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MILITARY GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA: MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, ROADS
Of all the regions of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula possesses the best marked frontier. It is separated from France, its only neighbour, by one broad range of mountains, which defines its boundaries even more clearly than the Alps mark those of Italy. For the Alps are no single chain, but a system of double and triple chains running parallel to each other, and leaving between them debatable lands such as Savoy and the Southern Tyrol. Between Spain and France there is no possibility of any such claims and counter-claims. It is true that Roussillon, where the eastern end of the Pyrenean range runs into the sea, was Spanish down to 1659, but that was a political survival from the Middle Ages, not a natural union: there can be no doubt that geographically Roussillon is a French and not an Iberian land: the main backbone of the boundary chain lies south and not north of it.
The Pyrenees, though in height they cannot vie with the Alps, and though they are not nearly so jagged or scarped as the greater chain, are extremely difficult to cross, all the more so because the hand of man has seldom come to help the hand of nature in making practicable lines of access between France and Spain. In the whole length between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean there are only two short fronts where intercommunication is easy, and these lie at the extreme east and west, where the mountains touch the sea. In the 250 miles which intervene there is hardly one good pass practicable for wheeled traffic or for the march of an army: most are mere mule-paths, rarely used save by smugglers and shepherds. The only one of these minor routes employed in the war was that which leads from Jaca in Aragon to Oloron in Béarn, and that was not much used: only on one single occasion in 1813 does it appear prominently in history, when Clausel’s French division, fleeing before Wellington and pressed up against the foot of the mountains, escaped across it with some difficulty.
The only passes that were systematically employed during the war were those which lie close to the water at each end of the Pyrenean chain. At the eastern end there are three which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia. One hugs the water’s edge, and crawls along under the cliffs from Perpignan to Rosas: this was not in 1808 the most important of the three, though it is the one by which the railway passes to-day. Inland there are two other roads over difficult crests—one ten, the other forty miles from the shore—the former from Bellegarde to Figueras, the other from Mont-Louis to Puycerda and Vich. The first was the pass most used in the war, being less exposed than the Rosas route to English descents from the sea: the coast road could actually be cannonaded by warships at some corners. It was blocked indeed by the fortress of Figueras, but that stronghold was only in Spanish hands for a very short period of the war. The inmost, or Mont-Louis-Puycerda road was bad, led into nothing more than a few upland valleys, and was very little employed by the French. It would have been of importance had it led down into the lowlands of Aragon, but after taking a long turn in the hills it harks back towards the Catalan coast, and joins the other two roads near Gerona—a fortress which is so placed as practically to command every possible access into Eastern Spain.
Taking all three of these paths into Catalonia together, they do but form a sort of back door into the Iberian Peninsula. They only communicate with the narrow eastern coast-strip from Barcelona to Valencia. There is no direct access from them into Castile, the heart of the country, and only a roundabout entrance by Lerida into Aragon. The great mass of the Catalan and Valencian Sierras bars them out from the main bulk of the Spanish realm. Catalonia and Valencia, wealthy and in parts fertile as they are, are but its back premises.
The true front door of the kingdom is formed by the passes at the other, the western, end of the Pyrenees. Here too we have three available routes, but they differ in character from the roads at the edge of the Mediterranean, in that they open up two completely separate lines of advance into Spain, and do not (like the Catalan defiles) all lead on to the same goal. All three start from Bayonne, the great southern fortress of Gascony. The first keeps for some time close to the seaside, and after crossing the Bidassoa, the boundary river of France and Spain, at Irun, leaves the fortress of San Sebastian a few miles to its right and then charges the main chain of the mountains. It emerges at Vittoria, the most northerly town of importance in the basin of the Ebro. A few miles further south it crosses that stream, and then makes for Burgos and Madrid, over two successive lines of Sierras. It opens up the heart of both Old and New Castile. The other two roads from Bayonne strike inland at once, and do not hug the Biscayan shore like the Irun-Vittoria route. They climb the Pyrenees, one by the pass of Maya, the other, twenty miles further east, by the more famous pass of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne suffered disaster of old, and left the great paladin, Roland, dead behind him. The Maya and Roncesvalles roads join, after passing the mountains, at the great fortress of Pampeluna, the capital of Navarre. From thence several lines are available for the invader, the two chief of which are the roads into Old Castile by Logro?o and into Aragon by Tudela. Pampeluna is quite as valuable as Vittoria as the base for an attack on Central Spain.
The whole Iberian Peninsula has been compared, not inaptly, to an inverted soup-plate: roughly it consists of a high central plateau, surrounded by a flat rim. But no comparison of that kind can be pressed too hard, and we must remember that the rim is variable in width: sometimes, as on the north coast, and in the extreme south-east of the peninsula, it is very narrow, and much cut up by small spurs running down to the sea. But as a rule, and especially in Central Portugal, Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia, it is broad and fertile. Indeed if we set aside the northern coast—Biscay, Asturias, and Galicia—we may draw a sharp division between the rich and semi-tropical coast plain, and the high, wind-swept, and generally barren central plateau. All the wealth of the land lies in the outer strip: the centre is its most thinly inhabited and worthless part. Madrid, lying in the very midst of the plateau, is therefore not the natural centre of the land in anything save a mathematical sense. It is a new and artificial town of the sixteenth century, pitched upon as an administrative capital by the Hapsburg kings; but in spite of the long residence of the court there, it never grew into a city of the first class. Summing up its ineligibilities, an acute observer said that Madrid combined ‘the soil of the Sahara, the sun of Calcutta, the wind of Edinburgh, and the cold of the North Pole.’ Though in no sense the natural capital of the country, it has yet a certain military importance as the centre from which the road-system of Spain radiates. There is, as a glance at the map will show, no other point from which all the main avenues of communication with the whole of the provinces can be controlled. An invader, therefore, who has got possession of it can make any combined action against himself very difficult. But he must not flatter himself that the capture of Madrid carries with it the same effect that the capture of Paris or Berlin or Vienna entails. The provinces have no such feeling of dependence on the national capital as is common in other countries. France with Paris occupied by an enemy is like a body deprived of its head. But for Andalusians or Catalonians or Galicians the occupation of Madrid had no such paralysing effect. No sentimental affection for the royal residence—and Madrid was nothing more—existed. And a government established at Seville or Cadiz, or any other point, would be just as well (or as ill) obeyed as one that issued its orders from the sandy banks of the Manzanares.
The main geographical, as well as the main political, characteristics of Spain are determined by its very complicated mountain-system. It is a land where the rivers count for little, and the hills for almost everything, in settling military conditions. In most countries great rivers are connecting cords of national life: their waters carry the internal traffic of the realm: the main roads lie along their banks. But in Spain the streams, in spite of their length and size, are useless. They mostly flow in deep-sunk beds, far below the level of the surrounding country-side. Their rapid current is always swirling round rocks, or dashing over sandbanks: often they flow for mile after mile between cliffs from which it is impossible to reach the water’s edge. In the rainy season they are dangerous torrents: in the summer all save the very largest dwindle down into miserable brooks. A river in Spain is always a sundering obstacle, never a line of communication. Only for a few scores of miles near their mouths can any one of them be utilized for navigation: the Douro can be so employed as far as Freneda on the frontier of Portugal, the Tagus in good seasons as far as Abrantes, the Guadalquivir to Seville. For the rest of their long courses they are not available even for the lightest boats.
Spanish rivers, in short, are of importance not as lines of transit, but as obstacles. They form many fine positions for defence, but positions generally rendered dangerous by the fact that a very few days of drought may open many unsuspected fords, where just before there had been deep and impassable water. Rivers as broad as the Tagus below Talavera and the Douro at Toro were occasionally crossed by whole armies in dry weather. It was always hazardous to trust to them as permanent lines of defence.
It is the mountains which really require to be studied in detail from the military point of view. Speaking generally we may describe the Iberian system—as distinct from the Pyrenees—as consisting of one chain running roughly from north to south, so as to separate the old kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while at right angles to this chain run a number of others, whose general courses are parallel to each other and run from east to west. There is no single name for the mountains which separate Castile and Aragon, nor do they form one continuous range. They are a number of separate systems, often divided from each other by wide gaps, and sometimes broadening out into high tablelands. The central nucleus, from which the rest run out, lies between the provinces of New Castile and Valencia, from Guadalajara in the former to Morella in the latter. Here there is a great ganglion of chaotic sierras, pierced by hardly a single practicable road. Northward, in the direction of Aragon, they sink down into the plain of the Ebro: southward they spread out into the lofty plateau of Murcia, but rise into higher and narrower ranges again as they get near the frontier of Andalusia.
This block of chains and plateaus forms the central watershed of Spain, which throws westward the sources of the Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir, and eastward those of the Xucar and Segura. The basins of these streams and their tributaries form three-fourths of the Iberian Peninsula. The rest consists mainly of the great valley of the Ebro: this hardly falls into the system, and is somewhat exceptional. It has been described as serving as a sort of wet-ditch to the main fortification of the peninsula. Starting in the western extension of the Pyrenees, quite close to the Bay of Biscay, it runs diagonally across Spain, more or less parallel to the Pyrenees, and falls into the Mediterranean between Catalonia and Valencia. It is more low-lying than the rest of the main valleys of Spain, is broader, and is not so much cramped and cut up by mountains running down to it at right angles to its course.
Behind the Ebro lie, chain after chain, the parallel sierras which mark off the divisions of the great central plateau of Spain. Arteche compares them to the waves of a great petrified sea, running some higher and some lower, but all washing up into jagged crests, with deep troughs between them.
The first and most northerly of these waves is that which we may call the range of Old Castile, which separates the basin of the Ebro from that of the Douro. At one end it links itself to the Pyrenean chain in the neighbourhood of Santander: at the other it curves round to join the more central sierras in the direction of Soria and Calatayud. It is the lowest of the chains which bound the central plateau of Spain, and is pierced by three practicable roads, of which the most important is that from Vittoria to Burgos.
Between this chain on the east and the Cantabrian mountains on the north lies the great plain of Old Castile and Leon, the heart of the elder Spanish monarchy, in the days when Aragon was still independent and Andalusia remained in the hands of the Moor. It is a fairly productive corn-producing land, studded with ancient cities such as Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Toro, Zamora, Salamanca. The Tierra de Campos (land of the plains), as it was called, was the granary of Northern Spain, the most civilized part of the kingdom, and the only one where there existed a fairly complete system of roads. For want of the isolated mountain chains which cut up most provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, it was hard to defend and easy to overrun. If the mountains that divide it from the Ebro valley are once passed, there is no way of stopping the invader till he reaches the border of Asturias, Galicia, or New Castile. The whole plain forms the valley of the Upper Douro and its tributaries, the Adaja, Pisuerga, Esla, Tormes, and the rest. It narrows down towards Portugal, as the mountains of Galicia on the one side and Estremadura on the other throw out their spurs to north and south. Hence the Lower Douro valley, after the Portuguese frontier has been passed, is a defile rather than a plain. Before Oporto and the estuary are reached, there are many places where the mountains on either side come right down to the river’s edge.
The second chain is much more important, and more strongly marked: it divides Old from New Castile, the valley of the Douro from that of the Tagus. In its central and western parts it is really a double range, with two narrow valleys between its chief ridges. These valleys are drained by the Zezere and Alagon, two tributaries of the Tagus which flow parallel for many scores of miles to the broad river which they feed. If we call this great system of mountains the chain of New Castile it is only for convenience’ sake: the Spaniards and Portuguese have no common name for them. In the east they are styled the Sierra de Ayllon; above Madrid they are known as the Guadarrama—a name sometimes extended to the whole chain. When they become double, west of Madrid, the northern chain is the Sierra de Gata, the southern the Sierra de Gredos. Finally in Portugal the extension of the Sierra de Gata is called the Sierra da Estrella, the southern parallel ridge the Sierra do Moradal. The whole system forms a very broad, desolate, and lofty belt of hills between the Tagus and Douro, through which the practicable passes are few and difficult. Those requiring notice are (1) the Somosierra Pass, through which runs the great northern road from Burgos to Madrid: its name is well remembered owing to the extraordinary way in which Napoleon succeeded in forcing it (against all the ordinary rules of war) in the winter of 1808. (2) There is a group of three passes, all within twelve miles of each other, across the Guadarrama, through which there debouch on to Madrid the main roads from North-western Spain—those from (a) Valladolid and Segovia, (b) from Astorga, Tordesillas, and Arevalo, (c) from Salamanca by Avila. After this group of passes there is a long space of impracticable hills, till we come to the chief road from north to south, parallel to the Portuguese frontier: it comes down the valley of the Alagon from Salamanca, by Ba?os and Plasencia, on to the great Roman bridge of Alcantara, the main passage over the Middle Tagus. This is a bad road through a desolate country, but the exigencies of war caused it to be used continually by the French and English armies, whenever they had to transfer themselves from the valley of the Douro to that of the Tagus. Occasionally they employed a still worse route, a little further west, from Ciudad Rodrigo by Perales to Alcantara. When we get within the Portuguese frontier, we find a road parallel to the last, from Almeida by Guarda to Abrantes, also a difficult route, but like it in perpetual use: usually, when the French marched from Salamanca to Alcantara, Wellington moved in a corresponding way from near Almeida to Abrantes. This road runs along the basin of the Zezere, though not down in the trough of the river, but high up the hillsides above it. Spanish and Portuguese roads, as we shall see, generally avoid the river banks and run along the slopes far above them.
The next great chain across the Peninsula is that which separates the barren and sandy valley of the Upper Tagus from the still more desolate and melancholy plateau of La Mancha, the basin of the Guadiana. Of all the regions of Central Spain, this is the most thinly peopled and uninviting. In the whole valley there are only two towns of any size, Ciudad Real, the capital of La Mancha, and Badajoz, the frontier fortress against Portugal. The mountains north of the Guadiana are called first the Sierra de Toledo, then the Sierra de Guadalupe, lastly on the Portuguese frontier the Sierra de San Mamed. Their peculiarity, as opposed to the other cross-ranges of the Peninsula, is that at their eastern end they do not unite directly with the mountains of Valencia, but leave a broad gap of upland, through which the roads from Madrid to Murcia and Madrid to Valencia take their way. When the Sierra de Toledo once begins roads are very few. There are practically only three—(1) Toledo by San Vincente to Merida, a most break-neck route winding among summits for forty miles; (2) Almaraz by Truxillo to Merida, the main path from Tagus to Guadiana, and the most used, though it is difficult and steep; (3) Alcantara by Albuquerque to Badajoz, a bad military road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, continuing the similar route from Salamanca to Alcantara.
Leaving the barren basin of the Guadiana to proceed southward, we find across our path a range of first-rate importance, the southern boundary of the central plateaux of Spain: dropping down from its crest we are no longer among high uplands, but in the broad low-lying semi-tropical plain of Andalusia, the richest region of Spain. The chain between the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir and the barren plateau of La Mancha is known for the greater part of its course as the Sierra Morena, but in its western section it takes the name of Sierra de Constantino. The passes across it require special notice: the most eastern and the most important is that of Despe?a Perros, through which passes the high road from Madrid to Cordova, Seville, and Cadiz. At its southern exit was fought the fight of Baylen, in which the armies of Napoleon received their first great check by the surrender of Dupont and his 20,000 men on July 23, 1808. Higher up the defile lies another historic spot, on which Christian and Moor fought the decisive battle for the mastery of Spain in the early years of the thirteenth century, the well-known fight of Las Navas de Tolosa. The Despe?a Perros has two side-passes close to its left and right: the former is that of San Estevan del Puerto: the latter is known as the ‘King’s Gate’ (Puerto del Rey). All these three defiles present tremendous difficulties to an assailant from the north, yet all were carried in a single rush by the armies of Soult and Sebastiani in 1810. The central pass of the Sierra Morena lies ninety miles to the left, and is of much less importance, as it starts from the most arid corner of La Mancha, and does not connect itself with any of the great roads from the north. It leads down on to Cordova from Hinojosa. Again sixty miles to the west three more passes come down on to Seville, the one by Llerena, the second by Monasterio, the third by Fregenal: they lead to Badajoz and Merida. These are easier routes through a less rugged country: they were habitually used by Soult in 1811 and 1812, when, from his Andalusian base at Seville, he used to go north to besiege or to relieve the all-important fortress of Badajoz.
