“Sharp brush with the Enemy yesterday. News came that the French Cavalry, to the number of 700, lay at Sahagun. Lord Paget,[3] with the 15th Hussars, about 400 men, went to surprise them. In one charge he put ’em to the rout, taking 150 prisoners. Well done, Hussars! Sir John thanked them right heartily when he got here. Every man in the force is burning to get at the Enemy. Desperate cold weather. Snow everywhere.
“Dec. 23rd. Sahagun.
“All is up with our hopes of striking a blow at Soult. One more night, and we should have come up with him. Now the forward march is countermanded. Seems that Napoleon is making a rush to cut off our communication with the coast. I suppose there isn’t a man of us that wouldn’t still go on, in the face of any odds. But Sir John asks no advice. He is quiet, resolved, with never a look of hesitation.
“Yet having come so far, now to go back, with nothing done—’tis an awful disappointment. Some, much as they love Sir John, are bitter about it, and will not or cannot see the need. Jack trusts him fully, and says he understands,—Boney has been too sharp. If he can cross our communications with Portugal, we shall just find ourselves between him and Soult, and the Spanish Armies nowhere.
“So we cross the Esla at once—that’s to say, the Army begins to-day. Our Regiment, luckily, is one of the Reserve, and we shall be among the last to retire.”
All this was true, as jotted down by Roy; and very much besides that no man in the camp knew, except Moore and his most intimate friends.
When the news first arrived of the collapse of three Spanish forces, Moore at first planned an immediate retreat to Portugal, there to await fresh reinforcements from England.
But when one assurance after another was given that the Spaniards were still in the mood to fight, with vehement urging that he would not leave them to their fate, he at length resolved to give them another opportunity to show themselves men.
A daring conception came to his mind, and was rapidly acted upon. Instead of retiring at once to a position of safety, he would first make a swoop upon Soult’s Army, thus threatening the line of Napoleon’s communications with France. And his object in so doing was, simply and definitely, to draw the whole weight of the Conqueror’s fury upon himself and his small British Army, thus relieving the terrible pressure upon the more southern provinces of Spain.
It was a startling and a hazardous step. In the hand of any less brilliant and experienced Commander, it might have ended in an awful disaster—in a modern Thermopylæ on a huge scale—in the complete destruction of the entire British force. But Moore knew what he was about.