“The French,” said sir John Moore, “will find Mr. James Moore’s Narrative.the Spaniards troublesome subjects, but in the first instance they will have little more than a march to subdue the country.”
“The defeat and dispersion of the Spanish armies will be,” said lord Wellington, “the probable consequence Letter to Lord Liverpool, Jan. 31, 1810. MSS.of any action in which either imprudence, necessity, or even expediency, may lead them to engage. The armies may be lost, the authorities dispersed, but the war of Partisans will probably continue.”
And when the edge of the sword was, in 1810, as in 1808, descending on the unguarded front of Andalusia, lord Wellington, on the first indication of Joseph’s march, designed to make a movement similar in principle to that executed by sir John Moore on Sahagun, that is, by an irruption into Appendix, [No. II.] Section 3.Castile, to threaten the enemy’s rear, in such sort that he should be obliged to return from Andalusia or suffer his forces in Castile to be beaten. Nor was he at first deterred from this project, by the knowledge, that fresh troops were entering Spain. The Junta, indeed, assured him that only eight thousand men had reinforced the French; but, although circumstances led him to doubt this assertion, he was not without hopes to effect his purpose before the reinforcements, whatever they might be, could come into line. He had even matured his plan, as far as regarded the direction of the march, when other considerations obliged him to relinquish it, and these shall be here examined, because French and Spanish writers then, and since, have accused him of looking on with indifference, if not with satisfaction, at the ruin of the Central Junta’s operation, as if it only depended upon him to render them successful.
Why he refused to join in the Spanish projects has been already explained. He abandoned his own,—
1º. Because the five thousand men promised from England had not arrived, and his hospitals being full, he could not, including Hill’s division, bring more than twenty thousand British soldiers into the field. Hill’s division, however, could not be moved without leaving the rear of the army exposed to the French in the south,—a danger, which success in Castile, by recalling the latter from Andalusia, would only increase.
2º. The Portuguese had suffered cruelly during the winter from hunger and nakedness, the result of the scarcity of money before-mentioned. To Lord Wellington’s Correspondence. MSS.bring them into line, was to risk a total disorganization, destructive alike of present and future advantages. On the other hand, the French in Castile, consisting of the sixth corps and the troops of Kellerman’s government, lord Wellington knew to be at least thirty thousand strong, of which twenty thousand were in one mass; and, although the rest were dispersed from Burgos to Avila, and from Zamora to Valladolid, they could easily have concentrated in time to give battle, and would have proved too powerful. That this reasoning was sound shall now be shewn.
Mortier’s march from Seville would not have terminated at Badajos, if the British force at Abrantes, instead of advancing to Portalegre, had been employed in Castile. The invasion of Andalusia, was only part of a general movement throughout Spain; and when the king placed himself at the head of the army, to force the Morena, Kellerman marched from Salamanca to Miranda del Castanar and Bejar, with the sixth corps, and thus secured the defiles leading into the valley of the Tagus, and at the same time, the second corps coming down that valley, communicated with the sixth by the pass of Baños, and with the fifth by Seradillo and Caceres. Hence, without losing hold of Andalusia, three corps d’armée, namely, the sixth, second, and fifth, amounting to fifty thousand men, could, on an emergency, be brought together to oppose any offensive movement of lord Wellington’s. Nor was this the whole of the French combinations; for, in rear of all these forces, Napoleon was crowding the Peninsula with fresh armies, and not eight thousand, as the Central Rolls of the French army.Junta asserted, but one hundred thousand men, rendered disposable by the peace with Austria and the evacuation of Walcheren, were crossing, or to cross, the western Pyrennees.
Of these, the first detachments reinforced the divisions in the field, but the succeeding troops formed an eighth and ninth corps, and the former, under the command of the duke of Abrantes, advancing gradually through Old Castile, was actually in the plains of Valladolid, and would, in conjunction with Kellerman, have overwhelmed the British army; but for that sagacity, which the French, with derisive but natural anger, and the Spaniards, with ingratitude, have termed “The selfish caution of the English system.”
Truly, it would be a strange thing, to use so noble and costly a machine, as a British army, with all its national reputation to support, as lightly as those Spanish multitudes, collected in a day, dispersed in an hour, reassembled again without difficulty, incapable of attaining, and consequently, incapable of losing, any military reputation.