Last of all the great Spanish chains is that which lies close along the Mediterranean Sea, forming the southern edge of the fertile Andalusian plain. It is the Sierra Nevada, which, though neither the longest nor the broadest of the ranges of the south, contains the loftiest peaks in Spain, Mulha?en and La Veleta. This chain runs from behind Gibraltar along the shore, till it joins the mountains of Murcia, leaving only a very narrow coast-strip between its foot and the southern sea. Three roads cut it in its western half, which, starting from Granada, Ronda, and Antequera all come down to the shore at, or in the neighbourhood of, the great port of Malaga. The parts of the coast-line that are far from that city are only accessible by following difficult roads that run close to the water’s edge.
We have still to deal with two corners of the Iberian Peninsula, which do not fall into any of the great valleys that we have described—Galicia and Northern Portugal in the north-west, and Catalonia in the north-east. The geographical conditions of the former region depend on the Cantabrian Mountains, the western continuation of the Pyrenees. This chain, after running for many miles as a single ridge, forks in the neighbourhood of the town of Leon. One branch keeps on in its original direction, and runs by the coast till it reaches the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre. The other turns south-west and divides Spain from Portugal as far as the sea. The angle between these forking ranges is drained by a considerable river, the Minho. The basins of this stream and its tributary the Sil, form the greater part of the province of Galicia. Their valleys are lofty, much cut up by cross-spurs, and generally barren. The access to them from Central Spain is by two openings. The main one is the high road from Madrid to Corunna by Astorga; it does not follow the course of either the Sil or the Minho, but charges cross-ridge after cross-ridge of the spurs of the Galician hills, till at last it comes down to the water, and forks into two routes leading the one to Corunna, the other to the still more important arsenal of Ferrol. The other gate of Galicia is a little to the south of Astorga, where a pass above the town of Puebla de Sanabria gives access to a steep and winding road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, which finally gets into the valley of the Minho, and turns down to reach the port of Vigo. It will be remembered that Sir John Moore, in his famous retreat, hesitated for some time at Astorga between the Vigo and Corunna roads, and finally chose the latter. His judgement was undoubtedly correct, but the best alternative was bad, for in winter even the Madrid-Corunna road, the main artery of this part of Spain, is distressing enough to an army. It does not follow any well-marked valley, but cuts across four separate ranges, every one of which in January was a nursery of torrents in its lower slopes, and an abode of snow in its upper levels. Besides the roads with which we have already dealt there is a third important line of communication in Galicia, that by the narrow coast-plain of the Atlantic, from Corunna by Santiago to Vigo, and thence into Portugal as far as Oporto. This would be a good road but for the innumerable river-mouths, small and great, which it has to cross: the road passes each stream just where it ceases to be tidal, and at each is fronted at right angles by a defensible position, which, if held by a competent enemy, is difficult to force from the front, and still more difficult to turn by a detour up-stream. Nevertheless it was by this route that Soult successfully invaded Northern Portugal in the spring of 1809. It must be remembered that he was only opposed by bands of peasants not even organized into the loosest form of militia.
The geography of Catalonia, the last Iberian region with which we have to deal, is more simple than that of Galicia. The land is formed by a broad mountain belt running out from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, parallel to the Mediterranean. From this chain the slopes run down and form on the eastern side a coast-plain, generally rather narrow, on the western a series of parallel valleys drained by tributaries of the Segre, the most important affluent of the Ebro. They all unite near Lerida, an important town and a great centre of roads. But two considerable rivers, the Ter and the Llobregat, have small basins of their own in the heart of the central mountain mass, which open down into the coast-plain by defiles, the one blocked by the peak of Montserrat, the other by the town of Gerona. During the greater part of the Peninsular War the French held the larger share of the shoreland, dominating it from the great fortress of Barcelona, which they had seized by treachery ere hostilities began. In 1811 they captured Tarragona also, the second capital of the sea coast. But they never succeeded in holding down all the small upland plains, and the minor passes that lead from one to the other. Hunted out of one the Spanish army took refuge in the next, and, though it dwindled down ultimately to a mass of guerilla bands, was never caught en masse and exterminated. There were too many bolt-holes among the network of hills, and the invaders never succeeded in stopping them all, so that down to the end of the war the patriots always maintained a precarious existence inland, descending occasionally to the shore to get ammunition and stores from the English squadrons which haunted the coast. They were supplied and reinforced from the Balearic Isles, which Napoleon could never hope to touch, for his power (like that of the witches of old) vanished when it came to running water. The survival of the Catalan resistance after the French had drawn a complete cordon around the hill-country, holding the whole coast-plain on the one hand, and Lerida and the Segre valley on the other, is one of the incidents of the war most creditable to Spanish constancy.
Having dealt with the physical geography of Spain, it is necessary for us to point out the way in which the natural difficulties of the country had influenced its main lines of communication. Roads always take the ‘line of least resistance’ in early days, and seek for easy passes, not for short cuts. The idea that ‘time is money,’ and that instead of going round two sides of a triangle it may be worth while to cut a new path across its base, in spite of all engineering difficulties, was one very unfamiliar to the Spaniard. Nothing shows more clearly the state of mediaeval isolation in which the kingdom still lay in 1808 than the condition of its roads. Wherever the country presented any serious obstacles, little or no attempt had been made to grapple with them since the days of the Romans. The energetic Charles III, alone among the kings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had done something to improve the system of intercommunication. He had, for example, superseded the old break-neck road from the plains of Leon into Galicia, by building the fine new chaussée from Astorga to Villafranca by Manzanal; but among the line of Hapsburg and Bourbon sovereigns Charles was a rare exception. Under the imbecile rule of his son (or rather of Godoy) improvements ceased, and internal communications were as much neglected as any other branch of state management. What roads there were, when the war of 1808 broke out, were in a state of dreadful neglect. The Spaniard was still too prone to go round an intolerable distance rather than attempt a serious piece of engineering work. Let us take, for example, the northern coast of Spain: the Cantabrian range is no doubt a most serious obstacle to intercourse between Castile and Leon, on the one side, and the maritime provinces of Asturias and Biscay on the other. But who would have conceived it possible that in a length of 300 miles of mountain, there should be no more than five roads practicable for wheeled traffic and artillery? Yet this was so: to get down from the central plateau to the coast there are only available these five routes—one from Leon to Oviedo, one from Burgos to Santander, one from Burgos to Bilbao, one from Vittoria to Bilbao, and one from Vittoria to San Sebastian and Irun. There were many other points at which a division travelling in light order without guns or baggage could cross the watershed—as was shown in Blake’s flight from Reynosa and Ney’s invasion of the Asturias. But for an army travelling with all its impedimenta such bypaths were impracticable.
Let us take another part of the Peninsula—its eastern side. The ancient separation between Aragon and Castile is fully reflected by the utter isolation of the two for intercommunication. To get from Madrid to the east coast there are only three roads suitable for wheeled traffic: one goes by the main gap in the hills by Chinchilla to Murcia, another by Reque?a to Valencia. The third passes by Calatayud to Saragossa and ultimately to Barcelona. Between it and the Valencia road there is a gap of no less than 120 miles unpierced by any good practicable line of communication. This being so, we begin to understand how it was that the operations on the eastern side of Spain, during the whole of the struggle, were a sort of independent episode that never exercised any great influence on the main theatre of the war, or, on the other hand, was much affected by the progress of the strife in Castile or Portugal. Soult’s conquest of Andalusia did not help Suchet to conquer Valencia. On the other hand, when the latter did, in January, 1812, succeed in his attempt to subdue the eastern coast-line, it did not much affect him that Wellington was storming Ciudad Rodrigo and pressing back the French in the west. He was able to hold on to Valencia till the allies, in 1813, got possession of the upper valley of the Ebro and the great road from Madrid to Saragossa and Lerida, after the battle of Vittoria. It was only then that his flank was really turned, and that he was compelled to retreat and to abandon his southern conquests.
Summing up the general characteristics of the road-system of Spain, we note first that the main routes are rather at right angles to the great rivers than parallel to them. The sole exception is to be found in the valley of the Ebro, where the only good cross-road of Northern Spain does follow the river-bank from Logro?o and Tudela on to Saragossa and Lerida.
Just because the roads do not cling to the valleys, but strike across them at right angles, they are always crossing watersheds by means of difficult passes. And so there is hardly a route in the whole Peninsula where it is possible to find fifty miles without a good defensive position drawn across the path. Moreover, the continual passes make the question of supplies very difficult: in crossing a plain an army can live, more or less, on the supplies of the country-side; but among mountains and defiles there is no population, and therefore no food to be had. Hence an army on the move must take with it all that it consumes, by means of a heavy wagon train, or an enormous convoy of pack-mules. But only the best roads are suitable for wheeled traffic, and so the lines practicable for a large host are very restricted in number. The student is often tempted to consider the movements of the rival generals very slow. The explanation is simply that to transfer an army from one river-basin to another was a serious matter. It was necessary to spend weeks in collecting at the base food and transport sufficient to support the whole force till it reached its goal. In 1811 or 1812 the French and English were continually moving up and down the Portuguese frontier parallel to each other, the one from Salamanca to Badajoz, the other from Almeida or Guarda to Elvas. But to prepare for one of these flittings was such a serious matter that by the time that the army was able to move, the enemy had usually got wind of the plan, and was able to follow the movement on his own side of the frontier. There were months of preparation required before a few weeks of active operations, and when the concentration was over and the forces massed, they could only keep together as long as the food held out, and then had to disperse again in order to live. This was what was meant by the old epigram, that ‘in Spain large armies starve, and small armies get beaten.’
Half the strategy of the campaigns of 1811-12-13 consisted in one of the combatants secretly collecting stores, concentrating his whole army, and then dashing at some important part of his adversary’s line, before the other could mass his forces in a corresponding way. If prompt, the assailant might gain a fortnight, in which he might either try to demolish the enemy in detail before he could concentrate, or else to take from him some important position or town. In 1811 Marmont and Dorsenne played this trick on Wellington, during the short campaign of El Bodon and Aldea da Ponte. They relieved Ciudad Rodrigo, and nearly caught some divisions of the English army before the rest could join. But missing the instant blow, and allowing Wellington time to draw in his outlying troops, they failed and went home. In 1812, on the other hand, the British general successfully played off this device on the French. He first concentrated in the north, and captured Ciudad Rodrigo in eleven days, before Marmont could mass his scattered divisions; then going hastily south he took Badajoz in exactly the same way, storming it after only nineteen days of siege. Soult drew his army together at the news of Wellington’s move, but had to bring troops from such distances, and to collect so much food, that he arrived within three marches of Badajoz only to hear that the place had just fallen.
In dealing with the main geographical facts of the war it is fair to recollect that an invasion of Spain from France is one of the most difficult of undertakings, because the whole river and mountain system of the Peninsula lies across the main line of advance from Bayonne to Cadiz, which the invader must adopt. While the French conquest must be pushed from north to south, both the streams and the Sierras of Spain all run at right angles to this direction, i.e. from east to west. In advancing from the Pyrenees to Madrid, and again from Madrid to Seville and Cadiz, the invader has to cross every main river—Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir—and to force the passes of every main range. Moreover, as he advances southward, he has to keep his flanks safe against disturbance from the two mountainous regions, Catalonia and Portugal, which lie along the eastern and western coasts of the Peninsula. Unless the whole breadth of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, be occupied step by step as the invader moves on towards the Straits of Gibraltar, he can always be molested and have his lines of communication with France threatened. In the end it may be said that Napoleon’s whole scheme of conquest was shipwrecked upon the blunder of attacking Andalusia and Cadiz while Portugal was still unsubdued. Wellington’s constant sallies out of that country upon the French flank, in Leon and Estremadura, detained such large forces to protect the valleys of the Central Douro and Tagus that enough men were never found to finish the conquest of the south and east. And finally one crushing victory at Salamanca, in the plains of Leon, so threatened the invader’s line of touch with France, that he had to abandon the whole south of Spain in order to concentrate an army large enough to force Wellington back from Burgos and the great northern road.
On the other hand, one tremendous advantage possessed by the French in the central years of the war must be remembered. It is manifest that Madrid is the only really important road-centre in Spain, and that its undisturbed possession by the French in 1809-11 gave them the advantage of being able to operate from a single point, against enemies who lay in a vast semicircle around, with no good cross-roads to join them and enable them to work together. The small ‘Army of the Centre,’ which was always kept in and around Madrid, could be used as a reserve for any other of the French armies, and transferred to join it in a few marches, while it was infinitely more difficult to unite the various forces lying on an outer circle at Astorga, Almeida, Abrantes, and Cadiz, which the Spaniards and the British kept in the field. In short, in estimating the difficulties of the two parties, the advantage of the central position must be weighed against the disadvantage of long and exposed lines of communication.
One of the cardinal blunders of Napoleon’s whole scheme for the conquest of the Peninsula was that he persisted in treating it as if it were German or Italian soil, capable of supporting an army on the march. His troops were accustomed to live on the country-side while crossing Central Europe, and therefore made no proper preparations for supplying themselves by other means than plunder. But in Spain there are only a few districts where this can be done: it may be possible to get forward without an enormous train of convoys in Andalusia, the coast plain of Valencia, and certain parts of the rather fertile plateau of Leon, the wheat-bearing Tierra de Campos. But over four-fifths of the Peninsula, an army that tries to feed on the country-side will find itself at the point of starvation in a few days, and be forced to disperse in order to live.
Till he had seen Spain with his own eyes Napoleon might perhaps have been excused for ignoring the fact that his ordinary method of ‘making war support itself’ was not in this case possible. But even after he had marched from Bayonne to Madrid, and then from Madrid to Astorga, in 1808, he persisted in refusing to see facts as they were. We find him on his way back to Paris from the campaign uttering the extraordinary statement that ‘Spain is a much better country than he had ever supposed, and that he had no idea what a magnificent present he had made to his brother Joseph till he had seen it.’ Of his utter failure to grasp the difficulties of the country we may get a fair conception from his orders, given at the same time, to Marshal Soult, who was at that moment occupied in pushing Sir John Moore towards Corunna. He told the Duke of Dalmatia that if he reached Lugo on January 9, and the English got away safely by sea, he was to march on Oporto, where he ought to arrive on the first of February; after seizing that city he was to go on to Lisbon, which he might reach on or about February 10. As a matter of fact Soult saw the English depart, and occupied Corunna on January 19, but his army was so utterly worn out, and his stores so entirely exhausted, that with the best will in the world he could not move again till February 20, only took Oporto on March 29, and had not yet started for Lisbon when Wellesley suddenly fell on him and drove him out of the country on May 12, 1809. The Emperor, in short, had given Soult orders executable perhaps, according to the distance, in Lombardy or Bavaria, but utterly absurd when applied to a country where roads are few and bad, with a defile or a river crossing the path at every few miles, and where food has to be carefully collected before a move, and taken on with the army by means of enormous convoys. Moreover the month was January, when every brook had become a raging mountain stream, and every highland was covered with snow! With such conceptions of the task before him, it is not wonderful that Napoleon was continually issuing wholly impracticable orders. The one that we have just quoted was sent out from Valladolid: how much worse would the case be when the Emperor persisted in directing affairs from Paris or Vienna, the last news that had reached him from the front being now several weeks old! With all his genius he never thoroughly succeeded in grasping the state of affairs, and to the very last continued to send directions that would have been wise enough in Central Europe, but happened to be inapplicable in the Iberian Peninsula.
It is only fair to Napoleon to add that his Spanish enemies, who ought at least to have known the limitations of their own road-system, and the disabilities of their half-starved armies, used habitually to produce plans of operations far more fantastically impossible than any that he ever drafted. They would arrange far-reaching schemes, for the co-operation of forces based on the most remote corners of the Peninsula, without attempting to work out the ‘logistics’ of the movement. The invariable result was that such enterprises either ended in disaster, or at the best came to a stop after the first few marches, because some vital point of the calculation had already been proved to have been made on erroneous data.
THE SPANISH ARMY IN 1808
When the English student begins to investigate the Peninsular War in detail, he finds that, as regards the Spanish armies and their behaviour, he starts with a strong hostile prejudice. The Duke of Wellington in his dispatches, and still more in his private letters and his table-talk, was always enlarging on the folly and arrogance of the Spanish generals with whom he had to co-operate, and on the untrustworthiness of their troops. Napier, the one military classic whom most Englishmen have read, is still more emphatic and far more impressive, since he writes in a very judicial style, and with the most elaborate apparatus of references and authorities. When the reader begins to work through the infinite number of Peninsular diaries of British officers and men (for there are a very considerable number of writers from among the rank and file) the impression left upon him is much the same. It must be confessed that for the most part they had a very poor opinion of our allies.
Before allowing ourselves to be carried away by the almost unanimous verdict of our own countrymen, it is only fair to examine the state and character of the Spanish army when the war broke out. Only when we know its difficulties can we judge with fairness of its conduct, or decide upon its merits and shortcomings.
