My reply was not that of a courtier. But he loved the young men of his schools, and those, above all, who, like me, had not awaited the end of their course before becoming officers.
"Ah! you prefer promotion."
"Sire, they say that things are not going well in Spain since your majesty left there. Send me thither; give me a company, and I will win death or the cross."
"Very well."
I received the company I sought, not, however, in a French, but in an Italian regiment. I was ordered to Arragon in November, 1810, and made part of the army commanded by Suchet. My colonel, San-Polo, received me warmly.
"You will find more than one of your countrymen in my regiment," said he; "and you had better have them give an account of your men. I warn you that they are very devils. You must be vigilant and firm; just but inflexible; if not, you will find yourself exposed to strange surprises, and I be put to the necessity of punishing you."
The colonel was no false prophet. Those Italians are terrible soldiers. Rash, useful principally for an assault or coup-de main, never flinching under fire, but, once out of it, quarrelsome, intractable and given to pillaging, ours, I confess, more than once seemed to sack and destroy for the mere pleasure of doing so. I can yet see the comical though moving scene which took place in Burgos, where my battalion, in 1808, boiled their pots with all the mandolines and guitars they could find in the city, notwithstanding the despair of the inhabitants, who hastened to bring them coals and wood. But the soup, seasoned with jokes and bursts of laughter, seemed to them the better for it.
Before I return to my story, a few words on the situation of the army of Arragon.
General Suchet had taken one after another the towns of Mequinenza; on the southern confines of the province of Huesca; Lareda, in Lower Catalonia, to the north-west of Mequinenza; and Tortosa, south of Lerida, at the extremity of the province of Tarragona. He thus commanded part of the rivers Ebro, the Segre, and the Cinca; and, moreover, the capture of those cities had enabled him to collect a complete park of siege artillery at Tortosa. Unfortunately, the commandant of Figuera having allowed himself to be surprised in Upper Catalonia, our forces there were compelled to fall back toward Girona, and the Spanish General Campoverde, beaten before Figueras by Baraguay d'Hilliers, had profited by our mishap, not only to rally his troops, but also to annoy our magazines and communications. Therefore, although he had received orders from the emperor, on the 10th of March, to invest Tarragona, whose capture, completing our occupation of the principality of Catalonia, would have opened the road to Valentia to us, General Suchet did not yet dare attempt an enterprise of such importance. The task of keeping the two districts of Mora and Alcuniz in subjection— the first in Lower Catalonia, to the north of Tortosa, and the second in Arragon to the north-west of Mequinenza, and in the province of Ternel— paralyzed his forces. His artillery, too, had been retarded. In short, instead of an effective force of over forty thousand men, which the junction of the army of Arragon with that of Catalonia should have formed, he had not more than thirty battalions at his service.
You are not a soldier, and you do not understand how even the lowest officer racks his head over the probabilities of some approaching expedition, and with what feverish impatience the men in the ranks await the signal of departure. Headquarters were established at Lareda, and magazines already were placed at Reus, Monblanch, and Alcobar, to the north and west of Tarragona; but it was reported that an English fleet under Admiral Adams was preparing to re-provision the last-named city, and to interrupt our communications by transporting to our rear the troops of Campoverde and Sarsfield by the mouths of the Ebro. Our park of siege artillery remained motionless at Tortosa, and as yet Suchet had not begun to move.