1º. The allies’ line of defence was weak. Was it therefore injudiciously adopted?
The French beaten at Vittoria were disorganized and retreated without artillery or baggage on excentric lines; Foy by Guipuscoa, Clauzel by Zaragoza, Reille by San Estevan, the King by Pampeluna. There was no reserve to rally upon, the people fled from the frontier, Bayonne and St. Jean Pied de Port if not defenceless were certainly in a very neglected state, and the English general might have undertaken any operation, assumed any position, offensive or defensive, which seemed good to him. Why then did he not establish the Anglo-Portuguese beyond the mountains, leaving the Spaniards to blockade the fortresses behind him? The answer to this question involves the difference between the practice and the theory of war.
“The soldiers, instead of preparing food and restingWellington’s Dispatches. themselves after the battle dispersed in the night to plunder, and were so fatigued that when the rain came on the next day they were incapable of marching and had more stragglers than the beaten enemy. Eighteen days after the victory twelve thousand five hundred men, chiefly British, were absent, most of them marauding in the mountains.”
Such were the reasons assigned by the English general for his slack pursuit after the battle of Vittoria, yet he had commanded that army for six years! Was he then deficient in the first qualification of a general, the art of disciplining and inspiring troops, or was the English military system defective? It is certain that he always exacted the confidence of his soldiers as a leader. It is not so certain that he ever gained their affections. The barbarity of the English military code excited public horror, the inequality of promotion created public discontent; yet the general complained he had no adequate power to reward or punish, and he condemned alike the system and the soldiers it produced. The latter “were detestable for every thing but fighting, and the officers as culpable as the men.” The vehemence of these censures is inconsistent with his celebrated observation, subsequently made, namely, “that he thought he could go any where and do any thing with the army that fought on the Pyrenees,” and although it cannot be denied that his complaints were generally too well-founded, there were thousands of true and noble soldiers, and zealous worthy officers, who served their country honestly and merited no reproaches. It is enough that they have been since neglected, exactly in proportion to their want of that corrupt aristocratic influence which produced the evils complained of.
2º. When the misconduct of the troops had thus weakened the effect of victory, the question of following Joseph at once into France assumed a new aspect. Wellington’s system of warfare had never varied after the battle of Talavera. Rejecting dangerous enterprize, it rested on profound calculation both as to time and resources for the accomplishment of a particular object, namely, the gradual liberation of Spain by the Anglo-Portuguese army. Not that he held it impossible to attain that object suddenly, and his battles in India, the passage of the Douro, the advance to Talavera, prove that by nature he was inclined to daring operations; but such efforts, however glorious, could not be adopted by a commander who feared even the loss of a brigade lest the government he served should put an end to the war. Neither was it suitable to the state of his relations with the Portuguese and Spaniards; their ignorance jealousy and passionate pride, fierce in proportion to their weakness and improvidence, would have enhanced every danger.
No man could have anticipated the extraordinary errors of the French in 1813. Wellington did not expect to cross the Ebro before the end of the campaign, and his battering train was prepared for the siege of Burgos not for that of Bayonne. A sudden invasion of France her military reputation considered, was therefore quite out of the pale of his methodized system of warfare, which was founded upon political as well as military considerations; and of the most complicated nature, seeing that he had at all times to deal with the personal and factious interests and passions, as well as the great state interests of three distinct nations two of which abhorred each other. At this moment also, the uncertain state of affairs in Germany strongly influenced his views. An armistice which might end in a separate peace excluding England, would have brought Napoleon’s whole force to the Pyrenees, and Wellington held cheap both the military and political proceedings of the coalesced powers. “I would not move a corporal’s guard in reliance upon such a system,” was the significant phrase he employed to express his contempt.
These considerations justified his caution as to invading France, but there were local military reasons equally cogent. 1º. He could not dispense with a secure harbour, because the fortresses still in possession of the French, namely, Santona, Pancorbo, Pampeluna, and St. Sebastian, interrupted his communications with the interior of Spain; hence the siege of the latter place. 2º. He had to guard against the union of Suchet and Clauzel on his right flank; hence his efforts to cut off the last-named general; hence also the blockade of Pampeluna in preference to siege and the launching of Mina and the bands on the side of Zaragoza.
3º. After Vittoria the nature of the campaign depended upon Suchet’s operations, which were rendered more important by Murray’s misconduct. The allied force on the eastern coast was badly organized, it did not advance from Valencia as we have seen until the 16th, and then only partially and by the coast, whereas Suchet had assembled more than twenty thousand excellent troops on the Ebro as early as the 12th of July; and had he continued his march upon Zaragoza he would have saved the castle of that place with its stores. Then rallying Paris’ division, he could have menaced Wellington’s flank with twenty-five thousand men exclusive of Clauzel’s force, and if that general joined him with forty thousand.
On the 16th, the day lord William Bentinck quitted Valencia, Suchet might have marched from Zaragoza on Tudela or Sanguessa, and Soult’s preparations originally made as we have seen to attack on the 23d instead of the 25th, would have naturally been hastened. How difficult it would then have been for the allies to maintain themselves beyond the Ebro is evident, much more so to hold a forward position in France. That Wellington feared an operation of this nature is clear from his instructions to lord William Bentinck and to Mina; and because Picton’s and Cole’s divisions instead of occupying the passes were kept behind the mountains solely to watch Clauzel; when the latter had regained the frontier of France Cole was permitted to join Byng and Morillo. It follows that the operations after the battle of Vittoria were well considered and consonant to lord Wellington’s general system. Their wisdom would have been proved if Suchet had seized the advantages within his reach.
4º. A general’s capacity is sometimes more taxed to profit from a victory than to gain one. Wellington, master of all Spain, Catalonia excepted, desired to establish himself solidly in the Pyrenees, lest a separate peace in Germany should enable Napoleon to turn his whole force against the allies. In this expectation, with astonishing exertion of body and mind, he had in three days achieved a rigorous examination of the whole mass of the Western Pyrenees, and concluded that if Pampeluna and San Sebastian fell, a defensive position as strong as that of Portugal, and a much stronger one than could be found behind the Ebro, might be established. But to invest those places and maintain so difficult a covering line was a greater task than to win the battle of Vittoria. However, the early fall of San Sebastian he expected, because the errors of execution in that siege could not be foreseen, and also for gain of time he counted upon the disorganized state of the French army, upon Joseph’s want of military capacity, and upon the moral ascendancy which his own troops had acquired over the enemy by their victories. He could not anticipate the expeditious journey, the sudden arrival of Soult, whose rapid reorganization of the French army, and whose vigorous operations contrasted with Joseph’s abandonment of Spain, illustrated the old Greek saying, that a herd of deer led by a lion are more dangerous than a herd of lions led by a deer.