History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814, vol. 5

by William Francis Patrick Napier

Wellington thought otherwise, for he knew not that the commissariat stores, which he had ordered up, did not arrive regularly because of the extreme fatigue of the animals who carried them; and those that did arrive were not available for the troops, because, as the rear of an army, and especially a retreating army, is at once the birth-place and the recipient of false reports, the subordinate commissaries and conductors of the temporary dépôts, alarmed with rumours that the enemy’s cavalry had forestalled the allies on the march, carried off or destroyed the field-stores: hence the soldiers were actually feeding on acorns when their commander supposed them to be in the receipt of good rations. The destruction of the swine may be therefore, in some measure, palliated; but there is neither palliation nor excuse to be offered for the excesses and outrages committed on the inhabitants, nor for many officers’ habitual inattention to their duty, of which the general justly complained. Certainly the most intolerable disorders had marked the retreat, and great part of the sufferings of the army arose from these and previous disorders, for it is too common with soldiers, first to break up the arrangements of their general by want of discipline, and then to complain of the misery which those arrangements were designed to obviate. Nevertheless Wellington’s circular was not strictly just, because it excepted none from blame, though in conversation he admitted the reproach did not apply to the light division nor to the guards.

With respect to the former the proof of its discipline was easy though Wellington had not said so much in its favour; for how could those troops be upbraided, who held together so closely with their colours, that, exclusive of those killed in action, they did not leave thirty men behind. Never did the extraordinary vigour and excellence of their discipline merit praise more than in this retreat. But it seems to be a drawback to the greatness of lord Wellington’s character, that while capable of repressing insubordination, either by firmness or dexterity as the case may require, capable also of magnanimously disregarding, or dangerously resenting injuries, his praises and his censures are bestowed indiscriminately, or so directed as to acquire partizans and personal friends rather than the attachment of the multitude. He did not make the hard-working military crowd feel that their honest unobtrusive exertions were appreciated. In this he differs not from many other great generals and statesmen, but he thereby fails to influence masses, and his genius falls short of that sublime flight by which Hannibal in ancient, and Napoleon in modern times, commanded the admiration of the world. Nevertheless it is only by a comparison with such great men that he can be measured, nor will any slight examination of his exploits suffice to convey a true notion of his intellectual power and resources. Let this campaign be taken as an example.

It must be evident that it in no manner bears out the character of an easy and triumphant march, which English writers have given to it. Nothing happened according to the original plan. The general’s operations were one continual struggle to overcome obstacles, occasioned by the enemy’s numbers, the insubordination of his own troops, the slowness, incapacity, and unfaithful conduct of the Spanish commanders, the want of money, and the active folly of the different governments he served. For first his design was to menace the French in Spain so as to bring their forces upon him from other parts, and then to retire into Portugal, again to issue forth when want should cause them to disperse. He was not without hopes indeed to strike a decisive blow, yet he was content, if the occasion came not, to wear out the French by continual marching, and he trusted that the frequent opportunities thus given to the Spaniards would finally urge them to a general effort. But he found his enemy, from the first, too powerful for him, even without drawing succour from distant parts, and he would have fallen back at once, were it not for Marmont’s rashness. Nor would the victory of the Arapiles itself have produced any proportionate effect but for the errors of the king, and his rejection of Soult’s advice. Those errors caused the evacuation of Andalusia, yet it was only to concentrate an overwhelming force with which the French finally drove the victors back to Portugal.

Again, Wellington designed to finish his campaign in the southern provinces, and circumstances obliged him to remain in the northern provinces. He would have taken Burgos and he could not; he would have rested longer on the Carrion, and his flanks were turned by the bridges of Palencia and Baños; he would have rested behind the Douro, to profit of his central position, but the bridge at Tordesillas was ravished from him, and the sudden reparation of that at Toro, obliged him to retire. He would have united with Hill on the Adaja, and he could only unite with him behind the Tormes; and on this last river also he desired either to take his winter quarters, or to have delivered a great battle with a view to regain Madrid, and he could do neither. Finally he endeavoured to make an orderly and an easy retreat to Ciudad Rodrigo, and his army was like to have dissolved altogether. And yet in all these varying circumstances, his sagacity as to the general course of the war, his promptness in taking advantage of particular opportunities, was conspicuous. These are the distinguishing characteristics of real genius.

