the Cardinal’s. With his present feeble and inefficient force Galluzo had no other means of protecting Extremadura than by breaking down, or defending these bridges; if he could effect this, the province would be secure from an attack on the side of Talavera. Almaraz was the most important of these points; here he planted ten pieces of cannon and two mortars, and stationed 5000 men. The more surely to prevent the enemy from winning the passage he mined the bridge; but so firmly had this noble pile been built, that when the mine was fired, the explosion only served to injure it without rendering it impassable. Don Francisco Trias was sent with 850 men to the Puente del Arzobispo; on his way he met the engineer, who had previously been dispatched to break it down, but who had been prevented from attempting it by the enemy, so that this bridge was already in their power. Trias, therefore, took his position with the view of checking the incursions of the French on this side, and ordered Don Antonio Puig, with such assistants as he could procure from the magistrates of Talavera la Vieja, to destroy the Puente del Conde, and provide for the defence of that point, and of three fords upon the same part of the river. When this officer arrived he had neither a single soldier under his command, nor arms for the peasantry; the latter want was soon supplied; the peasantry were zealous, and some of the stragglers joined him.
The bridge of the Cardinal was assigned to the keeping of a battalion of Walloon Guards and a squadron of the volunteers of Extremadura, under Brigadier Don Francisco Durasmiel. Galluzo also stationed his reserve at Jaraicejo, under Brigadier Don Josef Vlazquez Somosa, and sent another field officer to Truxillo to collect and organize the stragglers who might either voluntarily join him, or be detained by the patroles. While the General was making these dispositions for the defence of the province, the Junta of Badajoz made the greatest exertions to supply the wants of this new army, and its efforts were well seconded by the Extremaduran people. Half a million of reales was raised in loans and free gifts within a week; all the cloth of Torremocha and of other clothing towns was applied to the use of the army, ... no other work was carried on in the monastery of Guadalupe than that of making earthen vessels for their cookery; and commissaries were sent to the sixteen villages nearest the bridge of Almaraz to see that rations of bread for 5000 men were daily delivered there. These measures were so effectual, that the troops were soon comfortably clothed, and after the first day they had no want of any thing.