The armed force which served under the banners of Charles IV in the spring of 1808 consisted of 131,000 men, of whom 101,000 were regulars and 30,000 embodied militia. The latter had been under arms since 1804, and composed the greater part of the garrisons of the seaports of Spain, all of which had to be protected against possible descents of English expeditions.
Of the 101,000 men of the regular army, however, not all were available for the defence of the country. While the war with Russia was still in progress, Bonaparte had requested the Spanish government to furnish him with a strong division for use in the North , and in consequence the Marquis of La Romana had been sent to the Baltic with 15,000 men, the picked regiments of the army. There remained therefore only 86,000 regulars within the kingdom. A very cursory glance down the Spanish army-list of 1808 is sufficient to show that this force was far from being in a satisfactory condition for either offensive or defensive operations.
It is well worth while to look at the details of its composition. The infantry consisted of three sorts of troops—the Royal Guard, the line regiments, and the foreign corps in Spanish pay. For Spain, more than any other European state, had kept up the old seventeenth-century fashion of hiring foreign mercenaries on a large scale. Even in the Royal Guard half the infantry were composed of ‘Walloon Guards,’ a survival from the day when the Netherlands had been part of the broad dominions of the Hapsburg kings. The men of these three battalions were no longer mainly Walloons, for Belgium had been a group of French departments for the last thirteen years. There were Germans and other foreigners of all sorts in the ranks, as well as a large number of native Spaniards. There were also six regiments of Swiss mercenaries—over 10,000 bayonets—and in these the men in the ranks did really come from Switzerland and Germany, though there was a sprinkling among them of strangers from all lands who had ‘left their country for their country’s good.’ There were also one Neapolitan and three Irish regiments. These latter were survivals from the days of the ‘Penal Laws,’ when young Irishmen left their homes by thousands every year to take service with France or Spain, in the hope of getting some day a shot at the hated redcoats. The regiments bore the names of Hibernia, Irlanda, and Ultonia (i.e. Ulster). They were very much under their proper establishment, for of late years Irish recruits had begun to run short, even after the ’98: they now took service in France and not in Spain. The three Irish corps in 1808 had only 1,900 men under arms, instead of the 5,000 which they should have produced; and of those the large majority were not real Irish, but waifs of all nationalities. Of late native Spaniards had been drafted in, to keep the regiments from dying out. On the other hand we shall find that not only the foreign regiments but the whole Spanish army was still full of officers of Irish name and blood, the sons and grandsons of the original emigrants of two generations back. An astounding proportion of the officers who rose to some note during the war bore Irish names, and were hereditary soldiers of fortune, who justified their existence by the unwavering courage which they always showed, in a time when obstinate perseverance was the main military virtue. We need only mention Blake, the two O’Donnells, Lacy, Sarsfield, O’Neill, O’Daly, Mahony, O’Donahue. If none of them showed much strategical skill, yet their constant readiness to fight, which no series of defeats could tame, contrasts very well with the spiritless behaviour of a good many of the Spanish generals. No officer of Irish blood was ever found among the cowards, and hardly one among the traitors.
The ten foreign corps furnished altogether about 13,000 men to the Spanish regular army. The rest of the infantry was composed of thirty-five regiments of troops of the line, of three battalions each, and twelve single-battalion regiments of light infantry. They were theoretically territorial, like our own infantry of to-day, and mostly bore local names derived from the provinces—Asturias, Toledo, Estremadura, and so forth. All the light infantry corps belonged to the old kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre, which were therefore scantily represented in the nomenclature of the ordinary line regiments. There were altogether 147 battalions of Spanish infantry, excluding the foreign troops, and if all of these had been up to the proper establishment of 840 men, the total would have amounted to 98,000 bayonets. But the state of disorganization was such that as a matter of fact there were only 58,000 under arms. The regiments which Napoleon had requisitioned for service in the North had been more or less brought up to a war-footing, and each showed on an average 2,000 men in the ranks. But many of the corps in the interior of Spain displayed the most lamentable figures: e.g. the three battalions of the regiment of Estremadura had only 770 men between them, Cordova 793, and Navarre 822—showing 250 men to the battalion instead of the proper 840. Theoretically there should have been no difficulty in keeping them up to their proper strength, as machinery for recruiting them had been duly provided. Voluntary enlistment was the first resource: but when that did not suffice to keep the ranks full, there was a kind of limited conscription called the Quinta to fall back upon. This consisted in balloting for men in the regimental district, under certain rules which allowed an enormous number of exemptions—e.g. all skilled artisans and all middle-class townsfolk were free from the burden—so that the agricultural labourers had to supply practically the whole contingent. Substitutes were allowed, if by any means the conscript could afford to pay for them. The conscription therefore should have kept the regiments up to their proper strength, and if many of them had only a third of their complement under arms, it was merely due to the general demoralization of the times. Under Godoy’s administration money was always wanting, more especially since Napoleon had begun to levy his monthly tribute of 6,000,000 francs from the Spanish monarchy, and the gaps in the ranks probably represented enforced economy as well as corrupt administration.
The 30,000 embodied militia, which formed the remainder of the Spanish infantry, had been under arms since 1804, doing garrison duty; they seem in many respects to have been equal to the line battalions in efficiency. They bore names derived from the towns in whose districts they had been raised—Badajoz, Lugo, Alcazar, and so forth. Their officering was also strictly local, all ranks being drawn from the leading families of their districts, and seems to have been quite as efficient as that of the line. Moreover their ranks were, on the average, much fuller than those of the regular regiments—only two battalions in the total of forty-three showed less than 550 bayonets on parade.
It is when we turn to the cavalry that we come to the weakest part of the Spanish army. There were twelve regiments of heavy and twelve of light horse, each with a nominal establishment of 700 sabres, which should have given 16,800 men for the whole force. There were only about 15,000 officers and troopers embodied, but this was a small defect. A more real weakness lay in the fact that there were only 9,000 horses for the 15,000 men. It is difficult for even a wealthy government, like our own, to keep its cavalry properly horsed, and that of Charles IV was naturally unable to cope with this tiresome military problem. The chargers were not only too few, but generally of bad quality, especially those of the heavy cavalry: of those which were to be found in the regimental stables a very large proportion were not fit for service. When the five regiments which Napoleon demanded for the expedition to Denmark had been provided with 540 horses each and sent off, the mounts of the rest of the army were in such a deplorable state that some corps had not the power to horse one-third of their troopers: e.g. in June, 1808, the Queen’s Regiment, No. 2 of the heavy cavalry, had 202 horses for 668 men; the 12th Regiment had 259 horses for 667 men; the 1st Chasseurs—more extraordinary still—only 185 horses for 577 men. It resulted from this penury of horses that when Napoleon made a second demand for Spanish cavalry, asking for a division of 2,000 sabres to aid Junot in invading Portugal, that force had to be made up by putting together the mounted men of no less than ten regiments, each contributing two or at the most three squadrons and leaving the rest of its men dismounted at the dép?t.
Even if the cavalry had all been properly mounted, they would have been far too few in proportion to the other arms, only 15,000 out of a total force of 130,000—one in eight; whereas in the time of the Napoleonic wars one in six, or even one in five, was considered the proper complement. In the Waterloo campaign the French had the enormous number of 21,000 cavalry to 83,000 infantry—one to four. What with original paucity, and with want of remounts, the Spaniards took the field in 1808, when the insurrection began, with a ridiculously small number of horsemen. At Medina de Rio Seco they had only 750 horsemen to 22,000 foot-soldiers, at Baylen only 1,200 to 16,000. Later in the war they succeeded in filling up the ranks of the old cavalry regiments, and in raising many new ones. But the gain in number was not in the least accompanied by a gain in efficiency. For the whole six years of the struggle the mounted arm was the weakest point of their hosts. Again and again it disgraced itself by allowing itself to be beaten by half its own numbers, or by absconding early in the fight and abandoning its infantry. It acquired, and merited, a detestable reputation, and it is hard to find half a dozen engagements in which it behaved even reasonably well. When Wellington was made generalissimo of the Spanish armies in 1813 he would not bring it up to the front at all, and though he took 40,000 Spaniards over the Pyrenees, there was not a horseman among them. It is hard to account for the thorough worthlessness of these squadrons, even when we make allowance for all the difficulties of the time: Spain was notoriously deficient in decent cavalry officers when the war began. The horses were inferior to the French, and the equipment bad. From early disasters the troopers contracted a demoralization which they could never shake off. But granting all this, it is still impossible to explain the consistent misbehaviour of these evasive squadrons. The officers, no doubt, had a harder task in organizing their new levies than those of the infantry and artillery, but it is curious that they should never have succeeded in learning their business even after four or five years of war.
The artillery of the Spanish army, on the other hand, earned on the whole a good reputation. This was not the result of proper preparation. When the struggle began it consisted of thirty-four batteries of field artillery, six of horse, and twenty-one garrison batteries (compa?ias fijas), with a total of 6,500 men. Forty batteries—that is to say 240 guns or somewhat less, for in some cases there seem to have been only four instead of six pieces in the battery—was according to the standard of 1808 a mediocre allowance to an army of 130,000 men, only about two-thirds of what it should have been. But this was not the worst. Deducting four fully-horsed batteries, which had been taken off by Napoleon to Denmark, there remained in Spain four horse and thirty-two field batteries. These were practically unable to move, for they were almost entirely destitute of horses. For the 216 guns and their caissons there were only in hand 400 draught animals! When the war began, the artillery had to requisition, and more or less train, 3,000 horses or mules before they could move from their barracks! I do not know any fact that illustrates better the state of Spanish administration under the rule of Godoy. The raising of the great insurrectionary armies in the summer of 1808 ought to have led to an enormous increase to the artillery arm, but the trained men were so few that the greatest difficulty was found in organizing new batteries. Something was done by turning the marine artillery of the fleet into land troops, and there were a few hundreds of the militia who had been trained to work guns. But the officers necessary for the training and officering of new batteries were so scarce, that for many months no fresh forces of the artillery arm could take the field. In the autumn of 1808, at the time of the battles of Espinosa and Tudela, if we carefully add up the number of guns brought into action by the five armies of Galicia, Estremadura, Aragon, the ‘Centre’ (i.e. Andalusia and Castile), and Catalonia, we do not find a piece more than the 240 which existed at the outbreak of the war. That is to say, the Spaniards had raised 100,000 new levies of infantry, without any corresponding extension of the artillery arm. During the campaign the conduct of the corps seems on the whole to have been very good, compared with that of the other arms. This was to be expected, as they were old soldiers to a much greater extent than either the infantry or the cavalry. They seem to have attained a fair skill with their weapons, and to have stuck to them very well. We often hear of gunners cut down or bayonetted over their pieces, seldom of a general bolt to the rear. For this very reason the personnel of the batteries suffered terribly: every defeat meant the capture of some dozens of guns, and the cutting up of the men who served them. It was as much as the government could do to keep up a moderate number of batteries, by supplying new guns and amalgamating the remnants of those which had been at the front. Each batch of lost battles in 1808-10 entailed the loss and consequent reconstruction of the artillery. If, in spite of this, we seldom hear complaints as to its conduct, it must be taken as a high compliment to the arm. But as long as Spanish generals persisted in fighting pitched battles, and getting their armies dispersed, a solid proportion of artillery to infantry could never be established. Its average strength may be guessed from the fact that at Albuera the best army that Spain then possessed put in line 16,300 men with only fourteen guns, less than one gun per thousand men—while Napoleon (as we have already noted) believed that five per thousand was the ideal, and often managed in actual fact to have three. In the latter years of the war the pieces were almost always drawn by mules, yoked tandem-fashion, and not ridden by drivers but goaded by men walking at their side—the slowest and most unsatisfactory form of traction that can be imagined. Hence came, in great part, their inability to man?uvre.
Of engineers Spain in 1808 had 169 officers dispersed over the kingdom. The corps had no proper rank and file. But there was a regiment of sappers, 1,000 strong, which was officered from the engineers. There was no army service corps, no military train, no organized commissariat of any kind. When moving about a Spanish army depended either on contractors who undertook to provide horses and wagons driven by civilians, or more frequently on the casual sweeping in by requisition of all the mules, oxen, and carts of the unhappy district in which it was operating. In this respect, as in so many others, Spain was still in the Middle Ages. The fact that there was no permanent arrangement for providing for the food of the army is enough in itself to account for many of its disasters. If, like the British, the Spaniards had possessed money to pay for what they took, things might have worked somewhat better. Or if, like the French, they had possessed an organized military train, and no scruples, they might have contrived to get along at the cost of utterly ruining the country-side. But as things stood, depending on incapable civil commissaries and the unwilling contributions of the local authorities, they were generally on the edge of starvation. Sometimes they got over the edge, and then the army, in spite of the proverbial frugality of the Spanish soldier, simply dispersed. It is fair to the men to say that they generally straggled back to the front sooner or later, when they had succeeded in filling their stomachs, and got incorporated in their own or some other regiment. It is said that by the end of the war there were soldiers who had, in their fashion, served in as many as ten different corps during the six years of the struggle.
Summing up the faults of the Spanish army, its depleted battalions, its small and incompetent cavalry force, its insufficient proportion of artillery, its utter want of commissariat, we find that its main source of weakness was that while the wars of the French Revolution had induced all the other states of Europe to overhaul their military organization and learn something from the methods of the French, Spain was still, so far as its army was concerned, in the middle of the eighteenth century. The national temperament, with its eternal relegation of all troublesome reforms to the morrow, was no doubt largely to blame. But Godoy, the all-powerful favourite who had also been commander-in-chief for the last seven years, must take the main responsibility. If he had chosen, he possessed the power to change everything; and in some ways he had peddled a good deal with details, changing the uniforms, and increasing the number of battalions in each regiment. But to make the army efficient he had done very little: the fact was that the commander-in-chief was quite ignorant of the military needs and tendencies of the day: all his knowledge of the army was gained while carpet-soldiering in the ranks of the royal bodyguard. It was natural that the kind of officers who commended themselves to his haughty and ignorant mind should be those who were most ready to do him homage, to wink at his peculations, to condone his jobs, and to refrain from worrying him for the money needed for reforms and repairs. Promotion was wholly arbitrary, and was entirely in the favourite’s hands. Those who were prepared to bow down to him prospered: those who showed any backbone or ventured on remonstrances were shelved. After a few years of this system it was natural that all ranks of the army became demoralized, since not merit but the talents of the courtier and the flatterer were the sure road to prosperity. Hence it came to pass that when the insurrection began, the level of military ability, patriotism, and integrity among the higher ranks of the army was very low. There were a few worthy men like Casta?os and La Romana in offices of trust, but a much greater proportion of Godoy’s protégés. One cannot condone the shocking way in which, during the first days of the war, the populace and the rank and file of the army united to murder so many officers in high place, like Filanghieri, the Captain-General of Galicia, Torre del Fresno, the Captain-General of Estremadura, and Solano, who commanded at Cadiz. But the explanation of the atrocities is simple: the multitude were resenting the results of the long administration of Godoy’s creatures, and fell upon such of them as refused to throw in their lot immediately with the insurrection. The murdered men were (rightly or wrongly) suspected either of an intention to submit to Joseph Bonaparte, or of a design to hang back, wait on the times, and make their decision only when it should become obvious which paid better, patriotism or servility. The people had considerable justification in the fact that a very large proportion of Godoy’s protégés, especially of those at Madrid, did swear homage to the intruder in order to keep their places and pensions. They were the base of the miserable party of Afrancesados which brought so much disgrace on Spain. The misguided cosmopolitan liberals who joined them were much the smaller half of the traitor-faction.
Godoy and his clique, therefore, must take the main responsibility for the state of decay and corruption in which the Spanish army was found in 1808. What more could be expected when for so many years an idle, venal, dissolute, ostentatious upstart had been permitted to control the administration of military affairs, and to settle all promotions to rank and office? ‘Like master like man’ is always a true proverb, and the officers who begged or bought responsible positions from Godoy naturally followed their patron’s example in spreading jobs and peculation downwards. The undrilled and half-clothed soldiery, the unhorsed squadrons, the empty arsenals, the idle and ignorant subalterns, were all, in the end, the result of Godoy’s long domination. But we do not wish to absolve from its share of blame the purblind nation which tolerated him for so long. In another country he would have gone the way of Gaveston or Mortimer long before.