Passing over as already sufficiently illustrated that master-stroke, the battle of Salamanca, the reader would do well to mark, how this great commander did, after that event, separate the king’s army from Marmont’s, forcing the one to retreat upon Burgos, and driving the other from Madrid; how he thus broke up the French combinations, so that many weeks were of necessity required to reunite a power capable of disturbing him in the field; how he posted Clinton’s division and the Gallicians, to repress any light excursion by the beaten army of Portugal; how, foreseeing Soult’s plan to establish a new base of operations in Andalusia, he was prepared, by a sudden descent from Madrid, to drive Soult himself from that province; how promptly, when the siege of Burgos failed, and his combinations were ruined by the fault of others, how promptly I say, he commenced his retreat, sacrificing all his high-wrought expectation of triumph in a campaign which he burned to finish, and otherwise would have finished, even with more splendour than it had commenced.

If Burgos, a mean fortress of the lowest order, had fallen early, the world would have seen a noble stroke. For the Gallicians, aided by a weak division of Wellington’s army, and by the British reinforcements making up from Coruña, would, covered by Burgos, have sufficed to keep the army of Portugal in check, while Popham’s armament would have fomented a general insurrection of the northern provinces. Meanwhile Wellington, gathering forty-five thousand Anglo-Portuguese, and fifteen thousand Spaniards, on the Tagus, would have marched towards Murcia; Ballesteros’ army, and the sixteen thousand men composing the Alicant army, would there have joined him, and with a hundred thousand soldiers he would have delivered such a battle to the united French armies, if indeed they could have united, as would have shaken all Europe with its martial clangor. To exchange this glorious vision, for the cold desolate reality of a dangerous winter retreat was, for Wellington, but a momentary mental struggle, and it was simultaneous with that daring conception, the passage of the bridge of Burgos under the fire of the castle.

Let him be traced now in retreat. Pursued by a superior army and seeing his cavalry defeated, he turned as a savage lion at the Carrion, nor would he have removed so quickly from that lair, if the bridges at Palencia and Baños had been destroyed according to his order. Neither is his cool self-possession to be overlooked; for when both his flanks were thus exposed, instead of falling back in a hurried manner to the Duero, he judged exactly the value of the rugged ground on the left bank of the Pisuerga, in opposition to the double advantage obtained by the enemy at Palencia and Baños; nor did the difficulty which Souham and Caffarelli, independent commanders and neither of them accustomed to move large armies, would find in suddenly changing their line of operations escape him. His march to Cabeçon and his position on the left of the Pisuerga was not a retreat, it was the shift of a practised captain.

When forced to withdraw Hill from the Tagus, he, on the instant, formed a new combination to fight that great battle on the Adaja which he had intended to deliver near the Guadalaviar; and though the splendid exploit of captain Guingret, at Tordesillas, baffled this intent, he, in return, baffled Souham by that ready stroke of generalship, the posting of his whole army in front of Rueda, thus forbidding a passage by the restored bridge. Finally, if he could not maintain the line of the Duero, nor that of the Tormes, it was because rivers can never be permanently defended against superior forces, and yet he did not quit the last without a splendid tactical illustration. I mean that surprising movement from the Arapiles to the Valmusa, a movement made not in confusion and half flight, but in close order of battle, his columns ready for action, his artillery and cavalry skirmishing, passing the Junguen without disorder, filing along the front of and winding into the rear of a most powerful French army, the largest ever collected in one mass in the Peninsula, an army having twice as many guns as the allies, and twelve thousand able horsemen to boot. And all these great and skilful actions were executed by lord Wellington with an army composed of different nations; soldiers, fierce indeed, and valiant, terrible in battle, but characterised by himself, as more deficient in good discipline than any army of which he had ever read!

Men engaged only in civil affairs and especially book-men are apt to undervalue military genius, talking as if simple bravery were the highest qualification of a general; and they have another mode of appeasing an inward sense of inferiority, namely, to attribute the successes of a great captain, to the prudence of some discreet adviser, who in secret rules the general, amends his errors, and leaves him all the glory. Thus Napoleon had Berthier, Wellington has sir George Murray! but in this, the most skilful, if not the most glorious of Wellington’s campaigns, sir George Murray was not present, and the staff of the army was governed by three young lieutenant-colonels, namely, lord Fitzroy Somerset, Waters, and Delancey; for though sir Willoughby Gordon joined the army as quarter-master-general after the battle of Salamanca, he was inexperienced, and some bodily suffering impeded his personal exertions.