Now, admitting that, by superior discipline and experience, the French troops had effected their retreat on either line without any serious calamity, what would have followed?
1º. If Victor joined the king, the latter could only have retired, by Guadalaxara, upon the third corps, or have gone by the Guadarama towards Soult.
2º. If Victor joined Sebastiani, the two corps must have retreated to Guadalaxara, and the king would have joined them there, or, as before said, have pushed for the Guadarama to join Soult.
No doubt, that marshal, having so powerful an army, would, in either case, have restored Joseph to his capital, and have cut off sir Arthur’s communication with Portugal by the valley of the Tagus. Nevertheless, a great moral impression would have been produced by the temporary loss of Madrid, which was, moreover, the general depôt of all the French armies; and, meanwhile, Venegas, Cuesta, and sir Arthur Wellesley would have been united, and on one line of operations (that of La Mancha), which, under such circumstances, would have forced the junta to consent to the occupation of Cadiz. In this view it must be admitted that the plan was conceived with genius.
Victor’s position on the Alberche was, however, strong; he commanded twenty-five thousand veterans; and, as the Spaniards were very incapable in the field, it may be argued that a general movement of the whole army to Escalona, and from thence to Maqueda, would have been preferable to a direct attack at Salinas; because the allies, if thus suddenly placed in the midst of the French corps, might have beaten them in detail, and would certainly have cut the king off from the Guadarama, and forced him back upon the Guadalaxara. But, with Cuesta for a colleague, how could a general undertake an operation requiring celerity and the nicest calculation?
The false dealing of the junta no prudence could guard against; but experience proves that, without extraordinary good fortune, some accident will always happen to mar the combinations of armies acting upon “double external lines.” And so it was with respect to Venegas; for that general, with a force of twenty-six thousand men, suffered himself to be held in check for five days by three thousand French, and at the battle of Almonacid shewed that he knew neither when to advance nor when to retreat.
The patience with which sir Arthur Wellesley bore the foolish insults of Cuesta, and the undaunted firmness with which he fought to protect the Spanish army, require no illustration. When the latter fell back from St. Ollalla on the 26th, it was impossible for the British to retreat with honour; and there is nothing more memorable in the history of this war, nothing more creditable to the personal character of the English chief, than the battle of Talavera, considered as an isolated event. Nevertheless, that contest proved that the allies were unable to attain their object; for, notwithstanding Victor’s ill-judged partial attacks on the night of the 27th and morning of the 28th, and notwithstanding the final repulse of the French, all the advantages of the movements, as a whole, were with the latter. They were, on the 31st of July, including the garrison of Toledo, still above forty thousand men; and they maintained their central position, although it was not until the 1st of August that Soult’s approach caused any change in the views of the allied generals; and this brings us to the fundamental error of sir Arthur Wellesley’s operations.
That so able a commander should engage himself in the narrow valley of the Tagus with twenty thousand British and forty thousand Spanish troops, when fifty thousand French were waiting for him at the further end, and above fifty thousand more were hanging on his flank and rear, shews that the greatest masters of the art may err. He who wars walks in a mist through which the keenest eyes cannot always discern the right path. “Speak to me of a general who has made no mistakes in war,” said Turenne, “and you speak of one who has seldom made war.”
Sir Arthur Wellesley thus excused his error:—“When I entered Spain I had reason to believe that I should be joined by a Spanish army in such a respectable state of discipline and efficiency, as that it had kept in check, during nearly three months after a defeat, a French army, at one time superior, and at no time much inferior.”
“I had likewise reason to believe that the French corps, in the north of Spain, were fully employed; and although I had heard of the arrival of marshal Soult at Zamora, on the 29th of June, with a view to equip the remains of his corps, I did not think it possible that three French corps, consisting of thirty-four thousand men, under three marshals, could have been assembled at Salamanca without the knowledge of the governor of Ciudad Rodrigo, or of the junta of Castile; that these corps could have been moved from their stations in Gallicia, the Asturias, and Biscay, without setting free, for general operations, any Spanish troops which had been opposed to them, or without any other inconvenience to the enemy than that of protracting, to a later period, the settlement of his government in those provinces;—and that they could have penetrated into Estremadura, without a shot being fired at them by the troops deemed sufficient to defend the passes by the Spanish generals.” But thus it was that, like the figures in a phantasmagoria, the military preparations of Spain, however menacing in appearance, were invariably found to be vain and illusory.