When this was the state of the Spanish armies, it is no wonder that the British observer, whether officer or soldier, could never get over his prejudice against them. It was not merely because a Spanish army was generally in rags and on the verge of starvation that he despised it. These were accidents of war which every one had experienced in his own person: a British battalion was often tattered and hungry. The Spanish government was notoriously poor, its old regiments had been refilled again and again with raw conscripts, its new levies had never had a fair start. Hence came the things which disgusted the average Peninsular diarist of British origin—the shambling indiscipline, the voluntary dirt, the unmilitary habits of the Spanish troops. He could not get over his dislike for men who kept their arms in a filthy, rusty condition, who travelled not in orderly column of route but like a flock of sheep straggling along a high road, who obeyed their officers only when they pleased. And for the officers themselves the English observer had an even greater contempt: continually we come across observations to the effect that the faults of the rank and file might be condoned—after all they were only half-trained peasants—but that the officers were the source and fount of evil from their laziness, their arrogance, their ignorance, and their refusal to learn from experience. Here is a typical passage from the Earl of Munster’s Reminiscences:—
‘We should not have been dissatisfied with our allies, malgré their appearance and their rags, if we had felt any reason to confide in them. The men might be “capable of all that men dare,” but the appearance of their officers at once bespoke their not being fit to lead them in the attempt. They not only did not look like soldiers, but even not like gentlemen, and it was difficult from their mean and abject appearance, particularly among the infantry, to guess what class of society they could have been taken from. Few troops will behave well if those to whom they should look up are undeserving respect. Besides their general inefficiency we found their moral feeling different from what we expected. Far from evincing devotion or even common courage in their country’s cause, they were very often guilty, individually and collectively, of disgraceful cowardice. We hourly regretted that the revolution had not occasioned a more complete bouleversement of society, so as to bring forward fresh and vigorous talent from all classes. Very few of the regular military showed themselves worthy of command. Indeed, with the exception of a few self-made soldiers among the Guerillas, who had risen from among the farmers and peasantry, it would be hard to point out a Spanish officer whose opinion on the most trivial military subject was worth being asked. We saw old besotted generals whose armies were formed on obsolete principles of the ancien régime of a decrepit government. To this was added blind pride and vanity. No proofs of inferiority could open their eyes, and they rushed from one error and misfortune to another, benefiting by no experience, and disdaining to seek aid and improvement’ .
A voice from the ranks, Sergeant Surtees of the Rifle Brigade, gives the same idea in different words.
‘Most of the Spanish officers appeared to be utterly unfit and unable to command their men. They had all the pride, arrogance, and self-sufficiency of the best officers in the world, with the very least of all pretension to have a high opinion of themselves. It is true they were not all alike, but the majority were the most haughty, and at the same time the most contemptible creatures in the shape of officers that ever I beheld’ .
As a matter of fact the class of officers in Spain was filled up in three different ways. One-third of them were, by custom, drawn from the ranks. In an army raised by conscription from all strata of society excellent officers can be procured in this way. But in one mainly consisting of the least admirable part of the surplus population, forced by want or hatred of work into enlisting, it was hard to get even good sergeants. And the sergeants made still worse sub-lieutenants, when the colonel was forced to promote some of them. No wonder that the English observer thought that there were ‘Spanish officers who did not look like gentlemen.’ This class were seldom or never allowed to rise above the grade of captain. The remaining two-thirds of the officers received their commissions from the war office: in the cavalry they were supposed to show proofs of noble descent, but this was not required in the infantry. There was a large sprinkling, however, of men of family, and for them the best places and the higher ranks were generally reserved—a thing feasible because all promotion was arbitrary, neither seniority nor merit being necessarily considered. The rest were drawn from all classes of society: for the last fifteen years any toady of Godoy could beg or buy as many commissions for his protégés as he pleased. But a large, and not the worst, part of the body of officers was composed of the descendants of soldiers of fortune—Irishmen were most numerous, but there were also French and Italians—who had always been seen in great numbers in the Spanish army. They held most of the upper-middle grades in the regiments, for the promoted sergeants were kept down to the rank of captain, while the nobles got rapid promotion and soon rose to be colonels and generals. On the whole we cannot doubt that there was a mass of bad officers in the Spanish army: the ignorant fellows who had risen from the ranks, the too-rapidly promoted scions of the noblesse, and the nominees of Godoy’s hangers-on, were none of them very promising material with which to conduct a war à outrance for the existence of the realm.
In 1808 there was but one small military college for the training of infantry and cavalry officers. Five existed in 1790, but Godoy cut them down to one at Zamora, and only allowed sixty cadets there at a time, so that five-sixths of the young men who got commissions went straight to their battalions, there to pick up (if they chose) the rudiments of their military education. From want of some common teaching the drill and organization of the regiments were in a condition of chaos. Every colonel did what he chose in the way of manual exercise and man?uvres. A French officer says that in 1807 he saw a Spanish brigade at a review, in which, when the brigadier gave the order ‘Ready, present, fire!’ the different battalions carried it out in three different times and with wholly distinct details of execution.
Not only was the Spanish army indifferently officered, but even of such officers as it possessed there were not enough. In the old line regiments there should have been seventy to each corps, i.e. 2,450 to the 105 battalions of that arm. But Godoy had allowed the numbers to sink to 1,520. When the insurrection broke out, the vacant places had to be filled, and many regiments received at the same moment twenty or thirty subalterns taken from civil life and completely destitute of military training. Similarly the militia ought to have had 1,800 officers, and only possessed 1,200 when the war began. The vacancies were filled, but with raw and often indifferent material.
Such were the officers with whom the British army had to co-operate. There is no disguising the fact that from the first the allies could not get on together. In the earlier years of the war there were some incidents that happened while the troops of the two nations lay together, which our countrymen could never forgive or forget. We need only mention the midnight panic in Cuesta’s army on the eve of Talavera, when 10,000 men ran away without having had a shot fired at them, and the cowardly behaviour of La Pe?a in 1811, when he refused to aid Graham at the bloody little battle of Barossa.
The strictures of Wellington, Napier, and the rest were undoubtedly well deserved; and yet it is easy to be too hard on the Spaniards. It chanced that our countrymen did not get a fair opportunity of observing their allies under favourable conditions; of the old regular army that fought at Baylen or Zornoza they never got a glimpse. It had been practically destroyed before we came upon the field. La Romana’s starving hordes, and Cuesta’s evasive and demoralized battalions were the samples from which the whole Spanish army was judged. In the Talavera campaign, the first in which English and Spanish troops stood side by side, there can be no doubt that the latter (with few exceptions) behaved in their very worst style. They often did much better; but few Englishmen had the chance of watching a defence like that of Saragossa or Gerona. Very few observers from our side saw anything of the heroically obstinate resistance of the Catalonian miqueletes and somatenes. Chance threw in our way Cuesta and La Pe?a and Imaz as types of Peninsular generals, and from them the rest were judged. No one supposes that the Spaniards as a nation are destitute of all military qualities. They made good soldiers enough in the past, and may do so in the future: but when, after centuries of intellectual and political torpor, they were called upon to fight for their national existence, they were just emerging from subjection to one of the most worthless adventurers and one of the most idiotic kings whom history has known. Charles IV and Godoy account for an extraordinary amount of the decrepitude of the monarchy and the demoralization of its army.
It is more just to admire the constancy with which a nation so handicapped persisted in the hopeless struggle, than to condemn it for the incapacity of its generals, the ignorance of its officers, the unsteadiness of its raw levies. If Spain had been a first-rate military power, there would have been comparatively little merit in the six years’ struggle which she waged against Bonaparte. When we consider her weakness and her disorganization, we find ourselves more inclined to wonder at her persistence than to sneer at her mishaps.
THE FRENCH ARMY IN SPAIN
§ 1. The Army of 1808: its Character and Organization.
In dealing with the history of the imperial armies in the Peninsula, it is our first duty to point out the enormous difference between the troops who entered Spain in 1807 and 1808, under Dupont, Moncey, and Murat, and the later arrivals who came under Bonaparte’s personal guidance when the first disastrous stage of the war was over.
Nothing can show more clearly the contempt which the Emperor entertained, not only for the Spanish government but for the Spanish nation, than the character of the hosts which he first sent forth to occupy the Peninsula. After Tilsit he was the master of half a million of the best troops in the world; but he did not consider the subjugation of Spain and Portugal a sufficiently formidable task to make it necessary to move southward any appreciable fraction of the Grand Army. The victors of Jena and Friedland were left in their cantonments on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder, while a new force, mainly composed of elements of inferior fighting value, was sent across the Pyrenees.
This second host was at Napoleon’s disposition mainly owing to the fact that during the late war he had been anticipating the conscription. In the winter of 1806-7 he had called out, a year too soon, the men who were due to serve in 1808. In the late autumn of 1807, while his designs in Spain were already in progress, he had summoned forth the conscription of 1809. He had thus under arms two years’ contingents of recruits raised before their proper time. The dép?ts were gorged, and, even after the corps which had been depleted in Prussia and Poland had been made up to full strength, there was an enormous surplus of men in hand.
To utilize this mass of conscripts the Emperor found several ways. Of the men raised in the winter of 1806-7 some thousands had been thrown into temporary organizations, called ‘legions of reserve,’ and used to do garrison duty on the Atlantic coast, in order to guard against possible English descents. There were five of these ‘legions’ and two ‘supplementary legions’ in the army sent into Spain: they showed a strength of 16,000 men. None of them had been more than a year under arms, but they were at any rate organized units complete in themselves. They formed the greater part of the infantry in the corps of Dupont.
A shade worse in composition were twenty ‘provisional regiments’ which the Emperor put together for Spain. Each regimental dép?t in the south of France was told to form four companies from its superabundant mass of conscripts. These bodies, of about 560 men each, were united in fours, and each group was called a ‘provisional regiment.’ The men of each battalion knew nothing of those of the others, since they were all drawn from separate regiments: there was not a single veteran soldier in the ranks: the officers were almost all either half-pay men called back to service, or young sub-lieutenants who had just received their commissions. These bodies, equally destitute of esprit de corps and of instruction, made up nearly 30,000 men of the army of Spain. They constituted nearly the whole of the divisions under Bessières and Moncey, which lay in Northern Spain at the moment of the outbreak of the war.
But there were military units even less trustworthy than the ‘provisional regiments’ which Napoleon transferred to Spain in the spring of 1808. These were the five or six régiments de marche, which were to be found in some of the brigades which crossed the Pyrenees when the state of affairs was already growing dangerous. They were formed of companies, or even smaller bodies, hastily drawn together from such southern dép?ts, as were found to be still in possession of superfluous conscripts even after contributing to the ‘provisional regiments.’ They were to be absorbed into the old corps when the pressing need for instant reinforcements for the Peninsula should come to an end. In addition to all these temporary units, Bonaparte was at the same moment making a vast addition to his permanent regular army. Down to the war of 1806-7 the French regiments of infantry had consisted of three battalions for the field and a fourth at the dép?t, which kept drafting its men to the front in order to fill up the gaps in the other three. Napoleon had now resolved to raise the establishment to five battalions per regiment, four for field service, while the newly created fifth became the dép?t battalion. When the Peninsular War broke out, a good many regiments had already completed their fourth field-battalion, and several of these new corps are to be found in the rolls of the armies which had entered Spain. The multiplication of battalions had been accompanied by a reduction of their individual strength: down to February, 1808, there were nine companies to each unit, and Junot’s corps had battalions of a strength of 1,100 or 1,200 bayonets. But those which came later were six-company battalions, with a strength of 840 bayonets when at their full establishment.
All the troops of which we have hitherto spoken were native Frenchmen. But they did not compose by any means the whole of the infantry which the Emperor dispatched into Spain between October, 1807, and May, 1808. According to his usual custom he employed great numbers of auxiliaries from his vassal kingdoms: we note intercalated among the French units seven battalions of Swiss, four of Italians, two each of Neapolitans and Portuguese, and one each of Prussians, Westphalians, Hanoverians, and Irish. Altogether there were no less than 14,000 men of foreign infantry dispersed among the troops of Junot, Dupont, Bessières, Moncey, and Duhesme. They were not massed, but scattered broadcast in single battalions, save the Italians and Neapolitans, who formed a complete division under Lecchi in the army of Catalonia.
The cavalry of the army of Spain was quite as heterogeneous and ill compacted as the infantry. Just as ‘provisional regiments’ of foot were patched up from the southern dép?ts of France, so were ‘provisional regiments’ of cavalry. The best of them were composed of two, three, or four squadrons, each contributed by the dép?t of a different cavalry regiment. The worst were escadrons de marche, drawn together in a haphazard fashion from such of the dép?ts as had a surplus of conscripts even after they had given a full squadron to the ‘provisional regiments.’ There were also a number of foreign cavalry regiments, Italians, Neapolitans, lancers of Berg, and Poles. Of veteran regiments of French cavalry there were actually no more than three, about 1,250 men, among the 12,000 horsemen of the army of Spain.
When we sum up the composition of the 116,000 men who lay south of the Pyrenees on the last day of May, 1808, we find that not a third part of them belonged to the old units of the regular French army. It may be worth while to give the figures:—
Of veterans we have—
Infantry. Cavalry.
(1) A detachment of the Imperial Guard, which was intended to serve as the Emperor’s special escort during his irruption into Spain 3,600 1,750
(2) Twenty-six battalions of infantry of the line and light infantry, being all first, second, or third battalions, and not newly raised fourth battalions 25,800
(3) Three old regiments of cavalry of the line 1,250
(4) Three newly raised fourth battalions of infantry regiments of the line 1,800
This gives a total of regularly organized French troops of the standing army of 31,200 3,000
(5) Five legions of reserve, and two ‘supplementary legions of reserve’ 16,000
(6) Fifteen ‘provisional regiments’ from the dép?ts of Southern France 31,000
(7) Six régiments de marche of conscripts 3,200
(8) Eighteen battalions of Italian, Swiss, German, and other auxiliaries 14,000
(9) Sixteen ‘provisional regiments’ of cavalry, and a few detached ‘provisional squadrons,’ and escadrons de marche 9,500
(10) Three regiments of foreign cavalry 1,000
This makes a total of troops in temporary organization, or of foreign origin, of 64,200 10,500
Napoleon, then, intended to conquer Spain with a force of about 110,000 men, of which no more than 34,000 sabres and bayonets belonged to his regular army; the rest were conscripts or foreign auxiliaries. But we must also note that the small body of veteran troops was not distributed equally in each of the corps, so as to stiffen the preponderating mass of conscripts. If we put aside the division of Imperial Guards, we find that of the remaining 25,000 infantry of old organization no less than 17,500 belonged to Junot’s army of Portugal, which was the only one of the corps that had a solid organization. Junot had indeed a very fine force, seventeen old line battalions to two battalions of conscripts and three of foreigners. The rest of the veteran troops were mainly with Duhesme in Catalonia, who had a good division of 5,000 veterans. In the three corps of Dupont, Moncey, and Bessières on the other hand old troops were conspicuous by their absence: among the 19,000 infantry of Dupont’s corps, on which (as it chanced) the first stress of the Spanish war was destined to fall, there was actually only two battalions (1,700 men) of old troops. In Moncey’s there was not a single veteran unit; in Bessières’, only four battalions. This simple fact goes far to explain why Dupont’s expedition to Andalusia led to the capitulation of Baylen, and why Moncey’s march on Valencia ended in an ignominious retreat. Countries cannot be conquered with hordes of undrilled conscripts—not even countries in an advanced stage of political decomposition, such as the Spain of 1808.
§ 2. The Army of 1808-14: its Character and Organization.
Baylen, as we shall see, taught Napoleon his lesson, and the second army which he brought into the Peninsula in the autumn of 1808, to repair his initial disasters, was very differently constituted from the heterogeneous masses which he had at first judged to be sufficient for his task. It was composed of his finest old regiments from the Rhine and Elbe, the flower of the victors of Jena and Friedland. Even when the despot had half a million good troops at his disposition, he could not be in force everywhere, and the transference of 200,000 veterans to Spain left him almost too weak in Central Europe. In the Essling-Wagram campaign of 1809 he found that he was barely strong enough to conquer the Austrians, precisely because he had left so many men behind him in the Peninsula. In the Russian campaign of 1812, vast as were the forces that he displayed, they were yet not over numerous for the enterprise, because such an immense proportion of them was composed of unwilling allies and disaffected subjects. If the masses of Austrians, Prussians, Neapolitans, Portuguese, Westphalians, Bavarians, and so forth had been replaced by half their actual number of old French troops from Spain, the army would have been far more powerful. Still more was this the case in 1813: if the whole of the Peninsular army had been available for service on the Elbe and Oder at the time of Lützen and Bautzen, the effect on the general history of Europe might have been incalculable. Truly, therefore, did the Emperor call the Spanish War ‘the running sore’ which had sapped his strength ever since its commencement.
