A Corner of Spain

by Walter Wood

Moore had rapidly covered 400 miles on his way from Portugal to Spain, and found himself in Galicia. There he learned that his allies, the Spaniards, had been routed and dispersed. Anxious to avoid confusion and unnecessary calls on an impoverished country, he entreated the Spaniards not to fall back in the same direction as himself; but they did not accede to his wishes, and the result was a hopeless overcrowding of the houses on the line of retreat, and a call on the resources of the land which could not be met.

Officers and men who fought in the Peninsula and shared in the sufferings of that appalling retreat to Corunna have put on record vivid pictures of the terrible state of Moore's army. When he reached Benavente he sent General Crauford with 3000 men by way of Orense, nearly a hundred and forty miles away, which offered a shorter but harder road to the coast.

Moore's purpose was to prevent the French from securing an advantage over him by employing a light column. He himself took the longer but better road which led through Astorga and Villa Franca. At Astorga he was joined by Baird's division, and Moore ordered the destruction of everything which could check his retreat.

The rainy season had been succeeded by heavy falls of snow, for Moore was high in the hills, and the cold was intense, while the roads and fields by which he had to march were almost impassable. By that time the condition of the army was pitiful. Typhus fever swept through the ranks, and the roads were dotted with dead and dying men and women and children. In those days women were allowed to accompany British soldiers to war, and Moore had even a larger proportion than usual with him. The privations of the women and children remain as the most terrible feature of a retreat which stands almost unparalleled for suffering and loss. There was no ammunition for the guns, none for the muskets, and the soldiers were almost unshod and in rags. In this respect there was little difference between the pursuing French and the retreating English.

At the beginning of December Moore had 20,000 men under him, and he was relentlessly followed by an enemy in overwhelming force. Men and horses fell and died on the march, and day by day the flying army had had its strength reduced by death and desertion. Whole regiments forsook their colours and defied authority, in spite of the punishment of death which was imposed for disobedience and drinking. Whenever a wine-house was reached the soldiers raided it, and forgot their misery in debauchery.

The main body of the army kept a day's march ahead of the reserve and the rearguard. On New Year's morning 1809 the main body reached Bembibre, and immediately assailed the wine-shops. So hopelessly drunk were many of the troops when the rearguard came up that it was impossible to arouse them to a sense of their peril from the French cavalry who were harassing their rear, and they had to be left behind in great numbers. By that time the opposing armies had been marching within sight of each other for many miles, and the French horsemen swept on the drunken mob and butchered it. Soult's dragoons thundered in amongst the helpless crowd of British troops and shrieking women and children, and without distinction of sex or age put them to the sword. A few soldiers, mangled and bleeding, escaped from the massacre, and Moore ordered that they should parade through the ranks and show their wounds—a stern warning to the army of the effect of drink and disobedience.

Believing that Astorga would be a resting-place, the retreating army had kept up something like order, and had been inspired by the hope of battle; but there was no rest. Again everything that was burdensome was abandoned, and the terrible withdrawal was continued.

"From that hour," said Lord Londonderry, "we no longer resembled a British army. There was still the same bravery in our ranks, but it was only at moments, when the enemy was expected to come on, that our order and regularity returned, and except in that single point we resembled rather a crowd of insubordinate rebels in full flight before victorious soldiers than a corps of British troops moving in the presence of an enemy." Moore himself, in the last despatch he ever wrote, said he could not have believed that such complete demoralisation could have overtaken a British army.

Marvellous distances were traversed, notwithstanding the difficult country and the bitter weather. Villa Franca was reached on January 2, after sixty miles had been covered in two days. One march alone represented forty miles, but that was continued by night as well as day, and was marked by the abandonment of the dying and the dead. The troops dropped by whole sections on the road and died. "Not men only," wrote Lord Londonderry, "but women and children were subject to this miserable fate. Moore's army had carried along with it more than the too large proportion of women allotted by the rules of the service to armies in the field, and these poor wretches now heightened the horror of passing events by a display of suffering even more acute than that endured by their husbands. Some were taken in labour on the road, and in the open air, amid showers of sleet and snow, gave birth to infants which, with their mothers, perished as soon as they had seen the light. Others, carrying, some of them, two children on their backs, toiled on, and, when they came to look to the condition of their burdens, they would probably find one or both frozen to death."