History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France from the year 1807 to the year 1814, vol. 6

by William Francis Patrick Napier

Such was Soult’s plan of action but his great project was not adopted and the emperor’s reasons for neglecting it have not been made known. Nor can the workings of that capacious mind be judged of without a knowledge of all the objects and conditions of his combinations. Yet it is not improbable that at this period he did not despair of rejecting the allies beyond the Rhine either by force of arms, by negociation, or by working upon the family pride of the emperor of Austria. With this hope he would be naturally averse to incur the risk of a civil war by placing France under martial law, or of reviving the devouring fire of revolution which it had been his object for so many years to quell; and this is the more probable because it seems nearly certain, that one of his reasons for replacing Ferdinand on the Spanish throne was his fear lest the republican doctrines which had gained ground in Spain should spread to France. Was he wrong? The fierce democrat will answer Yes! But the man who thinks that real liberty was never attained under a single unmixed form of government giving no natural vent to the swelling pride of honour birth or riches; those who measure the weakness of pure republicanism by the miserable state of France at home and abroad when Napoleon by assuming power saved her; those who saw America with all her militia and her licentious liberty unable to prevent three thousand British soldiers from passing three thousand miles of ocean and burning her capital, will hesitate to condemn him. And this without detriment to the democratic principle which in substance may and should always govern under judicious forms. Napoleon early judged, and the event has proved he judged truly, that the democratic spirit of France however violent was unable to overbear the aristocratic and monarchic tendencies of Europe; wisely therefore while he preserved the essence of the first by fostering equality, he endeavoured to blend it with the other two; thus satisfying as far as the nature of human institutions would permit the conditions of the great problem he had undertaken to solve. His object was the reconstruction of the social fabric which had been shattered by the French revolution, mixing with the new materials all that remained of the old sufficiently unbroken to build with again. If he failed to render his structure stable it was because his design was misunderstood, and the terrible passions let loose by the previous stupendous explosion were too mighty even for him to compress.

To have accepted Soult’s project would have been to endanger his work, to save himself at the expense of his system, and probably to plunge France again into the anarchy from which he had with so much care and labour drawn her. But as I have before said, and it is true, Napoleon’s ambition was for the greatness and prosperity of France, for the regeneration of Europe, for the stability of the system which he had formed with that end, never for himself personally; and hence it is that the multitudes of many nations instinctively revere his memory. And neither the monarch nor the aristocrat, dominant though they be by his fall, feel themselves so easy in their high places as to rejoice much in their victory.

Whatever Napoleon’s motive was he did not adopt Soult’s project, and in February two divisions of infantry and Trielhard’s cavalry with many batteries were withdrawn. Two thousand of the best soldiers were also selected to join the imperial guards, and all the gensd’armes were sent to the interior. The total number of old soldiers left, did not, including the division of General Paris, exceed forty thousand exclusive of the garrison of Bayonne and other posts, and the conscripts, beardless youths, were for the most part unfit to enter the line nor were there enough of musquets in the arsenals to arm them. It is remarkable also, as shewing how easily military operations may be affected by distant operations, that Soult expected and dreaded at this time the descent of a great English army upon the coast of La Vendée, led thereto by intelligence of an expedition preparing in England, under sir Thomas Graham, really to aid the Dutch revolt.

While the French general’s power was thus diminished, lord Wellington’s situation was as suddenly ameliorated. First by the arrival of reinforcements, next by the security he felt from the rejection of the treaty of Valençay, lastly by the approach of better weather, and the acquisition of a very large sum in gold which enabled him not only to put his Anglo-Portuguese in activity but also to bring the Spaniards again into line with less danger of their plundering the country. During the forced cessation of operations he had been actively engaged preparing the means to enter France with power and security, sending before him the fame of a just discipline and a wise consideration for the people who were likely to fall under his power, for there was nothing he so much dreaded as the partizan and insurgent warfare proposed by Soult. The peasants of Baygorry and Bidarray had done him more mischief than the French army, and his terrible menace of destroying their villages, and hanging all the population he could lay his hands upon if they ceased not their hostility, marks his apprehensions in the strongest manner. Yet he left all the local authorities free to carry on the internal government, to draw their salaries, and raise the necessary taxes in the same mode and with as much tranquillity as if perfect peace prevailed; he opened the ports and drew a large commerce which served to support his own army and engage the mercantile interests in his favour; he established many sure channels for intelligence political and military, and would have extended his policy further and to more advantage if the English ministers had not so abruptly and ignorantly interfered with his proceedings. Finally foreseeing that the money he might receive would, being in foreign coin, create embarrassment, he adopted an expedient which he had before practised in India to obviate this. Knowing that in a British army a wonderful variety of knowledge and vocations good and bad may be found, he secretly caused the coiners and die-sinkers amongst the soldiers to be sought out, and once assured that no mischief was intended them, it was not difficult to persuade them to acknowledge their peculiar talents. With these men he established a secret mint at which he coined gold Napoleons, marking them with a private stamp and carefully preserving their just fineness and weight with a view of enabling the French government when peace should be established to call them in again. He thus avoided all the difficulties of exchange, and removed a very fruitful source of quarrels and ill-will between the troops and the country people and shopkeepers; for the latter are always fastidious in taking and desirous of abating the current worth of strange coin, and the former attribute to fraud any declination from the value at which they receive their money. This sudden increase of the current coin tended also to diminish the pressure necessarily attendant upon troubled times.