A word as to the tactical organization of the French army in 1808 is required. The infantry regiments of normal formation consisted, as we have seen, of four field battalions and one dép?t battalion; the last named never, of course, appeared at the front. Each field battalion was composed of six companies of 140 men: its two flank companies, the grenadiers and voltigeurs, were formed of the pick of the corps: into the grenadiers only tall, into the voltigeurs only short men were drafted. Thus a battalion should normally have shown 840 and a regiment 3,360 men in the field. But it was by no means the universal rule to find the whole four battalions of a regiment serving together. In the modern armies of France, Germany, or Russia, a regiment in time of peace lives concentrated in its recruiting district, and can take the field in a compact body. This was not the case in Napoleon’s ever-wandering hosts: the chances of war were always isolating single battalions, which, once dropped in a garrison or sent on an expedition, did not easily rejoin their fellows. Many, too, of the new fourth battalions raised in 1807 had never gone forward to Germany to seek the main body of their regiments. Of the corps which were brought down to Spain in the late autumn of 1808 there were more with three battalions than with four concentrated under the regimental eagle. Some had only two present, a few no more than one. But the Emperor disliked to have single isolated battalions, and preferred to work them in pairs, if he could not get three or four together. The object of this was that, if one or two battalions got much weakened in a campaign, the men could be fused into a single unit, and the supernumerary officers and sergeants sent back to the dép?t, where they would form a new battalion out of the stock of conscripts. But the fresh organization might very likely be hurried, by some sudden chance of war, to Flushing, or Italy, or the Danube, while the eagle and the main body remained in Spain—or vice versa.
There was therefore, in consequence of the varying strength of the regiments, no regularity or system in the brigading of the French troops in Spain: in one brigade there might be five or six isolated battalions, each belonging to a separate regiment; in another three from one regiment and two from a second; in a third four from one regiment and one from another. Nor was there any fixed number of battalions in a brigade: it might vary from three (a very unusual minimum) up to nine—an equally rare maximum. Six was perhaps the most frequent number. A division was composed of two, or less frequently of three, brigades, and might have any number from ten up to sixteen or eighteen battalions—i.e. it varied, allowing for casual losses, from 6,000 to 10,000 men. This irregularity was part of Napoleon’s system: he laid it down as an axiom that all military units, from a brigade to an army corps, ought to differ in strength among themselves: otherwise the enemy, if he had once discovered how many brigades or divisions were in front of him, could calculate with accuracy the number of troops with which he had to do.
Much confusion is caused, when we deal with Napoleon’s army, by the strange system of numeration which he adopted. The infantry, whether called ‘line regiments’ or ‘light infantry regiments,’ were drilled and organized in the same way. But the Emperor had some odd vagaries: he often refused to raise again a regiment which had been exterminated, or taken prisoners en masse. Hence after a few years of his reign there were some vacant numbers in the list of infantry corps. The regiments, for example, which were garrisoning the colonies at the time of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, fell one after another into the hands of the English as the war went on. They were never replaced, and left gaps in the army list. On the other hand the Emperor sometimes raised regiments with duplicate numbers, a most tiresome thing for the military historian of the next age. It is impossible to fathom his purpose, unless he was set on confusing his enemies by showing more battalions than the list of existing corps seemed to make possible. Or perhaps he was thinking of the old legions of the Roman Empire, of which there were always several in existence bearing the same number, but distinguished by their honorary titles. Those who wish to read the story of one of these duplicate regiments may follow in the history of Nodier the tale of the raising and extermination of Colonel Oudet’s celebrated ‘9th Bis’ of the line.
There is another difficulty caused by a second freak of the Emperor: all regiments ought, as we have said, to have shown four field battalions. But Bonaparte sometimes added one or even two more, to corps which stood high in his favour, or whose dép?ts produced on some occasions a very large surplus of conscripts. Thus we find now and then, in the morning state of a French army corps, a fifth or even a sixth battalion of some regiment. But as a rule these units had not a very long existence: their usual fate was to be sent home, when their numbers ran low from the wear and tear of war, in order to be incorporated in the normal cadres of their corps. On the authority of that good soldier and admirable historian, Foy, we are able to state that on the first of June, 1808, Napoleon had 417 field battalions, over and above the dép?ts, on his army rolls. If the 113 regiments of the line, and the thirty-two light infantry regiments had all been in existence and complete, there should have been 580 field battalions. Clearly then some corps had disappeared and many others had not more than three battalions ready. But the units were always being created, amalgamated, or dissolved, from week to week, so that it is almost impossible to state the exact force of the whole French army at any given moment. The most important change that was made during the year 1808 was the conversion of those of the provisional regiments which escaped Dupont’s disaster into new permanent corps. By combining them in pairs the 114th-120th of the line and the 33rd léger were created. In the succeeding five years more and more corps were raised: the annexation of Holland and Northern Germany in 1810-11 ultimately enabled the Emperor to carry the total of his line regiments up to 156 , and of his light infantry regiments up to thirty-six.
Of the French cavalry we need not speak at such length. When the Spanish war broke out, Bonaparte was possessed of about eighty regiments of horsemen, each taking the field with four squadrons of some 150 to 200 men. There were twelve regiments of cuirassiers, two of carabineers, thirty of dragoons, twenty-six of chasseurs à cheval, ten of hussars, i.e. fourteen regiments of heavy, thirty of medium, and thirty-six of light horse. The cuirassiers were hardly ever seen in Spain—not more than two or three regiments ever served south of the Pyrenees. On the other hand the greater part of the dragoons were employed in the Peninsula—there were in 1809 twenty-five of the thirty regiments of them in the field against the English and Spaniards. More than half of the hussars also served in Spain. To the veteran corps of regulars there were added, at the outset of the war, as will be remembered, a great number of ‘provisional regiments,’ but these gradually disappeared, by being incorporated in the older cadres, or in a few cases by being formed into new permanent units. There was also a mass of Polish, German, and Italian cavalry; but these auxiliaries did not bear such a high proportion to the native French as did the foreign part of the infantry arm. By far the most distinguished of these corps were the Polish lancers, whom the English came to know only too well at Albuera. The Italians were almost exclusively employed on the east coast of Spain, in the army of Catalonia. The Germans—mostly from Westphalia, Berg, and Nassau—were scattered about in single regiments among the cavalry corps of the various armies. They were always mixed with the French horse, and never appeared in brigades (much less in divisions) of their own.
The average strength of a French cavalry regiment during the years 1809-14 was four squadrons of about 150 men each. It was very seldom that a corps showed over 600 men in the ranks: not unfrequently it sank to 450. When it grew still further attenuated, it was usual to send back the cadres of one or two squadrons, and to complete to full numbers the two or three which kept the field. These figures do not hold good for the raw ‘provisional regiments’ which Bonaparte used during the first year of the war: they sometimes rose to 700 or even 800 strong, when the dép?ts from which they had been drawn chanced to be exceptionally full of recruits. But such large corps are not to be found in the later years of the war. By 1812, when Napoleon, busied in Central Europe, ceased to reinforce his Spanish armies, the average of a cavalry regiment had shrunk to 500 men. In 1813 it was seldom that 400 effective sabres could be mustered by any mounted corps.
As to the scientific arms of the French service, the artillery and engineers, there is no doubt that throughout the war they deserved very well of their master. Artillery cannot be improvised in the manner that is possible with infantry, and the batteries which accompanied Dupont’s and Moncey’s conscripts into Spain in 1808 were veterans. Without them the raw infantry would have fared even worse than it did, during the first year of the struggle. The proportion of guns which the French employed during the wars of the Empire was generally very large in comparison with the size of their armies—one of the many results of the fact that Bonaparte had originally been an artillery officer. He raised, as was remarked, the number of gunners in the French service to a figure as large as that of the whole regular army of Louis XVI at the moment when the Revolution broke out. But in Spain the difficulties of transport and the badness of the roads seem to have combined to keep down the proportion of guns to something very much less than was customary in the more favourable terrain of Italy or Germany. A large part, too, of the pieces were of very light metal—four- and even three-pounders, which were found easier to transport across the mountains than six- or eight-pounders, though much less effective in the field. In many of the campaigns, therefore, of the Peninsular War the French artillery stood in a proportion to the total number of men present, which was so low that it barely exceeded that customary among the British, who were notoriously more ‘under-gunned’ than any other European army save that of Spain. Junot at Vimiero had twenty-three guns to 13,500 men: Victor at Talavera had eighty guns to about 50,000 men: Masséna in 1810 invaded Portugal with some 70,000 men and 126 guns; at Fuentes d’O?oro he only showed forty-two guns to 40,000 bayonets and sabres. Soult at Albuera had (apparently) forty guns to 24,000 men: in the autumn campaign of 1813 the same marshal had 125 guns to 107,000 men. It will be noted that the proportion never rises to two guns per thousand men, and occasionally does not much exceed one gun per thousand. This contrasts remarkably with the 350 guns to 120,000 men which Bonaparte took out for the campaign of Waterloo, or even with the 1,372 guns to 600,000 men of the Russian expedition and 1,056 guns to 450,000 men of the ill-compacted army of 1813.
THE TACTICS OF THE FRENCH AND THEIR ADVERSARIES DURING THE PENINSULAR WAR
An account of the numbers and the organization of an army is of comparatively little interest, unless we understand the principles on which its leaders are accustomed to handle it on the day of battle, and its value as a fighting machine.
Speaking generally, the tactics of the French infantry during the Peninsular War were those which had been developed fifteen years before, during the first struggles of the Revolution. They nearly always attacked with a thick cloud of tirailleurs covering one or two lines of battalions in column. The idea was that the very numerous and powerful skirmishing line would engage the enemy sufficiently to attract all his attention, so that the massed battalions behind arrived at the front of battle almost without sustaining loss. The momentum of the columns ought then to suffice to carry them right through the enemy’s lines, which would already have suffered appreciably from the fire of the tirailleurs. This form of attack had won countless victories over Prussian, Austrian, and Russian; and many cases had been known where a hostile position had been carried by the mere impetus of the French columns, without a shot having been fired save by their skirmishers. But this method, which Wellington called ‘the old French style,’ never succeeded against the English. It had the fatal defect that when the column came up through the tirailleurs and endeavoured to charge, it presented a small front, and only the first two ranks could fire. For the normal French battalion advanced in column of companies, or less frequently of double companies, i.e. with a front of forty or at most of eighty men, and a depth of nine or of eighteen, since the company was always three deep, and there were six companies to a battalion. The rear ranks only served to give the front ranks moral support, and to impress the enemy with a sense of the solidity and inexorable strength of the approaching mass. Sometimes a whole regiment or brigade formed one dense column. Now if the enemy, as was always the case with the British, refused to be impressed, but stood firm in line, held their ground, and blazed into the head of the mass, the attack was certain to fail. For 800 men in the two-deep line, which Wellington loved, could all use their muskets, and thus poured 800 bullets per volley into a French battalion of the same strength, which only could return 160. The nine-deep, or eighteen-deep, column was a target which it was impossible to miss. Hence the front ranks went down in rows and the whole came to a standstill. If, as was often the case, the French battalion tried to deploy in front of the English line, so as to bring more muskets to bear, it seldom or never succeeded in accomplishing the man?uvre, for each company, as it straggled out from the mass, got shot down so quickly that the formation could never be completed. No wonder that Foy in his private journal felt himself constrained to confess that, for a set battle with equal numbers on a limited front, the English infantry was superior. ‘I keep this opinion to myself,’ he adds, ‘and have never divulged it; for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate the enemy, but also despise him.’ Foy kept his opinion so closely to himself that he did not put it in his formal history of the Peninsular War: it has only become public property since his journals were published in 1900.
But the fact that with anything like equal numbers the line must beat the column was demonstrated over and over again during the war. It had first been seen at Maida in 1806, but that obscure Calabrian battle was hardly known, even by name, save to those who had been present. It was at Talavera, and still more at Busaco and Albuera, that it became patent to everybody that the attack in battalion column, even if preceded by a vigorous swarm of skirmishers, could never succeed against the English. At the two former fights the French attacked uphill, and laid the blame of their defeat upon the unfavourable ground. But when at Albuera three English brigades drove double their own numbers from the commanding ridge on which Soult had ranged them, simply by the superiority of their musketry fire, there was no longer any possibility of disguising the moral. Yet to the end of the war, down to Waterloo itself, the French stuck to their old formation: at the great battle in 1815, as Wellington tersely said, ‘The French came on once more in the old style, and we beat them in the old style.’
But when Napoleon’s armies were opposed to troops who could not stand firm to meet them in a line formation, they generally succeeded. The Spaniards, in their earlier battles, often tried to resist in a line of deployed battalions, but their morale was not good enough when the attacking column drew close to them, and they generally gave way at the critical moment and let their assailants break through. The same had often been the case with the Austrians and Prussians, who in their earlier wars with Napoleon used the line formation which Frederick the Great had popularized fifty years before. The great king had accustomed his troops to fight in a three- or four-deep line, with a comparatively small provision of skirmishers to cover their front, for it was by the fire of the whole battalion that his troops were intended to win. The masses of tirailleurs which the French sent forward in front of their columns generally succeeded in engaging the Prussian or Austrian line so closely, that the columns behind them came up without much loss, and then broke the line by their mere momentum and moral effect. Hence in their later wars the German powers copied their enemies, and took to using a very thick skirmishing line backed by battalion columns in the French style.
Wellington never found any reason to do so. His method was to conceal his main line as long as possible by a dip in the ground, a hedge, or a wall, or to keep it behind the crest of the position which it was holding. To face the tirailleurs each battalion sent out its light company, and each brigade had assigned to it several detached companies of riflemen: from 1809 onward some of the 60th Rifles and one or two foreign light corps were broken up and distributed round the various divisions for this special purpose. This gave a line of skirmishers strong enough to hold back the tirailleurs for a long time, probably till the supporting columns came up to help them. It was only then that the British skirmishing line gave way and retired behind its main body, leaving the deployed battalions in face of the French column, of which they never failed to give a satisfactory account. The covering screen of light troops often suffered terribly; e.g., at Barossa, Brown’s ‘light battalion’ lost fourteen out of twenty-one officers and more than half its rank and file, while holding off the French advance from the line which was forming in its rear. But the combat always went well if the enemy’s skirmishers could be kept back, and his supporting columns forced to come to the front, to engage with the regiments in two-deep formation which were waiting for them.
Charges with the bayonet are often heard of in narratives—especially French narratives—of the Peninsular War. But it was very seldom that the opposing troops actually came into collision with the white weapon. There were occasions, almost invariably in fighting in villages or enclosed ground, on which considerable numbers of men were killed or wounded with the bayonet, but they were but few. It is certain, however, that the 43rd at Vimiero, the 71st and 88th at Fuentes d’O?oro, and the 20th at Roncesvalles, engaged in this fashion; and other cases could be quoted. But as a rule a ‘bayonet charge’ in a French historian merely means the advance of a column up to the enemy’s position without firing: it does not imply actual contact or the crossing of weapons. An English charge on the other hand was practically an advance in line with frequent volleys, or independent file-firing. At Albuera, or Barossa, or Salamanca it was the ball not the bayonet which did the work; the enemy was shot down, or gave way without any hand-to-hand conflict.
French cavalry tactics had by 1808 developed into as definite a system as those of the infantry. Napoleon was fond of massing his horsemen in very large bodies and launching them at the flank, or even at the centre, of the army opposed to him. He would occasionally use as many as 6,000 or 8,000, or (as at Waterloo) even 12,000 men for one of these great strokes. Two or three of his famous battles were won by tremendous cavalry charges—notably Marengo and Dresden, while Eylau was just saved from falling into a disaster by a blow of the same kind. But cavalry must be used at precisely the right moment, must be skilfully led and pushed home without remorse, and even then it may be beaten off by thoroughly cool and unshaken troops. It is only against tired, distracted, or undisciplined battalions that it can count on a reasonable certainty of success. All through the war the Spanish armies supplied the French horsemen with exactly the opportunities that they required: they were always being surprised, or caught in confusion while executing some complicated man?uvre; and as if this was not enough, they were often weak enough in morale to allow themselves to be broken even when they had been allowed time to take their ground and form their squares. The battles of Gamonal (1808), Medellin, Alba de Tormes, and Oca?a (1809), the Gebora, and Saguntum (1811) were good examples of the power of masses of horse skilfully handled over a numerous but ill-disciplined infantry.
