It must be remembered, that Marmont was so to hold his army, that he could concentrate in four days; that he was to make an incursion into Beira the moment Wellington crossed the Tagus; that Oporto was to be menaced, Almeida to be attacked, Coimbra to be occupied. These operations would undoubtedly have brought the allies back again at the commencement of the siege, because the fall of Badajos could not be expected under three weeks, which would have been too long to leave Beira and the fortresses at the mercy of the invader. Now Marmont did not reach the Agueda before the 31st March, when the siege of Badajos was approaching its conclusion; he did not storm Almeida, nor attack Ciudad Rodrigo, nor enter Coimbra, nor menace Oporto; and yet his operation, feebly as it was executed, obliged lord Wellington to relinquish his meditated attack on Andalusia, and return to the assistance of Beira. Again therefore the error was in the execution. And here we may observe how inferior in hardihood the French general was to his adversary. Wellington with eighteen thousand men had escaladed Badajos, a powerful fortress and defended by an excellent governor with five thousand French veterans; Marmont with twenty-eight thousand men would not attempt to storm Ciudad, although its breaches were scarcely healed, and its garrison disaffected. Nor did he even assail Almeida, which hardly meriting the name of a fortress, was only occupied by three thousand militia, scarcely able to handle their arms; and yet if he had captured Almeida, as he could scarcely have failed to do with due vigour, he would have found a battering train with which to take Ciudad Rodrigo, and thus have again balanced the campaign.
The duke of Ragusa was averse to serving in the Peninsula, he wished to be employed in the Russian expedition, and he had written to the emperor to desire his recal, or that the whole of the northern district, from Sebastian to Salamanca, including Madrid, should be placed under his orders. Unless that were done, he said he could only calculate the operations of his own troops. The other generals would make difficulties, would move slowly, and the king’s court was in open hostility to the French interest. The army of the north had in retiring from Leon scrupulously carried away every thing that could be useful to him, in the way of bridge, or battering equipages, or of ammunition or provisions, although he was in want of all these things.
Then he painted all the jealousies and disputes in the French armies, and affirmed that his own force, care being had for the posts of communication, and the watching of the army of Gallicia, would not furnish more than thirty-four thousand men for the field; a calculation contradicted by the imperial muster-rolls, which on the 1st of March bore sixty thousand fighting men present with the eagles. He also rated the allies at sixty thousand, well provided with every thing and ready to attack him, whereas the returns of that army gave only fifty-two thousand men including Hill’s corps; about thirty-five thousand only could have passed the Agueda, and their penury of means had, as we have seen, prevented them from even holding together, on the northern frontier. In like manner he assumed that two of the allied divisions were left upon the Agueda, when the army marched against Badajos, whereas no more than six hundred cavalry remained there. All these things prove that Marmont, either from dislike to the war, or natural want of vigour, was not equal to his task, and it is obvious that a diversion, begun so late, and followed up with so little energy, could have had little effect upon the siege of Badajos; it would have been far better to have followed his own first design of detaching three divisions to aid Soult, and retained the other two to menace Ciudad Rodrigo.
It is fitting now to test the operations of the armies of the south, and of the centre. The latter is easily disposed of. The secret of its inactivity is to be found in Marmont’s letter. Every thing at Madrid was confusion and intrigue, waste and want of discipline; in fine, the union of a court and an army, had destroyed the latter. Not so at Seville. There the hand of an able general, an indefatigable administrator were visible, and the unravelling the intricate combinations, which produced such an apparent want of vigour in the operations of the duke of Dalmatia, will form at once the apology for that general, and the just eulogium of lord Wellington.
First it must be held in mind that the army of the south, so powerful in appearance, did not furnish a proportionate number of men for field-service, because the reinforcements, although borne on the rolls, were for the most part retained in the northern governments. Soult had sixty-seven thousand French and six thousand “Escopeteros” present under arms in September; but then followed the surprise of Girard at Aroyo de Molinos, the vigorous demonstrations of Hill in December, the failure of Godinot at Gibraltar, the check sustained by Semélé at Bornos, and the siege of Tarifa, which diminished the number of men, and occasioned fresh arrangements on the different points of the circle. The harvest of 1811 had failed in Andalusia, as in all other parts, and the inhabitants were reduced to feed on herbs; the soldiers had only half rations of bread, and neither reinforcements of men, nor convoys of money, nor ammunition, nor clothes, had come either from France or from Madrid for a long period.