Nor was his provident sagacity less eminently displayed in purely military matters than in his administrative and political operations. During the bad weather he had formed large magazines at the ports, examined the course of the Adour, and carefully meditated upon his future plans. To penetrate into France and rally a great Bourbon party under the protection of his army was the system he desired to follow; and though the last point depended upon the political proceedings and successes of the allied sovereigns the military operations most suitable at the moment did not clash with it. To drive the French army from Bayonne and either blockade or besiege that place were the first steps in either case. But this required extensive and daring combinations. For the fortress and its citadel, comprising in their circuit the confluence of the Nive and the Adour, could not be safely invested with less than three times the number necessary to resist the garrison at any one point, because the communications of the invested being short internal and secure, those of the investers external difficult and unsafe, it behoved that each division should be able to resist a sally of the whole garrison. Hence, though reduced to the lowest point, the whole must be so numerous as seriously to weaken the forces operating towards the interior.

How and where to cross the Adour with a view to the investment was also a subject of solicitude. It was a great river with a strong current and well guarded by troops and gun-boats above Bayonne; still greater was it below the town; there the ebb tide run seven miles an hour, there also there were gun-boats, a sloop of war, and several merchant-vessels which could be armed and employed to interrupt the passage. The number of pontoons or other boats required to bridge the stream across either above or below, and the carriage of them, an immense operation in itself, would inevitably give notice of the design and render it abortive, unless the French army were first driven away, and even then the garrison of Bayonne nearly fifteen thousand strong might be sufficient to baffle the attempt. Nevertheless in the face of these difficulties he resolved to pass, the means adopted being proportionate to the greatness of the design.

He considered, that, besides the difficulty of bringing the materials across the Nive and through the deep country on each side of that river, he could not throw his bridge above Bayonne without first driving Soult entirely from the confluents of the Adour and from the Adour itself; that when he had effected this his own communications between the bridge and his magazines at the sea-ports would still be difficult and unsafe, because his convoys would have a flank march, passing the Nive as well as the Adour and liable to interruption from the overflowing of those rivers; finally, that his means of transport would be unequal to the wear and tear of the deep roads and be interrupted by rain. But throwing his bridge below the town he would have the Adour itself as a harbour, while his land convoys used the royal causeway leading close to the river and not liable to be interrupted by weather. His line of retreat also would then be more secure if any unforeseen misfortune should render it necessary to break up the investment. He had no fear that Soult, while retiring before the active force he intended to employ against him on the upper parts of the rivers, would take his line of retreat by the great Bordeaux road and fall upon the investing force: that road led behind Bayonne through the sandy wilderness called the Landes, into which the French general would not care to throw himself, lest his opponent’s operations along the edge of the desert should prevent him from ever getting out. To draw the attention of the French army by an attack on their left near the roots of the Pyrenees would be sure to keep the lower Adour free from any formidable defensive force, because the rapidity and breadth of the stream there denied the use of common pontoons, and the mouth, about six miles below Bayonne, was so barred with sand, so beaten by surges, and so difficult of navigation even with the help of the landmarks, some of which had been removed, that the French would never expect small vessels fit for constructing a bridge could enter that way. Yet it was thus lord Wellington designed to achieve his object. He had collected forty large sailing boats of from fifteen to thirty tons burthen, called chasse marées, as if for the commissariat service, but he secretly loaded them with planks and other materials for his bridge. These and some gun-boats he designed, with the aid of the navy, to run up the Adour to a certain point upon which he meant also to direct the troops and artillery, and then with hawsers, and pontoons formed into rafts, to throw over a covering body and destroy a small battery near the mouth of the river. He trusted to the greatness and danger of the attempt for success and in this he was favoured by fortune.

The French trading vessels in the Adour had offered secretly to come out upon licenses and enter the service of his commissariat, but he was obliged to forego the advantage because of the former interference and dissent of the English ministers about the passports he had previously granted. This added greatly to the difficulty of the enterprize. He was thus forced to maltreat men willing to be friends, to prepare grates for heating shot, and a battery of Congreve rockets with which to burn their vessels and the sloop of war, or at least to drive them up the river, after which he proposed to protect his bridge with the gun-boats and a boom.

While he was thus preparing for offensive operations the French general was active in defensive measures. He had fortified all the main passes of the rivers by the great roads leading against his left, but the diminution of his force in January obliged him to withdraw his outposts from Anglet, which enabled lord Wellington to examine the whole course of the Adour below Bayonne and arrange for the passage with more facility. Soult then in pursuance of Napoleon’s system of warfare, which always prescribed a recourse to moral force to cover physical weakness, immediately concentrated his left wing against the allies’ right beyond the Nive, and redoubled that harassing partizan warfare which I have already noticed, endeavouring to throw his adversary entirely upon the defensive. Thus on the 26th of January, Morillo having taken possession of an advanced post near Mendionde not properly belonging to him, Soult, who desired to ascertain the feelings of the Spaniards about the English alliance, caused Harispe under pretence of remonstrating to sound him; he did not respond and Harispe then drove him, not without a vigorous resistance, from the post.