History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814, vol. 2

by William Francis Patrick Napier

In the course of the 23d, the Spanish officer commanding the advanced posts reported that the French guns were withdrawn, and that it was evident they meant to retreat; Cuesta then became willing to attack, and proposed, in concert with sir Arthur Wellesley, to examine Victor’s position; but, to the surprise of the English commander, the Spaniard arrived in a coach, drawn by six horses, to perform this duty; and when the inequalities of the ground obliged him to descend from his vehicle, he cast himself at the foot of a tree, and in a few moments went to sleep. Yet he was always ready to censure and to thwart every proposal of his able coadjutor. This time, however, he consented to fall upon the enemy; and the troops were in motion early in the morning of the 24th; but the duke of Belluno was again duly informed of their intention; and having withdrawn his moveable column from Escalona, and relinquished the road to Madrid, retreated during the night to Torijos. Thus, the first combination of the allies failed entirely; and each hour the troops of the enemy were accumulating round them; for Venegas, who should have been at Fuente Duenas, high up on the Tagus, had not even passed Damyel; and the king was collecting his whole strength in front, between Toledo and Talavera; while Soult was fast gathering his more formidable power behind the mountains of Bejar.

The English general was indeed still ignorant of the danger which threatened him from the Salamanca country, or he would, doubtless, have withdrawn at once to Plasencia, and secured his communications with Lisbon, and with Beresford’s troops; but other powerful reasons were not wanting to prevent his further advance. Before he quitted Plasencia he had completed contracts with the alcaldes, in the Vera de Plasencia, for two hundred and fifty thousand rations of forage and provisions; and this, together with what he had before collected, would have furnished supplies for ten or twelve days, a sufficient time to beat Victor, and carry the army into a fresh country; but, distrustful, as he had reason to be, of the Spaniards, he again gave notice to Cuesta and the junta, that beyond the Alberche he would not move, unless his wants were immediately supplied; for, hitherto the rations contracted for had not been delivered; and his representations to the junta and to Cuesta were, by both, equally disregarded; there were no means of transport provided; the troops were already on less than half allowance, and absolute famine approached; and when the general demanded food for his soldiers, at the hands of those whose cause he came to defend, he was answered with false excuses, and insulted by false statements. Under any circumstances this would have forced him to halt; but the advance having been made in the exercise of his own discretion, and not at the command of his Sir A. Wellesley’s Correspondence, Parl. Papers, 1810. government, there could be no room for hesitation: wherefore, remonstrating warmly, but manfully, with the supreme junta, he announced his resolution to go no farther, nay, even to withdraw from Spain altogether.

It is evident that without these well-founded reasons for pausing, Cuesta’s conduct, and the state of his army, offered no solid ground for expecting success by continuing the forward movement; but the faithless and perverse conduct of the supreme junta, although hidden as yet from sir Arthur Wellesley, far exceeded the measure even of Cuesta’s obdurate folly. That body, after having agreed to the plan upon which the armies were acting, concluded, in the fulness of their ignorance, that the combined troops in the valley of the Tagus would be sufficient to overthrow Joseph; and, therefore, secretly ordered Venegas not to fulfil his part, arguing to themselves, with a cunning stupidity, that it would be a master stroke of policy to save him from any chance of a defeat; hoping thus to preserve a powerful force, under one of their own creatures, to maintain their own power. This was the cause why the army of La Mancha had failed to appear on the Tagus: and thus, the welfare of millions was made the sport of men, who yet were never tired of praising themselves, and have not failed to find admirers elsewhere.

As the Spaniards are perfect masters of the art of saying every thing and doing nothing, sir Arthur’s remonstrances drew forth many official statements, plausible replies, and pompous assertions, after their manner, but produced no amelioration of the evils complained of. Mr. Frere, also, thought it necessary to make some apology for himself, asserting that the evil was deep rooted, and that he had had neither time nor power to arrange any regular plan for the subsistence of the English armies. But all the evils that blighted the Spanish cause were deep seated; and yet Mr. Frere, who could not arrange a plan for the subsistence of the troops, that indispensable preliminary to military operations, and which was really within his province, thought himself competent to direct all the operations themselves which were in the province of the generals. He had found leisure to meddle in all the intrigues of the day; to aim at making and unmaking Spanish commanders; to insult sir John Moore; to pester sir John Cradock with warlike advice; and to arrange the plan of campaign for sir Arthur Wellesley’s army, without that officer’s concurrence.

CHAPTER II.

The English general’s resolution to halt at Talavera made little impression upon Cuesta. A French corps had retreated before him, and Madrid, nay, the Pyrennees themselves, instantly rose on the view of the sanguine Spaniard: he was resolved to be the first in the capital, and he pushed forward in pursuit, reckless alike of military discipline and of the friendly warnings of sir Arthur; who vainly admonished him to open his communications as quickly as possible with Venegas, and to beware how he let the enemy know that the British and Spanish armies were separated. In the fulness of his arrogant vanity, Cuesta crossed the Alberche on the 24th, and being unable to ascertain the exact route of the French, pursued them, by the road of Toledo, as far as Cebolla, and, by the road of Madrid, as far as El Bravo. On the 25th, still inflated with pride, he caused the troops at Cebolla to move on to Torrijos, and marched himself to St. Ollalla. The 26th he discovered that he had been pursuing a tiger. Meanwhile sir Arthur Wellesley, foreseeing the consequence of this imprudence, had sent general Sherbrooke, with two divisions of British infantry and all the cavalry, across the Alberche, to Cazalegas, where, being centrically situated with respect to Talavera, St. Ollalla, and Escalona, he could support the Spaniards, and, at the same time, hold communication with sir Robert Wilson, who had been at the latter town since the 23d. But a great and signal crisis was at hand, the full importance of which cannot be well understood without an exact knowledge of the situation and proceedings of all the armies involved in this complicated campaign.

The 30th of June, Soult, when at Zamora, received a despatch from the emperor, dated near Ratisbon, conferring on him the supreme command of the second, fifth, and sixth corps, with orders to concentrate them, and act decisively against the English. “Wellesley,” said Napoleon, “will probably advance, by the Tagus, against Madrid: in that case, pass the mountains, fall on his flank and rear, and crush him;” for, at that distance, and without other information than what his own sagacity supplied, this allknowing soldier foresaw the leading operations even as soon and as certainly as those who projected them.

The duke of Dalmatia immediately imparted these instructions to the king, and, at the same time, made known his own opinions and designs with respect to the probable projects of the allies. He was ignorant of the precise object and exact position of sir Arthur Wellesley, but, judging from the cessation of hostility in the north, that the English were in march with the design of joining Cuesta, and acting by the line of the Tagus, he proposed to concentrate the third corps at Salamanca, besiege Ciudad Rodrigo, and menace Lisbon, which, he justly observed, would bring the English army back to the northern provinces of Portugal; and if, as some supposed, the intention of sir Arthur was to unite, at Bragança, with Romana, and open the campaign to the north of the Douro, the French army would still be in a suitable position to oppose them.