“Many might be found to conduct matters as well as I can both here and in Germany, but nobody would enjoy the same advantages here, and I should be no better than another in Germany.”
The egregious folly which dictated this proposition was thus checked, and in December the new Cortez decided that he should retain the command of the armies and the regency be bound to fulfil its predecessor’s engagements. Nevertheless so deeply had he been offended by the libels relative to San Sebastian that a private letter to his brother terminated thus:—“It will rest with the king’s government to determine what they will do upon a consideration of all the circumstances of the case, but if I was to decide I would not keep the army in Spain for one hour.” And to many other persons at different times he expressed his fears and conviction that the cause was lost and that he should fail at last. It was under these, and other enormous difficulties he carried on his military operations. It was with an enemy at his back more to be dreaded than the foe in his front that he invaded the south of France; and that is the answer to those French writers who have described him as being at the head of more than two hundred thousand well-furnished soldiers, supported by a well-organized insurrection of the Spanish people, unembarrassed in his movements, and luxuriously rioting in all the resources of the Peninsula and of England.
BOOK XXIII.
CHAPTER I.
WAR IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.
While Pampeluna held out, Soult laboured to1813. November. complete his works of defence, especially the entrenched camp of St. Jean Pied de Port, that he might be free to change the theatre of war to Aragon. He pretended to entertain this project as late as November; but he must have secretly renounced all hope before that period, because the snows of an early and severe winter had rendered even the passes of the Lower Pyrenees impracticable in October. Meanwhile his political difficulties were not less than lord Wellington’s, all his efforts to draw forth the resources of France were met with apathy, or secret hostility, and there was no money in the military chest to answer the common daily expenses. A junta of the leading merchants in Bayonne voluntarily provided for the most pressing necessities of the troops, but their means were limited and Soult vainly urged the merchants of Bordeaux and Toulouse to follow the patriotic example. It required therefore all his firmness of character to support the crisis; and if the English naval force had been sufficient to intercept the coasting vessels between Bordeaux and Bayonne, the French army must have retired beyond the Adour. As it was, the greatest part of the field artillery and all the cavalry were sent so far to the rear for forage, that they could not be counted a part of the fighting troops; and the infantry, in addition to their immense labours, were forced to carry their own provisions from the navigable points of the rivers to the top of the mountains.
Soult was strongly affected. “Tell the emperor,” he wrote to the minister of war, “tell him when you make your next report that on the very soil of France, this is the situation of the army destined to defend the southern provinces from invasion; tell him also that the unheard-of contradictions and obstacles I meet with shall not make me fail in my duty.”
The French troops suffered much, but the privations of the allies were perhaps greater, for being on higher mountains, more extended, more dependent upon the sea, their distress was in proportion to their distance from the coast. A much shorter line had been indeed gained for the supply of the centre, and a bridge was laid down at Andarlassa which gave access to the roots of the Bayonette mountain, yet the troops were fed with difficulty; and so scantily, that lord Wellington in amends reduced the usual stoppage of pay, and invoked the army by its military honour to sustain with firmness the unavoidable pressure. The effect was striking. The murmurs, loud in the camps before, were hushed instantly, although the soldiers knew that some commissaries leaguing with the speculators upon the coast, secretly loaded the provision mules with condiments and other luxuries, to sell on the mountains at enormous profit. The desertion was however great, more than twelve hundred men went over to the enemy in less than four months; and they were all Germans, Englishmen or Spaniards, for the Portuguese who abandoned their colours invariably went back to their own country.
This difficulty of feeding the Anglo-Portuguese, the extreme distress of the Spaniards and the certainty that they would plunder in France and so raise the people in arms, together with the uneasy state of the political affairs in the Peninsula, rendered lord Wellington very averse to further offensive operations while Napoleon so tenaciously maintained his positions on the Elbe against the allied sovereigns. It was impossible to make a formidable and sustained invasion of France with the Anglo-Portuguese alone, and he had neither money nor means of transport to feed the Spaniards, even if policy warranted such a measure. The nature of the country also forbad a decisive victory, and hence an advance was attended with the risk of returning to Spain again during the winter, when a retreat would be dangerous and dishonouring. But on the 20th of October a letter from the governor of Pampeluna was intercepted, and lord Fitzroy Somerset, observing that the compliment of ceremony at the beginning was also in numerals, ingeniously followed the cue and made out the whole. It announced that the place could not hold out more than a week, and as intelligence of Napoleon’s disasters in Germany became known at the same time, lord Wellington was induced to yield once more to the wishes of the allied sovereigns and the English ministers, who were earnest that he should invade France.