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Plate VIII
To Face Page 516
Thus, in the three anticipated cases, the separation of the artillery was prudent, and promised to be advantageous. There was indeed a fourth case, that which really happened. All the Spanish armies were dispersed in an instant!—utterly effaced! but sir John Moore could not have divined such a catastrophe, while his ears were ringing with the universal clamour about the numbers and enthusiasm of the patriots; and if he had foreseen even a part of such disasters, he would never have advanced from Portugal. With the plans of the Spanish government he was unacquainted; but he was officially informed that above one hundred and forty thousand Spanish soldiers were between him and a feeble dispirited enemy; and as the intercepted letter from the governor of Bayonne stated that reinforcements would only arrive between the 18th of October and the 18th of November, it was reasonable to suppose that the French would not commence offensive operations before the latter period, and that ample time would be afforded to concentrate the English troops under the protection of the Spanish armies. If sir John Moore could have suspected the delusion under which the British government acted, the incredible folly of the central junta and the Spanish generals, or the inaccuracy of the military agents, if he could have supposed that the Spanish armies were weak in numbers, weaker in spirit, and destitute of food and clothing; or that, while the Spanish authorities were pressing him to advance, they would wantonly detain sir David Baird’s troops seventeen days on board the transports; if he could have imagined all this, undoubtedly his arrangements ought and would have been different; his army would have been kept together, and the road through Coria, however difficult, would have been preferred to a divided march.
The dangerous and absurd position of the Spanish armies, and the remote situation of the British troops in October, may be explained by the annexed diagram. Lisbon being taken as a centre, and the distance A between Lisbon and Coruña being the radius, let a circle passing through Madrid be described. Let the tangential line C be drawn perpendicular to the radius A, meeting the secant B at Sanguessa.
The extreme right of the Spaniards was posted at Sanguessa. Castaños was at Calahorra, and Blake was near Durango, but the main body of the French was at Vittoria; and not only divided the Spaniards, but was actually twenty-five miles nearer to Burgos and Valladolid, (the points of concentration for Moore’s and Baird’s corps) than either Castaños or Blake, and seventy-five miles nearer than Palafox.
The 10th, the emperor struck the first blow, by beating Belvedere and seizing Burgos. Sir David Baird did not march from Coruña until the 12th, and did not bring up the whole of his troops to Astorga before the 4th of December; hence it is clear, that whatever road the artillery had taken, the British army could not have averted the ruin of the Spaniards. Let us suppose the troops assembled at Salamanca on the 13th of November. They must have advanced either to Valladolid or to Madrid. If to Valladolid, the emperor was at Burgos with the imperial guards, ten or twelve thousand cavalry, and a hundred pieces of artillery. The first corps was within a day’s march, the second and fourth corps within three marches, and the sixth corps within two marches. Above a hundred thousand French soldiers could, therefore, have been concentrated in three days; and it is to be observed that sir John Moore never had twenty-five thousand in the field.
It is said, he might have gone to Madrid: in that case the separation of the artillery was a decided advantage, and the separation of Baird’s corps (which was not the general’s arrangement) was the error. The army could not have marched from Salamanca to Madrid in less than seven days; on the 21st of November then, twenty-four thousand British soldiers could have been collected in the capital; but the fourth French corps, which reached Segovia the 1st of December, would have cut off their communication with Portugal, and the emperor with forty thousand men was at Aranda de Douero. Castaños was defeated on the 23d; the remnants of his army were only at Guadalaxara about the 1st of December, and the sixth corps was in full pursuit of them. The English general must then have done one of three things; advanced to the relief of Castaños’s retreating army, joined St. Juan at the Somosierra, or retreated across the Tagus. In the first case, the emperor would have forced the Somosierra, and uniting with the fourth corps, have placed sixty thousand men upon sir John Moore’s rear; in the second case, the sixth and fourth corps, turning both his flanks, would have effected a junction behind the Somosierra, and cut him off from Madrid, while Napoleon, with forty thousand men, assailed him in front. To retreat over the Tagus was to adopt the southern provinces for a new base of operations, and might have been useful if the Spaniards would have rallied round him with enthusiasm and courage; but would they have done so when the emperor was advancing with his enormous force? After-experience proves that they would not. The duke of Dalmatia, in 1810, with an army very inferior to that under Napoleon, reached the gates of Cadiz without a serious blow being struck to oppose him, and at this time the people of the south were reckless of the opportunity procured for them by sir John Moore’s march on Sahagun; but, it has been said, that twenty-four thousand British troops acting vigorously, could have checked the emperor, and raised the courage of the Spaniards. To such an observation I will oppose a fact. In 1815, Napoleon crossed the Sambre with one hundred and fifteen thousand men, and the two hundred and ten thousand regular troops in his front, among which were more than thirty thousand English, could with difficulty stop his progress after four days’ fighting, in three of which he was successful.