On the other hand, against the English the French cavalry hardly ever accomplished anything worthy of note. It is only possible to name two occasions on which they made their mark: the first was at Albuera, where, profiting by an opportune cloud-burst which darkened the face of day, two regiments of lancers came in upon the flank of a British brigade (Colborne’s of the second division), and almost entirely cut it to pieces. The second incident of the kind was at Fuentes d’O?oro, in the same summer, when Montbrun’s cavalry charged with some effect on Houston’s division and hustled it back for some two miles, though they never succeeded in breaking its squares.
On the other hand the cases where the French horsemen found themselves utterly unable to deal with the British infantry were very numerous—we need only mention Cacabellos (during Moore’s retreat), El Bodon, Salamanca, and several skirmishes during the retreat from Burgos in 1812. After such experiences it was no wonder that Foy, and other old officers of the army of Spain, looked with dismay upon Napoleon’s great attempt at Waterloo to break down the long line of British squares between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, by the charges of ten or twelve thousand heavy cavalry massed on a short front of less than a mile. The Emperor had never seen the British infantry fight, and was entirely ignorant of their resisting power.
Of fights between cavalry and cavalry, where the two sides were present in such equal numbers as to make the struggle a fair test of their relative efficiency, there were but few in the Peninsular War. In the early years of the struggle Wellington was very scantily provided with horsemen, and never could afford to engage in a cavalry battle on a large scale. Later on, when he was more happily situated in this respect, he showed such a marked reluctance to risk great cavalry combats that the old saying that he was ‘pre-eminently an infantry general’ seems justified. That he could use his horsemen vigorously enough, when he saw his opportunity, he showed at Assaye, long before he had made his name known in Europe. Yet the only one of his great battles in Spain where his dragoons took a prominent part in the victory was Salamanca, where Le Marchant’s brigade struck such a smashing blow on the flank of the French army. We have his own authority for the fact that he hesitated to mass great bodies of horse, because he doubted the tactical skill of his officers, and the power of the regiments to man?uvre. ‘I considered our cavalry,’ he wrote ten years after the war was over, ‘so inferior to the French from want of order, that although I considered one squadron a match for two French, I did not like to see four British opposed to four French: and as the numbers increased and order, of course, became more necessary, I was the more unwilling to risk our men without having a superiority in numbers. They could gallop, but could not preserve their order.’
Foy, in his excellent history of the Spanish War, emits an opinion in words curiously similar to those of Wellington, stating that for practical purposes the English troopers were inferior to the French on account of their headlong impetuosity and want of power to man?uvre. When two such authorities agree, there must clearly have been some solid foundation for their verdict. Yet it is hard to quote many combats in their support: there were cases, no doubt, where English regiments threw their chances away by their blind fury in charging, as did the 23rd Light Dragoons at Talavera, the 13th Light Dragoons near Campo Mayor on March 25, 1811, and Slade’s brigade at Maguilla on June 11, 1812. Yet with the memory before us of Paget’s admirable operations at Sahagun and Benavente in December, 1808, of Lumley’s skilful containing of Latour Maubourg’s superior numbers at Albuera, and his brilliant success at Usagre over that same general in 1811, as well as Cotton’s considerable cavalry fight at Villa Garcia in 1812, it seems strange to find Wellington disparaging his own troopers. No doubt we must concede that the British horsemen did not show that marked superiority over their rivals of the same arm which Wellington’s infantry always asserted. But fairly balancing their faults and their merits, it would seem that there was something wanting in their general no less than in themselves. A lover of the cavalry arm would have got more profit out of the British horse than Wellington ever obtained. It is noticeable that not one of the successful fights cited above took place under the eye or the direction of the Duke.
As to the Spanish cavalry, it was (as we have already had occasion to remark) the weakest point in the national army. In the first actions of the war it appeared on the field in such small numbers that it had no chance against the French. But later on, when the juntas succeeded in raising large masses of horsemen, their scandalous conduct on a score of fields was the despair of Spanish generals. We need only mention Medellin and Oca?a as examples of their misbehaviour. No French cavalry-general ever hesitated to engage with double of his own number of Spanish horse. When vigorously charged they never failed to give way, and when once on the move it was impossible to rally them. It was often found on the night of a battle that the mass of the cavalry was in flight twenty miles ahead of the infantry, which it had basely deserted.
Napoleon, as every student of the art of war knows, had started his career as an officer of artillery, and never forgot the fact. He himself has left on record the statement that of all his tactical secrets the concentration of an overwhelming artillery fire on a given point was the most important. ‘When once the combat has grown hot,’ he wrote, ‘the general who has the skill to unite an imposing mass of artillery, suddenly and without his adversary’s knowledge, in front of some point of the hostile position, may be sure of success.’ His leading idea was to secure an overwhelming artillery preparation for his infantry attacks: for this reason his typical battle began with the massing of a great number of guns on the points of the enemy’s line which he intended ultimately to break down. In this respect he abandoned entirely the vicious tactics that prevailed in the earlier years of the revolutionary war, when the cannon, instead of being concentrated, were distributed about in twos and threes among the infantry battalions. We shall find that his method had been perfectly assimilated by his subordinates: when the ground allowed of it, they were much given to collecting many guns at some salient point of the line, and bringing a concentrated fire to bear on the weak spot in the enemy’s position. At Oca?a a battery of this kind had a great share in the credit of the victory; at Albuera it saved Soult’s routed troops from complete destruction. The names of artillery generals like Senarmont and Ruty need honourable mention for such achievements. If the French artillery had less effect against the English than against most of Napoleon’s foes, it was because of Wellington’s admirable custom of hiding his troops till the actual moment of battle. Austrian, Russian, or Prussian generals occupied a hillside by long lines drawn up on the hither slope, of which every man could be counted. Hence they could be thoroughly searched out and battered by the French guns, long before the infantry was let loose. Wellington, on the other hand, loved to show a position apparently but half-defended, with his reserves, or even his main line, carefully hidden behind the crest, or covered by walls and hedges, or concealed in hollows and ravines. Hence the French artillery-preparation was much embarrassed: there were no masses to fire at, and it was impossible to tell how any part of the line was held. By the end of the war the French marshals grew very chary of attacking any position where Wellington showed fight, for they never could tell whether they were opposed by a mere rearguard, or by a whole army skilfully concealed.
The English armies, unlike the French, always took with them a comparatively small proportion of artillery, seldom so much as two guns to the thousand men, as Foy remarks. But what there was was excellent, from its high discipline and the accuracy of its fire. The Duke preferred to work with small and movable units, placed in well-chosen spots, and kept dark till the critical moment, rather than with the enormous lines of guns that Bonaparte believed in. His horse artillery was often pushed to the front in the most daring way, in reliance on its admirable power of man?uvring and its complete steadiness. At Fuentes d’O?oro, for example, it was made to cover the retreat of the right wing before the masses of French cavalry, in a way that would have seemed impossible to any one who was not personally acquainted with Norman Ramsay and his gunners. Hence came the astounding fact that during the whole war the Duke never in the open field lost an English gun. Several times cannon were taken and retaken; once or twice guns not belonging to the horse or field batteries were left behind in a retreat, when transport failed. But in the whole six years of his command Wellington lost no guns in battle. Foy gives an unmistakable testimony to the English artillery in his history, by remarking that in its material it was undoubtedly superior to the French: the same fact may be verified from the evidence of our own officers, several of whom have left their opinion on record, that after having inspected captured French cannon, limbers, and caissons they much preferred their own.
This statement, it must be remembered, only applies to the field and horse artillery. The English siege artillery, all through the war, was notably inferior to the French. Wellington never possessed a satisfactory battering train, and the awful cost at which his sieges were turned into successes is a testimony to the inadequacy of his resources. The infantry were sent in to win, by sheer courage and at terrible expense of life, the places that could not be reduced by the ill-equipped siege artillery. There can be no doubt that in poliorcetics the enemy was our superior: but with a very small number of artillery officers trained to siege work, an insignificant body of Royal Engineers, and practically no provision of trained sappers, what was to be expected? It was not strange that the French showed themselves our masters in this respect. But the fault lay with the organization at head quarters, not with the artillery and engineer officers of the Peninsular army, who had to learn their trade by experience without having received any proper training at home.
OPENING OF HOSTILITIES: THE FRENCH INVASIONS OF ANDALUSIA AND VALENCIA
While the provinces of Spain were bursting out, one after another, into open insurrection, Murat at Madrid and Bonaparte at Bayonne were still enjoying the fools’ paradise in which they had dwelt since the formal abdication of Ferdinand VII. The former was busy in forcing the Junta of Regency to perform the action which he elegantly styled ‘swallowing the pill,’ i.e. in compelling it to do homage to Napoleon and humbly crave for the appointment of Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain. He imagined that his only serious trouble lay in the lamentable emptiness of the treasury at Madrid, and kept announcing smooth things to his master—‘The country was tranquil, the state of public opinion in the capital was far happier than could have been hoped: the native soldiery were showing an excellent disposition, the captains-general kept sending in good reports: the new dynasty was likely to be popular, and the only desire expressed by the people was to see their newly designated king arrive promptly in their midst.’ Letters of this kind continued to flow from the pen of the Duke of Berg till almost the end of the month. Even after details of the insurrection of Aragon and the Asturias began to reach him, he could write on May 31 that a strong flying column would suffice to put everything right. About this time he was seized by a violent fever and took to his bed, just as things were commencing to grow serious. On his convalescence he left for France, after putting everything in charge of Savary, the man who of all Frenchmen most deserved the hatred of Spain. About the middle of June he recrossed the French frontier, and after a few weeks went off to Naples to take up his new kingship there. Spain was never to see him again: the catastrophe which he had, by his master’s orders, brought about, was to be conducted to its end by other hands.
While Murat lay sick at the suburban palace of Chamartin, and while Napoleon was drafting acts and constitutions which the assembly of notables at Bayonne were to accept and publish, the first acts of war between the insurgents and the French army of occupation took place.
We have already had occasion to point out that the main military strength of the insurrection lay in Galicia and Andalusia, the two districts in which large bodies of regular troops had placed themselves at the disposition of the newly organized juntas. In Valencia, Catalonia, and Murcia the movement was much weaker: in Old Castile, Aragon, and the Asturias it had hardly any other forces at its disposal than hordes of half-armed peasants. Clearly then Galicia and Andalusia were the dangerous points for the French, and the former more than the latter, since an army descending from its hills, and falling on the long line of communications between France and Madrid, might cause the gravest inconvenience. If there had been any organized Spanish forces in Aragon, there would have been an equal danger of an attack directed from Saragossa against the eastern flank of the French communications. But while Galicia was possessed of a numerous army of regular troops, Aragon had nothing to show but a mass of hastily assembled peasants, who were not yet fully provided with arms and were only just beginning to be told off into battalions.
Napoleon, at the moment when he began to order his troops to move, was under the impression that he had to deal with a number of isolated riots rather than with a general insurrection of the Spanish nation. His first orders show that he imagined that a few flying columns would be able to scour the disaffected districts and scatter the bands of insurgents without much trouble. Instead of a strategical plan for the conquest of Spain, we find in his directions nothing more than provisions for the launching of a small column against each point where he had been informed that a rising had broken out. He presupposes that the kingdom as a whole is quiet, and that bodies of 3,000 or 4,000 men may march anywhere, without having to provide for the maintenance of their communications with Madrid, or with each other. Only in a friendly country would it have been possible to carry out such orders.
There were at the Emperor’s disposition, at the end of May, some 116,000 men beyond the Pyrenees: but the 26,000 troops under Junot in Portugal were so completely cut off from the rest, by the insurrection in Castile and Estremadura, that they had to be left out of consideration. Of the remainder the corps of Dupont and Moncey, 53,000 strong, lay in and about Madrid: Bessières, to whom the preservation of the main line of communications with France fell, had some 25,000 between Burgos and San Sebastian: Duhesme, isolated at Barcelona, and communicating with France by Perpignan and not by Bayonne, had only some 13,000 at his disposal in Catalonia. Up to the first week in June the Emperor thought that the 91,000 men of these four corps would be enough to pacify Spain.
His first design was somewhat as follows: Bessières was to keep a firm hand on the line of communications, but also to detach a division of 4,000 men under Lefebvre-Desnouettes against Saragossa, and a brigade under Merle to pacify Santander and the northern littoral. The Emperor does not at first seem to have realized that, with the army of Galicia hanging on his western flank, Bessières might not be able to spare men for such distant enterprises. He dealt with the corps as if it had nothing to face save the local insurgents of Aragon and Old Castile. From the large body of troops which lay about Madrid, Toledo, and Aranjuez, two strong columns were to be dispatched to strike at the two main centres of the insurrection in Southern Spain. Dupont was to take the first division of his army corps, with two brigades of cavalry and a few other troops, and march on Cordova and Seville. This gave him no more than about 13,000 men for the subjugation of the large and populous province of Andalusia. The other two infantry divisions of his corps remained for the present near Madrid.
On the other side of the capital, Marshal Moncey with a somewhat smaller force—one division of infantry from his own army corps and one brigade of cavalry, 9,000 men in all—was to move on Valencia, and to take possession of that city and of the great naval arsenal of Cartagena. His expedition was to be supported by a diversion from the side of Catalonia, for Duhesme (in spite of the small number of his army) was told to send a column along the sea-coast route, by Tarragona and Tortosa, to threaten Valencia from the north. Moncey’s remaining infantry divisions, which were not detailed for the expedition that he was to lead, remained near Madrid, available (like Dupont’s second and third divisions) for the reinforcement of Bessières or the strengthening of the two expeditionary columns, as circumstances might decide.
Clearly Dupont and Moncey were both sent forth to undertake impossible tasks. Napoleon had not comprehended that it was not provincial émeutes that he had to crush, but the regular resistance of a nation. To send a column of 12,000 men on a march through 300 miles of hostile territory to Cadiz, or a column of 9,000 men on a march of 180 miles to Valencia, presupposes the idea that the expeditions are affairs of police and not strategical operations. Our astonishment grows greater when we consider the character of the troops which Dupont and Moncey commanded. In the army of the former there was one veteran French battalion—that of the Marines of the Guard, six of raw recruits of the Legions of Reserve, two of Paris Municipal Guards (strangely distracted from their usual duties), one of the contingent of the Helvetic Confederation, and four of Swiss mercenaries in the Spanish service, who had just been compelled to transfer their allegiance to Napoleon. The cavalry consisted of four ‘provisional regiments’ of conscripts. It was a military crime of the first order to send 13,000 troops of this quality on an important expedition. Moncey’s force was of exactly the same sort—eight battalions of conscripts formed in ‘provisional regiments’ and two ‘provisional regiments’ of dragoons, plus a Westphalian battalion, and two Spanish corps, who deserted en masse when they were informed that they were to march against Valencia in company with the marshal’s French troops. He had not one single company or squadron of men belonging to the old imperial army.
Bessières was much more fortunate, as, among the 25,000 men of whom he could dispose, there were four veteran battalions of the line and two old regiments of cavalry; moreover there were sent ere long to his aid three of the battalions of the Imperial Guard which lay at Madrid, and four hundred sabres of the dragoons, chasseurs, and gendarmes of the same famous corps.
The march of the two expeditionary columns began on May 24, a date at which Murat and his master had but the faintest notion of the wide-spreading revolt which was on foot. Moncey and Dupont were both officers of distinction: the marshal was one of the oldest and the most respected officers of the imperial army: he had won the grade of general of division in the days of the Republic, and did not owe his first start in life to Napoleon. Of all the marshals he was by several years the senior. He passed as a steady, capable, and prudent officer of vast experience. Dupont on the other hand was a young man, who had first won a name by his brilliant courage at the combat of Dirnstein in the Austrian war of 1805. Since then he had distinguished himself at Friedland: he was on the way to rapid promotion, and, if his expedition to Andalusia had succeeded, might have counted on a duchy and a marshal’s baton as his reward. Napoleon knew him as a brave and loyal subordinate, but had never before given him an independent command. He could hardly guess that, when left to his own inspirations, such a brilliant officer would turn out to be dilatory, wanting in initiative, and wholly destitute of moral courage. It is impossible to judge with infallible accuracy how a good lieutenant will behave, when first the load of responsibility is laid upon his shoulders. On May 24, Dupont quitted Toledo with his 13,000 men: in the broad plains of La Mancha he met with no opposition. Everywhere the people were sullen, but no open hostility was shown. Even in the tremendous defiles of the Sierra Morena he found no enemy, and crossed the great pass of Despe?a Perros without having to fire a shot. Coming out at its southern end he occupied Andujar, the town at the main junction of roads in Eastern Andalusia, on June 5. Here he got clear intelligence that the whole country-side was up in arms: Seville had risen on May 26, and the rest of the province had followed its example. There was a large assembly of armed peasants mustering at Cordova, but the regular troops had not yet been brought up to the front. General Casta?os, whom the Junta had placed in chief command, was still busily engaged in concentrating his scattered battalions, forming them into brigades and divisions, and hastily filling up with recruits the enormous gaps which existed in the greater part of the corps. The regulars were being got together at a camp at Carmona, south of the Guadalquivir, and not far from Seville. The organization of new battalions, from the large number of volunteers who remained when the old regiments were completed, took place elsewhere. It would be weeks, rather than days, before the unorganized mass took shape as an army, and Dupont might count on a considerable respite before being attacked. But it was not only with the forces of Casta?os that he had to reckon: at Cordova, Seville, Granada, and all the other towns of Andalusia, the peasants were flocking in to be armed and told off into new regiments. There was every probability that in a few days the movement would spread northward over the Sierra Morena into La Mancha. An insurrection in this district would sever Dupont’s communications with Madrid, for he had not left behind him any sufficient detachments to guard the defiles which he had just passed, or to keep open the great post-road to the capital across the plains of New Castile. When he started he had been under the impression that it was only local troubles in Andalusia that he had to suppress.
