8º. There were two plans, either of which promised a reasonable chance of success, under the circumstances in which the French army was placed on the 14th. 1st. To abandon Andujar, send all the incumbrances into La Mancha, secure the passes, unite the fighting men at Carolina, and fall in one mass upon the first corps of Spaniards that advanced; the result of such an attack could hardly have been doubtful; but if, contrary to all probability, the Spaniards had been successful, the retreat of the French was open and safe. 2dly. To secure Carolina by a detachment, and placing small bodies in observation at Andujar and the ferry of Mengibar, to unite the army on the 15th at Baylen, and in that central position await the enemy. If the two corps of the Spanish army had presented themselves simultaneously upon both roads, the position was strong for battle and the retreat open; if one approached before the other, each might have been encountered and crushed separately. Dupont had a force more than sufficient for this object, and fortune was not against him.
9º. The direction in which Reding marched was good, but it should have been followed by the whole army. The heights of Argonilla would have screened the march of Castaños, and a few troops with some heavy guns left in front of the bridge of Andujar, would have sufficed to occupy Dupont’s attention. If the latter general had attacked Castaños upon the morning of the 16th, when Vedel’s division arrived from Baylen, the fourteen thousand men thus united by accident would easily have overthrown the two Spanish divisions in front of Andujar; and Reding, if he had lost an hour in retreating to Jaen, might have been taken in flank by the victorious troops, and in front by Gobert, and so destroyed. Instead of availing himself of this opening, the French general sent Vedel back to Baylen, and followed himself the day after; being encountered by Reding, he vainly hoped that the divisions (which with so much pains he had dispersed) would reunite to relieve him from his desperate situation; it is difficult to say why those divisions did not arrive during the battle, and more difficult to assign to each person a just portion of censure where all were to blame.
10º. In the action Dupont clung tenaciously to the miserable system of dividing his forces; his only chance of safety was to force Reding before Castaños could arrive upon the Tiedras; it was therefore a wretched misapplication of rules to have a reserve watching that torrent, and to fight a formal battle with a first and second line and half a dozen puny columns of attack. An energetic officer would have formed his troops in a dense mass and broken at once through the opposing force upon the weakest point; there are few armies so good, that such an assault would not open a passage through them; seven thousand infantry with cavalry and artillery is a powerful column of attack, and the Spanish line could not have withstood it for a moment. The battle should have been one of half an hour; Dupont, by his ridiculous evolutions, made it one of ten hours, and yet so badly did the patriots fight, that in all that time not a single prisoner or gun fell into their hands, and the fact of Reding’s entering at all into a convention, proves his fears for the final result. It is truly astonishing that Dupont, who, from his rank, must have been well acquainted with Napoleon’s Italian campaigns, should have caught so little of the spirit of his master. And then the inexplicable capitulation of Vedel after his retreat was actually effected! Vedel, who might have given battle and disputed the victory [Appendix, No. 6.] by himself without any great imprudence! Joseph called Dupont’s capitulation a “defection;” perhaps he was right.
11º. Castaños, although active in preparation, discovered but little talent in the field, his movements were slow, uncertain, and generally false: the attempt to turn the French position at Andujar by detaching four thousand men across the river was ill conceived and badly supported; it was of that class of combinations to which the separate march of Reding’s corps belonged. To the latter general the chief honour of the victory is due; yet, if Vedel had returned from Carolina upon the 19th, with the rapidity which the occasion required, Reding would have repented taking post at Baylen. It was undoubtedly a bold energetic step; but instead of remaining at that place, he should have descended instantly upon the rear of Dupont, leaving a corps of observation to delay the march of Vedel. Time not being taken into his calculation, Reding acted like a bold but rash and unskilful officer. Fortune, however, favoured his temerity, and with her assistance war is but a child’s play.
