‘The marshal held a council, at the end of which he called major Dulong. It was nine o’clock in the evening. “I have selected you from the army, he said to that brave officer, to seize the bridge of Ponte Nova which the enemy are now cutting: you must endeavour to surprise them. The time is favourable. Attack, vigorously with the bayonet you will succeed or you will die. I want no news save that of your success, send me no other report, your silence will be sufficient in a contrary case. Take a hundred men at your choice; they will be sufficient; add twenty-five dragoons, and kill their horses to make a rampart, if it be necessary, on the middle of the bridge to sustain yourself and remain master of the passage.”’
‘The major departed with determined soldiers and a Portuguese guide who was tied with the leather slings of the muskets. Arrived within pistol-shot of the bridge he saw the enemy cutting the last beam. It was then one o’clock the rain fell heavily and the enemy’s labourers being fatigued thought they might take some repose before they finished their work. The torrents descending from the mountains and the cavado itself made such a noise that the march of the French was not heard, the sentinel at the bridge was killed without giving any alarm, and Dulong with twenty-five grenadiers passed crawling on the beam, one of them fell into the cavado but happily his fall produced no effect. The enemy’s advanced post of twenty-four men was destroyed, &c. &c. The marshal, informed of this happy event, came up in haste with the first troops he could find to defend the bridge and accelerate the passage of the army; but the repairing was neither sufficiently prompt or solid to prevent many brave soldiers perishing. The marshal embraced major Dulong, saying to him, “I thank you in the name of France brave major; you have saved the army.”’
Then follows a detailed account of the Misserella bridge, or Saltador, and its abbatis and other obstacles; of Dulong’s attack; of his being twice repulsed; and of his carrying of the bridge, the Leaper as it was called, at the third assault, falling dreadfully wounded at the moment of victory; finally, of the care and devotion with which his soldiers carried him on their shoulders during the rest of the retreat. And the reader will observe that this account is not a mere description in the body of the work, but a separate paper in the Appendix, written by some officer evidently well acquainted with all the facts, perhaps Dulong himself, and for the express purpose of correcting the errors of detail in the body of that work. Theatrical to the critic, and even ridiculous it may likely enough appear. The noble courage and self-devotion of such a soldier as Dulong is a subject which no person will ever expect a Quarterly viewer to understand.
In the foregoing comments I have followed the stream of my own thoughts, rather than the order of the reviewer’s criticisms; I must therefore retrace my steps to notice some points which have been passed over. His observations about Zaragoza have been already disposed of in my reply to his first articles published in my fifth volume, but his comments upon Catalonian affairs shall now be noticed.
The assertion that lord Collingwood was incapable of judging of the efforts of the Catalans, although he was in daily intercourse with their chiefs, co-operating with their armies and supplying them with arms and stores, because he was a seaman, is certainly ingenious. It has just so much of pertness in it as an Admiralty clerk of the Melville school might be supposed to acquire by a long habit of official insolence to naval officers, whose want of parliamentary interest exposed them to the mortification of having intercourse with him. And it has just so much of cunning wisdom as to place it upon a par with that which dictated the inquiry which we have heard was sent out to sir John Warren during the late American war, namely, “whether light—very light frigates, could not sail up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario?” And with that surprising providence, which did send out birch-brooms and tanks to hold fresh water for the use of the ships on the said lake of Ontario. But quitting these matters, the reviewer insinuates what is absolutely untrue, namely, that I have only quoted lord Collingwood as authority for my statements about Catalonia. The readers of my work know that I have adduced in testimony the Spanish generals themselves, namely, Contreras, Lacy, and Rovira; the testimony of sir Edward Codrington, of sir Edward Pellew, of colonel Doyle, and of other Englishmen. That I have referred to St. Cyr, Suchet, Lafaille, and other French writers; that I have quoted Vacani and Cabane’s Histories, the first an Italian serving with the French army in Catalonia, the last a Spaniard and chief of the staff to the Catalan army: and now, to complete the reviewer’s discomfiture, I will add the duke of Wellington, who is a landsman and therefore according to this reviewer’s doctrine, entitled to judge:—
Letter to lord Liverpool, 19th Dec. 1809.
‘In Catalonia the resistance is more general and regular; but still the people are of a description with which your armies could not co-operate with any prospect of success, or even of safety. You see what Burghersh says of the Somatenes; and it is notorious that the Catalans have at all times been the most irregular, and the least to be depended upon of any of the Spaniards.’
So much for light frigates, birch-brooms, fresh-water tanks, and Collingwood’s incapacity to judge of the Catalans, because he was a seaman; and as for Reding’s complaints of the Spaniards when dying, they must go to sir George’s big book with this marginal note, that St. Cyr is not the authority. But for the grand flourish, the threat to prove at another time, ‘from Wellington’s despatches,’ that the Spaniards gave excellent intelligence and made no false reports, let the reader take the following testimony in anticipation:—
Extracts from lord Wellington’s Correspondence, 1809.
‘At present I have no intelligence whatever, excepting the nonsense I receive occasionally from ——; as the Spaniards have defeated all my attempts to obtain any by stopping those whom I sent out to make inquiries.’