Dupont was already beginning to find that the insurgents were in much greater numbers than he had expected when he crossed the Sierra Morena, but till he had made trial of their strength he considered that it would be wrong to halt. He had close before him the great city of Cordova, a most tempting prize, and he resolved to push on at least so far before taking it upon himself to halt and ask for reinforcements. His continued movement soon brought about the first engagement of the war, as at the bridge of Alcolea he found his advance disputed by a considerable hostile force .
The military commandant of the district of Cordova was a certain Don Pedro de Echávarri, a retired colonel whom the local Junta had just placed in command of its levies. His force consisted of 10,000 or 12,000 peasants and citizens, who had only received their arms three days before, and had not yet been completely told off into regiments and companies. On the 4th of June he had been sent a small body of old troops—one battalion of light infantry (Campo Mayor), and one of militia (the 3rd Provincial Grenadiers of Andalusia)—1,400 men in all, and with them eight guns. To have abandoned Cordova without a fight would have discouraged the new levies, and probably have led to Echávarri’s own death; for the armed mob which he commanded would have torn him to pieces as a traitor if he had refused to give battle. Accordingly he resolved to defend the passage of the Guadalquivir at the point where the high-road from Andujar crossed it, six miles outside Cordova. He barricaded the bridge and placed his guns and the two old battalions on the hither side of the river, in a position commanding the defile. On each flank of them some thousands of the Cordovan insurgents were drawn up, while the remainder of the levy, including all the mounted men, were sent across the bridge, and hidden in some hills which overhung the road by which the French were coming. They were ordered to show themselves, and to threaten to fall upon the enemy from the flank, when he should have developed his attack upon the bridge. If Echávarri had been guided by military considerations he would not have dared to offer battle with such a raw and motley force to 12,000 French troops—even if the latter were but the conscripts of Dupont. But political necessity compelled him to make the attempt.
When Dupont found the position of Alcolea occupied, he cannonaded the Spaniards for a time, and then launched his vanguard against the bridge. The leading battalion (it was one of those formed of the Paris Municipal Guards) stormed the barricades with some loss, and began to cross the river. After it the rest of Pannetier’s brigade followed, and began to deploy for the attack on the Spanish position. At this moment the Cordovan levies beyond the river showed themselves, and began to threaten a flank attack on Dupont. The latter sent his cavalry against them, and a few charges soon turned back the demonstration, and scattered the raw troops who had made it. Meanwhile Dupont’s infantry advanced and overpowered the two regular battalions opposed to them: seeing the line broken, the masses of insurgents on the flanks left the field without any serious fighting. The whole horde gave way and poured back into Cordova and right through the city, whose ruined walls they made no attempt to defend. They had lost very few men, probably no more than 200 in all, while the French had suffered even less, their only casualties being thirty killed and eighty wounded, wellnigh all in the battalion which had forced the barricades at the bridge.
There would be no reason to linger even for a moment over this insignificant skirmish, if it had not been for the deplorable events which followed—events which did more to give a ferocious character to the war than any others, save perhaps the massacre by Calvo at Valencia, which was taking place (as it chanced) on that very same day, June 7.
Dupont, after giving his army a short rest, led it, still ranged in battle array, across the six miles of plain which separated him from Cordova. He expected to find the defeated army of Echávarri rallying itself within the city. But on arriving in front of its gates, he found the walls unoccupied and the suburbs deserted. The Cordovans had closed their gates, but it was rather for the purpose of gaining time for a formal surrender than with any intention of resisting. Dupont had already opened negotiations for the unbarring of the gates, when a few scattered shots were fired at the French columns from a tower in the wall, or a house abutting on it. Treating this as a good excuse for avoiding the granting of a capitulation, Dupont blew open one of the gates with cannon, and his troops rushed into the empty streets without finding any enemy to defeat. The impudent fiction of Thiers to the effect that the entry of the French was seriously resisted, and that desperate street-fighting took place, is sufficiently disproved by the fact that in the so-called storming of Cordova the French lost altogether two killed and seven wounded.
Nevertheless the city was sacked from cellar to garret. Dupont’s undisciplined conscripts broke their ranks and ran amuck through the streets, firing into windows and battering down doors. Wherever there was the least show of resistance they slew off whole households: but they were rather intent on pillage and rape than on murder. Cordova was a wealthy place, its shops were well worth plundering, its churches and monasteries full of silver plate and jewelled reliquaries, its vaults of the strong wines of Andalusia. All the scenes of horror that afterwards occurred at Badajoz or San Sebastian were rehearsed for the first time at Cordova; and the army of Dupont had far less excuse than the English marauders and murderers of 1812 and 1813. The French had taken the city practically without loss and without opposition, and could not plead that they had been maddened by the fall of thousands of their comrades, or that they were drunk with the fury of battle after many hours of desperate fighting at the breaches. Nevertheless, without any excuse of this sort, Dupont’s army behaved in a way that would have suited better the hordes of Tilly and Wallenstein. Their commanders could not draw them away from their orgies and outrages till the next day: indeed, it seems that many of the French officers disgraced themselves by joining in the plunder. While the men were filling their haversacks with private property, there were found colonels and even generals who were not ashamed to load carts and coaches with pictures, tapestries, and metal-work from churches and public buildings, and bags of dollars from the treasury, where no less than 10,000,000 reals of specie had been found. Laplanne, whom Dupont appointed commandant of the place, took 2,000 ducats of blackmail from the Count of Villanueva, on whom he had billeted himself, in return for preserving his mansion from pillage. When the French left Cordova, nine days later, they had with them more than 500 wheeled vehicles seized in the place which were loaded with all sorts of plunder.
Dupont had hardly settled down in Cordova, and begun to substitute crushing military contributions for unsystematic pillage, when he found himself cut off from his base. The valley of the Upper Guadalquivir, and the slopes of the Sierra Morena, on both the southern and the northern sides of the passes, rose in arms in the second week of June. The French had left no detachments behind to preserve their communications: between Cordova and Toledo there were only a few posts where stragglers and sick had been collected, some isolated officers busy on surveying or on raising contributions, and some bodies of ten or twenty men escorting couriers or belated trains of wagons bearing food or ammunition to the front. Most of these unfortunate people were cut up by the insurgents, who displayed from the first a most ferocious spirit. The news of the sack of Cordova drove them to the commission of inhuman cruelties; some prisoners were blinded, others tortured to death: Foy says that the brigadier-general Réné, surprised while crossing the Morena, was thrown into a vat of boiling water and scalded to death. The parties, which escaped massacre hastily drew back towards Madrid and Toledo, and soon there was not a French soldier within 150 miles of Dupont’s isolated division.
That general did not at first realize the unpleasantness of his position. He had been sufficiently surprised by the opposition offered at Alcolea, and the rumours of the concentration of the army of Casta?os, to make him unwilling to advance beyond Cordova. He wrote to Murat asking for reinforcements, and especially for troops to keep open his lines of communication. There were, he said, at least 25,000 regular troops marching against him: the English might disembark reinforcements at Cadiz: the whole province was in a flame: it was impossible to carry out the Grand-Duke of Berg’s original orders to push straight on to Seville. But matters were even worse than he thought: in a few days he realized, from the non-arrival of couriers from Madrid, that he was cut off: moreover, his foraging parties, even when they were only a few miles outside Cordova, began to be molested and sometimes destroyed.
After waiting nine days, Dupont very wisely resolved to fall back, and to endeavour to reopen communications with his base. On June 16 he evacuated Cordova, much to the regret of his soldiers, who resented the order to abandon such comfortable quarters. On the nineteenth, dragging with him an enormous convoy of plunder, he reached Andujar, the great junction of roads where the routes from the passes of the Morena come down to the valley of the Guadalquivir. It would have been far wiser to go still further back, and to occupy the debouches of the defiles, instead of lingering in the plain of Andalusia. He should have retired to Baylen, the town at the foot of the mountains, or to La Carolina, the fortress in the upland which commands the southern exit of the Despe?a Perros. But he was vainly dreaming of resuming the attempt to conquer the whole south of Spain when reinforcements should arrive, and Andujar tempted him, since it was the best point from which he could threaten at once Cordova, Jaen, and Granada, the three chief towns of Eastern Andalusia. Here, therefore, he abode from June 19 to July 18, a wasted month during which the whole situation of affairs in Spain was changed.
Here we must leave Dupont, while we treat of the doings of the other French generals during the month of June. While the invasion of Andalusia was running its course, both Moncey and Bessières had been seriously engaged.
The first named of the two marshals was placed in charge of one-half of the offensive part of Napoleon’s plan for the subjugation of Spain, while Bessières was mainly responsible for the defensive part, i.e. for the maintaining of the communications between Madrid and Bayonne. It is with Moncey’s expedition against Valencia, therefore, that we must first deal. Although he started a few days later than Dupont, that marshal was (like his colleague) still dominated by the idea that possessed both Napoleon and Murat—that the insurrections were purely local, and that their suppression was a mere measure of police. This notion accounts for his choice of route: there are two roads from Madrid to Valencia, a long and fairly easy one which passes through the gap between the mountains of Murcia and those of Cuenca, by San Clemente, Chinchilla, and the plain of Almanza, and a shorter one, full of dangerous defiles and gorges, which cuts through the heart of the hills by Tarancon, Valverde, and Reque?a. The former crosses the watershed between the valley of the Tagus and those of the rivers flowing into the Mediterranean Sea at the easiest point, the latter at one of the most difficult ones. But Moncey, thinking only of the need to deal promptly with the Valencian insurgents, chose the shorter and more difficult route.
He left Madrid on June 4: a week later he was near Cuenca, in the midst of the mountains. Not a shot had yet been fired at him, but as he pressed eastward he found the villages more and more deserted, till at last he had reached a region that seemed to have become suddenly depopulated. He turned a little out of his way on the eleventh to occupy the city of Cuenca, the capital of this wild and rugged country, but resumed his advance on the eighteenth, after receiving from Madrid peremptory orders to press forward. There lay before him two tremendous defiles, which must be passed if he was to reach Valencia. The first was the deep-sunk gorge of the river Cabriel, where the highway plunges down a cliff, crosses a ravine, and climbs again up a steep opposing bank. The second, thirty miles further on, was the Pass of the Cabrillas, the point where the road, on reaching the edge of the central plateau of Spain, suddenly sinks down into the low-lying fertile plain of Valencia.
If the Conde de Cervellon, the general whom the Valencian Junta had put in charge of its army, had concentrated on these defiles the 7,000 or 8,000 regular troops who were to be found in the province and in the neighbouring district of Murcia, it is probable that Moncey would never have forced his way through the mountains; for each of the positions, if held in sufficient force, is practically impregnable. But the Spaniards had formed a deeply rooted notion that the invader would come by the easy road over the plains, by San Clemente and Almanza, and not through the mountains of Cuenca. The whole of the troops of Murcia and the greater part of those of Valencia had been directed on Almanza, where there was a good position for opposing an army descending from Castile. Only a small detachment had been sent to watch the northern road, and its commander, Don Pedro Adorno, had stationed at the bridge of the Cabriel no more than one battalion of Swiss mercenaries (No. 1 of Traxler’s regiment) and 500 armed peasants with four guns. The position was too extensive to be held by 1,500 men: Moncey found that the river was fordable in several places, and detached a small column to cross at each, while two battalions dashed at the bridge. In spite of the steepness of the ravine the French got over at more than one point, and climbed the opposite slope, whereupon the peasants fled, and half the Swiss battalion was surrounded and captured while it was trying to cover the retreat of the guns. Adorno, who was lying some miles to the rear, at Reque?a, when he should have been present in full force at the bridge, ought now to have fallen back to cover Valencia, but in a moment of panic he fled across country to join the army at Almanza .
This disgraceful flight left the Valencian Junta almost destitute of troops for the defence of the still stronger defile of the Cabrillas, which Moncey had yet to force before he could descend into the plain. The Junta hurried up to it two regiments of recruits—one of which is said to have been first practised in the manual exercise the day before it went into action. These, with 300 old soldiers, the wrecks of the combat at the Cabriel, and three guns, tried to hold the pass. Moncey turned both flanks of this very inadequate defending force, and then broke through its centre. Many of the Spaniards dispersed, 500 were slain or captured, and the rest fled down the pass to Valencia. After riding round the position, Moncey remarked that it was so strong that with 6,000 steady troops he would undertake to hold it against Napoleon himself and the Grand Army .
Two days later, after a rapid march down the defile and across the fertile Valencian plain, Moncey presented himself before the gates of its capital, and demanded its surrender. But he found that there was still much fighting to be done: a small column of regulars had arrived in the city, though the main army from Almanza was still far distant. With three battalions of old troops and 7,000 Valencian levies, Don José Caro, a naval officer and brother of the celebrated Marquis of La Romana, had taken up a position four miles outside the city at San Onofre. He had covered his front with some irrigation canals, and barricaded the road. Moncey had to spend the twenty-seventh in beating back this force into Valencia, not without some sharp fighting.
On the next day he made a general assault upon the city. Valencia was not a modern fortress: it had merely a wet ditch and an enceinte of mediaeval walls. There were several points where it seemed possible to escalade the defences, and the marshal resolved to storm the place. But he had forgotten that he had to reckon with the auxiliary fortifications which the populace had constructed during the last three days. They had built up the gates with beams and earth, barricaded the streets, mounted cannon on the walls where it was possible, and established several batteries of heavy guns to sweep the main approaches from the open country. The city being situated in a perfectly level plain, and in ground much cut up by irrigation canals, it had been found possible to inundate much of the low ground. As the river Guadalaviar washed the whole northern side of the walls, Moncey’s practicable points of attack were restricted to certain short spaces on their southern front.
The marshal first sent a Spanish renegade, a Colonel Solano, to summon the place. But the Valencians were exasperated rather than cowed by their late defeats; their leaders—especially Padre Rico, a fighting priest of undoubted courage and capacity—had worked them up to a high pitch of enthusiasm, and they must have remembered that, if they submitted, they would have to render an account for Calvo’s abominable massacre of the French residents. Accordingly the Junta returned the stirring answer that ‘the people of Valencia preferred to die defending itself rather than to open any sort of negotiations.’ A mixed multitude of 20,000 men, of whom some 8,000 were troops of one sort and another, manned the walls and barricades and waited for the assault.
After riding round the exposed front of the city, Moncey resolved to attack only the south-eastern section. He formed two columns, each of a brigade, of which one assailed the gate of San José near the river, while another marched on the gate of Quarte, further to the south. Considering the weak resistance that he had met at the Cabriel and at the Pass of the Cabrillas, he had formed a sanguine expectation that the Valencians would not make a firm stand, even behind walls and barricades. In this he was wofully deceived: the French had yet to learn that the enemy, though helpless in the open, was capable of the most obstinate resistance when once he had put himself under cover of bricks and earth. The first assault was beaten off with heavy loss, though Moncey’s conscripts showed great dash, reached the foot of the defences, and tried to tear down the palisades with their hands. The marshal should have seen at once that he had too large a business in hand for the 8,000 men of whom he could dispose. But he persevered, bringing forward his field artillery to batter the gates and earthworks before a second assault should be made. It was to no purpose, as they were soon silenced by the guns of position which the besieged had prepared for this very purpose. Late in the afternoon Moncey risked a second general attack, embracing the gate of Santa Lucia as well as the other points which he had before assailed. But the stormers were beaten off with even heavier loss than on the first assault, and bodies of the defenders, slipping out by posterns and side-gates, harassed the retreating columns by a terrible flanking fire.