Intelligence of the capitulation of Baylen was secretly spread among the Spaniards in Madrid as early as the 23d or 24th of July, but the French, although alarmed by rumours of some great disaster, were unable to acquire any distinct information, until the king sent two divisions into La Mancha to open Foy’s History. the communication; these troops arriving at Madrilejos, one hundred and twenty miles from Baylen, met captain Villontreys with his Spanish escort collecting prisoners, and apparently intending to proceed in his task to the very gates of Madrid. The extent of the disaster thus became known, and the divisions retraced their steps. Joseph called a council of war on the 29th, and Savary, enlightened by the instructions of Napoleon, proposed to unite all the French forces, to place a small garrison in the Retiro, and to fall upon the Spanish armies in succession as they advanced towards the capital; but a dislike to the war was prevalent amongst the higher ranks of the French army. The injustice of it was too glaring; and the reasons for a retreat, which might perchance induce Napoleon to desist, being listened to with more complacency than Savary’s proposal, it was resolved to abandon Madrid and retire behind the Ebro.
The king commenced this operation on the 1st of August, marching by the Somosierra; while Bessieres posted at Mayorga, covered the movement until the court reached Burgos, and then fell back himself. In a short time the French invaders were all behind the Ebro, the siege of Zaragoza was raised, and the triumphant cry of the Spaniards was heard throughout Europe.
The retreat of the king was undoubtedly hasty and ill-considered; whether as a military or political measure it was unwise. Bessieres, with seventeen thousand victorious troops and forty pieces of artillery, paralized the northern provinces, the Spanish army of Andalusia was too distant from that of Valencia to concert a combined movement, and if they had formed a junction their united force could not have exceeded forty thousand fighting men, ill provided, and commanded by jealous independent chiefs. Now the king, without weakening Bessieres’s corps too much, could have collected twenty thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and eighty pieces of artillery, and the battle of Rio Seco shows what such an army could have effected. Every motive of prudence and of honour called for some daring action to wipe off the ignominy of Baylen.
Let it be conceded that Joseph could not have maintained himself in Madrid; the line of the Duero was the true position for the French army. Taking Aranda as a centre, and occupying the Somosierra, Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, Burgos, and Soria on the circumference; two ordinary marches would have carried the king to the succour of any part of his position, and the northern provinces would thus have been separated from the southern; for Blake durst not have made a flank march to the Guadarama, Castaños durst not have remained in the basin of Madrid, and the siege of Zaragoza might have been continued, because from Aranda to Zaragoza the distance is not greater than from Valencia or from Madrid, and from Soria it is only three marches; hence the king could have succoured Verdier in time if the Valencians attacked him, and it was impossible for Castaños to have arrived at Zaragoza under a month; now by taking up the line of the Ebro, Napoleon’s plan of separating the provinces, and confining each to its own exertions, was frustrated, and Joseph virtually resigned the throne; for however doubtful the prudence of opposing the French might have been considered before the retreat, it became imperative upon all Spaniards to aid the energy of the multitude, when that energy was proved to be efficient.
In this manner Napoleon’s first effort against Spain was frustrated; not that he had miscalculated either the difficulties of his task, or the means to overcome them; for although Bessieres was the only general who perfectly succeeded in his operations, the plan of the emperor was so well combined, that it required the destruction of a whole army to shake it at all, and even when the king, by committing the great faults of abandoning Madrid and raising the siege of Zaragoza, had given the utmost force to Dupont’s catastrophe; the political position only of the French was weakened, their military hold of the country was scarcely loosened, and the Spaniards were unable to follow up their victory.
The moral effect of the battle of Baylen was surprising: it was one of those minor events which, insignificant in themselves, are the cause of great changes in the affairs of nations. The defeat of Rio Seco, the preparations of Moncey for a second attack on Valencia, the miserable plight of Zaragoza, the desponding view taken of affairs by the ablest men of Spain, and, above all, the disgust and terror excited among the patriots by the excesses of the populace, weighed heavy against the Spanish cause. One victory more, and probably the moral as well as the physical force of Spain would have been crushed; but the battle of Baylen, opening as it were a new crater for the Spanish fire, all their pride, and vanity, and arrogance burst forth, the glory of past ages seemed to be renewed, every man conceived himself a second Cid, and perceived in the surrender of Dupont, not the deliverance of Spain, but the immediate conquest of France. “We are much obliged to our good friends the English,” was a common phrase among them when conversing with the officers of Sir John Moore’s army; “we thank them for their good-will, and we shall have the pleasure of escorting them through France to Calais: the journey will be pleasanter than a long voyage, and we shall not give them the trouble of fighting the French; we shall, however, be pleased at having them as spectators of our victories.” This absurd confidence might have led to great things if it had been supported by wisdom, activity, or valour; but it was “a voice, and nothing more.”