It was under these circumstances that Soult received the order to send twenty thousand men against the Alemtejo. But the whole of the Polish troops, and the skeletons of regiments, and the picked men for the imperial guards, in all fifteen thousand, after being collected at the Despeñas Peros, while Suchet was before Valencia, had now marched to Talavera de la Reyna on the way to France; at that moment also Ballesteros appeared, with the fourth Spanish army, twelve thousand strong, in the Ronda, and his detachments defeated Maransin at Cartaña, which of necessity occasioned another change in the French dispositions. Moreover the very successes of Suchet had at this time increased Soult’s difficulties, because all the fugitives from Valencia gathered on the remains of the Murcian army; and fifteen thousand men, including the garrisons of Carthagena and Alicant, were again assembled on the frontier of Grenada, where, during the expedition to Estremadura, the French had only three battalions and some cavalry.
Thus the army of the south was, if the garrison of Badajos be excluded, reduced to forty-eight thousand French sabres and bayonets present with the eagles, and this at the very moment when its enemies were augmented by twenty-five thousand fresh men. Soult had indeed besides this force five thousand artillery-men and other attendant troops, and six thousand “Escopeteros” were capable of taking the field, while thirty thousand civic guards held his fortified posts. Nevertheless he was forced to reduce all the garrisons, and even the camp before the Isla to the lowest numbers, consistent with safety, ere he could bring twenty-four thousand French into the field for the succour of Badajos, and even then as we have seen, he was upon the point of losing Seville. These things prevented him from coming against the Alemtejo in March, when his presence with an army would have delayed the commencement of the siege until a battle had been fought: but he was the less fearful for the fortress because Marmont on the 22d of February and Foy on the 28th had announced, that if Badajos should be menaced, three divisions of the army of Portugal, then in the valley of the Tagus, would enter Estremadura; and these divisions uniting with Daricau’s and Drouet’s troops would have formed an army of thirty thousand men, and consequently would have sufficed to delay the operations of the allies. But Marmont, having subsequently received the emperor’s orders to move into Beira, passed the Gredos mountains instead of the Tagus river, and thus unintentionally deceived Soult; and whether his letters were intercepted, or carelessly delayed, it was not until the 8th of April, that the duke of Dalmatia was assured of his departure for Salamanca.
On the other hand Lord Wellington’s operations were so rapidly pushed forward, that Soult cannot be censured for false calculations. No general could suspect that such an outwork as the Picurina, would be taken by storm without being first battered; still less that Badajos, with its lofty walls, its brave garrison, and its celebrated governor, would in like manner be carried before the counterscarp was blown in, and the fire of the defences ruined. In fine, no man accustomed to war could have divined the surpassing resolution and surpassing fortune also, of the British general and his troops; neither is it impertinent to observe here, that as the French never use iron ordnance in a siege, their calculations were necessarily formed upon the effect of brass artillery, which is comparatively weak and slow: with brass guns the breaches would have been made three days later.
The fall of Badajos may therefore be traced partly to the Russian war, which drew fifteen thousand men from the army of the south, partly to the irresolution of Marmont, who did neither execute the emperor’s plan nor his own; finally, to the too great extent of country occupied, whereby time and numbers were swallowed. And here the question arises, if Soult, acting upon the principles laid down in his letter to Joseph, just before the battle of Talavera, should not have operated against the allies in great masses, relinquishing possession of Grenada, Malaga, in fine of every thing, save Seville and the camp before the Isla. If beaten, he would have lost Andalusia and fallen back on Suchet, but then the head of the French invasion, might have been more formidable at Valencia than at Seville, and Marmont could have renewed the battle. And such a chequered game, lord Wellington’s political situation both in England and Portugal being considered, would have gone near to decide the question of the British troops remaining in the latter country. This however is a grave and difficult matter to resolve.