Clearly the game was up: Moncey had lost at least 1,200 men, a sixth of his available infantry force. He was much to blame for pressing the attack when his first movement failed, for as Napoleon (wise after the event) said in his commentary on the marshal’s operations: ‘On ne prend pas par le collet une ville de quatre-vingt mille ames.’ If the first charge did not carry the walls, and the garrison stood firm, the French could only get in by the use of siege artillery, of which they did not possess a single piece.
Moncey’s position was now very dangerous: he knew that the country was up in arms behind him, and that his communications with Madrid were completely cut. He was also aware that Cervellon’s army from Almanza must be marching towards him, unless it had taken the alternative course of pressing in on his rear, to occupy the difficult passes by which he had come down into the Valencian coast-plain. His conscripts were dreadfully discouraged by their unexpected reverse: he was hampered by a great convoy of wounded men, whose transport would cause serious delays. Nothing had been heard of the diversion which General Chabran, with troops detached from Duhesme’s army in Catalonia, had been ordered to execute towards the northern side of Valencia. As a matter of fact that general had not even crossed the Ebro. Retreat was necessary: of the three possible lines on which it could be executed, that along the coast road, in the direction where Chabran was to be expected, was thought of for a moment, but soon abandoned: it was too long, and the real base of the marshal’s corps was evidently Madrid, and not Barcelona. The route by Tarancon and the Cabrillas, by which the army had reached Valencia, was terribly difficult: clearly it would be necessary to force again the defiles which had been cleared on the way down to the coast. And it was possible that 9,000 or 10,000 regular troops might now be occupying them.
Accordingly, Moncey resolved to retire by the third road, that through the plains by Almanza and San Clemente. If, as was possible, Cervellon’s whole army was now blocking it, they must be fought and driven off: a battle in the plain would be less dangerous than a battle at the Cabrillas or the bridge of the Cabriel. Before daylight on June 29, therefore, the marshal moved off on this road.
Luck now came to his aid: the incapable Spanish commander had made up his mind that the French would retreat by the way that they had come, and had sent forward General Llamas with all the troops of Murcia to seize the defile of the Cabrillas. He himself followed with the rest of the regulars, but halted at Alcira, behind the Xucar. Thus while Moncey was marching to the south, the main body of his enemies was moving northward. Cervellon refused to fight in the absence of Llamas, so nothing was left in the marshal’s way save bands of peasants who occupied the fords of the Xucar and the road between Jativa and Almanza: these he easily brushed away in a couple of skirmishes. Nor did a small column detached in pursuit from Valencia dare to meddle seriously with his rearguard. So without even exchanging a shot with the Spanish field-army, which Cervellon had so unwisely scattered and sent off on a false track, Moncey was able to make his way by Jativa, Almanza, and Chinchilla back towards La Mancha .
At San Clemente he met with reinforcements under General Frère, consisting of the third division of Dupont’s original corps, some 5,000 strong. This division had been sent to search for him by Savary, who had been filled with fears for his safety when he found that the communications were cut, and that Cuenca and all the hill-country had risen behind the expeditionary force. After vainly searching for Moncey on the northern road, in the direction of Reque?a, Frère at last got news that he had taken the southern line of retreat, and successfully joined him on July 8. At San Clemente the marshal intended to halt and to wait for Cervellon’s arrival, in the hope of beating him in the open. But a few days later he received news from Madrid, to the effect that Savary wished to draw back the French forces nearer to the capital, and that Frère, at least, must move in to Oca?a or Toledo. Much displeased at finding a junior officer acting as the lieutenant of the Emperor—for Savary was but a lieutenant-general, while he himself was a marshal—Moncey threw up the whole scheme of waiting to fight the Valencian army, and marched back to the immediate neighbourhood of Madrid .
There can be no doubt that the marshal had extraordinary luck in this short campaign. If he had been opposed by a general less timid and incapable than the Conde de Cervellon, he might have found arrayed against him, at the bridge of the Cabriel, or at the Cabrillas, a considerable body of regulars—eight or nine thousand men—with a numerous artillery, instead of the insignificant forces which he actually defeated. Again, while he was trying to storm Valencia, Cervellon might have attacked him in the rear with great chance of success; or the Spaniard might have kept his forces united, and opposed Moncey as he retreated from before Valencia. Instead of doing so he split up his army into detachments, and the greater part of it was sent off far from the central point of his operations, and did not fire a shot. Truly such a general was, as Thucydides remarks concerning the Spartans of old, ‘very convenient for his adversaries.’ A less considerate enemy would have had a fair chance of bringing Moncey’s campaign to the same disastrous end that befell that of Dupont.
OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH: THE SIEGE OF SARAGOSSA
Having watched the failure of the expeditions by which Napoleon had hoped to complete the conquest of Southern Spain, we must turn our eyes northward, to Madrid and the long line of communications which joined the capital to the French base of operations at Vittoria, Pampeluna, and San Sebastian. At the moment when the Valencian and Andalusian expeditions were sent out from Madrid and Toledo, Murat had still under his hand a large body of troops, the second and third division of Moncey’s corps, the second and third of Dupont’s, and the 5,000 horse and foot of the Imperial Guard—in all more than 30,000 men. Bessières, if the garrison of the northern fortresses and some newly arrived reinforcements are added to his original force, had more than 25,000. With these the grand-duke and the marshal had to contain the insurrection in Northern Spain, and to beat back the advance of the army of Galicia.
The furthest points to the north and east to which the wave of insurrection had washed up were Logro?o and Tudela in the Ebro valley, Santander on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, and Palencia and Valladolid in Old Castile. All these places lay in Bessières’ sphere of action, and he promptly took measures to suppress the rising at each point. On June 2 a column sent out from Vittoria reoccupied Logro?o, slaying some hundreds of half-armed peasants, and executing some of their leaders who had been taken prisoners. On the same day a stronger force, six battalions and two squadrons under General Merle, marched from Burgos on Santander. Driving before him the insurgents of the Upper Ebro valley, Merle advanced as far as Reynosa, and was about to force the defiles of the Cantabrian Mountains and to descend on to Santander, when he received orders to return and to take part in suppressing the more dangerous rising in the plains of Old Castile. News had arrived that the captain-general, Cuesta, was collecting a force at Valladolid, which threatened to cut the road between Burgos and Madrid. To deal with him Bessières told off Merle, and another small column of four battalions and two regiments of chasseurs under his brilliant cavalry-brigadier, Lasalle, one of the best of Napoleon’s younger generals. After sacking Torquemada (where some peasants attempted an ineffectual resistance) and ransoming the rich cathedral town of Palencia, Lasalle got in touch with the forces of Cuesta at the bridge of Cabezon, where the main road from Burgos to Valladolid crosses the river Pisuerga. On the eleventh of June Merle joined him: on the twelfth their united forces, 9,000 strong, fell upon the levies of the Captain-general.
Throughout the two years during which he held high command in the field, Gregorio de la Cuesta consistently displayed an arrogance and an incapacity far exceeding that of any other Spanish general. Considering the state of his embryo ‘army of Castile,’ it was insane for him to think of offering battle. He had but four cannon; his only veteran troops were 300 cavalry, mainly consisting of the squadrons which had accompanied Ferdinand VII as escort on his unhappy journey to Bayonne. His infantry was composed of 4,000 or 5,000 volunteers of the Valladolid district, who had not been more than a fortnight under arms, and had seen little drill and still less musketry practice. It was absolutely wicked to take them into action. But the men, in their ignorance, clamoured for a battle, and Cuesta did not refuse it to them. His dispositions were simply astounding; instead of barricading or destroying the bridge and occupying the further bank, he led his unhappy horde across the river and drew them up in a single line, with the bridge at their backs.
On June 12 Lasalle came rushing down upon the ‘army of Castile,’ and dashed it into atoms at the first shock. The Spanish cavalry fled (as they generally did throughout the war), the infantry broke, the bridge and the guns were captured. Some hundreds of the unfortunate recruits were sabred, others were drowned in the river. Cuesta fled westwards with the survivors to Medina de Rio Seco, abandoning to its fate Valladolid, which Lasalle occupied without opposition on the same evening. The combat by which this important city was won had cost the French only twelve killed and thirty wounded.
This stroke had completely cleared Bessières’ right flank: there could be no more danger from the north-west till the army of Galicia should think proper to descend from its mountains to contest with the French the dominion of the plains of Leon and Old Castile. The marshal could now turn his attention to other fronts of his extensive sphere of command. After the fight of Cabezon Merle’s division was sent northward, to conquer the rugged coastland of the province of Santander. There were frightful defiles between Reynosa and the shore of the Bay of Biscay: the peasants had blocked the road and covered the hillsides with sungahs. But the defence was feeble—as might be expected from the fact that the district could only put into the field one battalion of militia and a crowd of recent levies, who had been about three weeks under arms. On June 23 Merle finished clearing the defiles and entered Santander, whose bishop and Junta fled, with the wreck of their armed force, into the Asturias.
Meanwhile the troops under Bessières had been equally active, but with very different results, on the Middle Ebro and in the direction of Aragon. It was known at Burgos and at Bayonne that Saragossa had risen like the rest of the Spanish cities. But it was also known that there was hardly a man of regular troops in the whole kingdom of Aragon: here, as in Old Castile or in Santander, the invaders would have to deal only with raw levies, who would probably disperse after their first defeat. Saragossa itself, the central focus of the rising, was no modern fortress, but a town of 60,000 souls, surrounded by a mediaeval wall more fitted to assist in the levy of octroi duties, than in a defence against a regular army. Accordingly the column under Lefebvre Desnouettes, which was directed to start from Pampeluna against the Aragonese insurgents, was one of very moderate size—3,500 infantry, 1,000 horse, and a single battery of field artillery. But it was to be joined a few days later by another brigade and battery, which would bring its total force up to something more than 6,000 men.
The resources of the kingdom of Aragon were large, but the patriots were, when the war broke out, in a condition most unfavourable for strenuous action. The province was one of those which had been denuded of its usual garrison: there only remained part of a cavalry regiment, the ‘King’s Dragoons,’ whose squadrons had been so depleted that it had only 300 men and ninety horses, with a weak battalion of Volunteers of Aragon—some 450 men—and 200 gunners and sappers. In addition there had straggled into Saragossa about 500 men from various Spanish corps at Madrid, Burgos, and elsewhere, who had deserted their colours when the news of the insurrection reached them. This was a small cadre on which to create a whole army, but the feat was accomplished by the energetic young man who put himself at the head of the rising in the middle valley of the Ebro. Joseph Palafox, the second son of a noble family of Aragon, had been one of the suite which accompanied Ferdinand VII to Bayonne, and was an indignant spectator of the abominable treachery which there took place. When the tragedy was over he was fortunate enough to escape to Spain: he retired to his native district, took a prominent part in rousing the Aragonese, and was chosen by them as Captain-general when the weak or incapable Guillelmi was deposed. He was only twenty-eight years of age, and had no military experience, for he had only served in the peaceful ranks of the king’s bodyguard. He had been a courtier rather than a soldier, yet at the critical moment of his life it cannot be denied that he displayed a courage and energy which justified the high opinions which the Aragonese entertained of him. He kept Saragossa clean from the plague of political assassination, which was so rife in every other corner of Spain. He wisely got his appointment as Captain-general confirmed by the Cortes of Aragon, which he summoned to meet in its ancient form. He found out the most capable leaders of the populace, and always asked their advice before taking any important step. But his main virtue was his untiring activity: considering the procrastination and want of organizing power displayed by most of the Spanish generals, his talent for rapid work seems remarkable. He was only placed in power on May 26, and by June 8 he was already engaged with the French. In this short time he had raised and organized seven regiments of new levies—7,400 men in all. They were stiffened with the deserters from Madrid, and commanded by such retired and half-pay officers as could be got together. There were some scores of cannon in the arsenal of Saragossa, but hardly any gunners, and a very small store of ammunition. Palafox started a powder factory and a manufactory of small arms, turned the workmen of the Canal of Aragon into a corps of sappers, and made a general levy of horses to remount his single regiment of dragoons, and to provide his artillery with draught animals. This was but the commencement of Palafox’s activity: ere Saragossa was saved he had raised the whole kingdom, and got more than 30,000 men under arms.
Already by the eighth of June he had hurried out a small force to meet Lefebvre Desnouettes at Tudela, the frontier town on the Ebro, which in the Middle Ages had been known as ‘the key of Aragon.’ This force, which consisted of 2,000 of his new levies, was placed under the command of his own elder brother the Marquis of Lazan, who had escaped from Madrid under the pretext that he would bring pressure to bear upon the Captain-general and induce him to submit to Murat. The marquis, though joined by 3,000 or 4,000 peasants and citizens of Tudela, was easily routed by the French column, and forced back to Mallen sixteen miles nearer to Saragossa. Lefebvre followed him, after having executed a certain number of the notables of Tudela and sacked the town. Reinforced by more of his brother’s new levies, Lazan offered battle again at Mallen, in a bad position, where his men had little protection against the enemy’s artillery and the charges of his Polish lancers. He was naturally routed with severe losses. But even then the Aragonese were not broken in spirit: Palafox himself marched out with the remainder of his new levies, some of whom had not been five days under arms. At Alagon, only seventeen miles from the gates of Saragossa, he drew up 6,000 infantry (of whom 500 were regulars) 150 dragoons and four guns, trying to cover himself by the line of the Canal of Aragon and some olive groves. It is hardly necessary to say that his artillery was overpowered by the fourteen pieces of the French, and that his infantry gave back when furiously assailed by the Poles. Palafox charged at the head of his two squadrons of dragoons, but was wounded in the arm and had his horse killed under him. His routed followers carried him back into the city, where the majority took refuge, while the more faint-hearted fled beyond it to Alcaniz and other points in Upper Aragon.
Elated by three easy victories, Lefebvre thought that there was nothing more to do but to enter Saragossa in triumph. He was much deceived: the citizens were standing at bay behind their flimsy defences, having recovered in a single night from the dismay caused by the arrival of the broken bands who had fought at Alagon. The military conditions were not unlike those which Moncey had to face in another region, a fortnight later: Saragossa like Valencia lies in an extensive plain, with its northern side washed by the waters of the Ebro, and its eastern by those of the shallow and fordable Huerba: but its southern and western fronts are exposed to attack from the open. It was surrounded by a brick wall of ten to twelve feet high, interrupted in several places by convents and barracks whose blank back-faces continued the line of the enceinte. Inside the wall were the crowded lanes in which dwelt the 60,000 citizens, a tangle of narrow streets save the one broad Coso which intersects the place from east to west. The houses were mostly solid and lofty structures of brick and stone, with the heavy barred windows and doors usual in Spain. The strength, such as it was, of Saragossa consisted not in its outer shell, but in the closely packed houses, convents, and churches, each of which might serve at need as a small fortress. Many of them were solid enough to resist any form of attack save that of being battered by artillery. When barricades had been thrown across the lanes from side to side, each square of buildings would need to be assaulted and captured piecemeal. But none of the French officers who arrived in front of Saragossa on June 15, 1808, had any conception that the problem about to be presented to them was that of street-fighting carried on from house to house. There had been many sieges since the war of the French Revolution began, but none carried on in this manner. In Italy or Germany no one had ever heard of a city which tried, for want of bastions and curtains, to defend itself by barricades: such places always saved themselves by an obvious and blameless surrender.
But if a siege was coming, there was one position just outside the town which was clearly destined to play a chief part in it. Just across the Huerba lay a broad flat-topped hill, the Monte Torrero, which rose to the height of 180 feet, and overlooked all the south side of the place. It was such a splendid vantage-ground for siege-batteries, that the defenders were bound to hold it, lest it should fall into the power of the French. It should have been crowned by a strong detached fort, or even by an entrenched camp. But Palafox in the short time at his disposal had only been able to throw up a couple of open batteries upon it, and to loophole the extensive magazines and workshops of the Canal of Aragon, which were scattered over the summit of the hill, while the canal itself flowed, as a sort of outer defence, around its further foot.
Saragossa had two other outlying defences: the one was the Aljafferia, an old square castle with four towers at its corners, which had been the abode of Moorish emirs, and of Aragonese kings, but now served as the prison of the Inquisition. It lay a couple of hundred yards outside the western gate (Puerto del Portillo) of the city. It was a solid brick structure, but quite unsuited to resist a serious artillery attack. The second outwork was the suburb of San Lazaro beyond the Ebro: it was connected with Saragossa by a new and handsome bridge, known as the ‘Puente de Piedra,’ or ‘Stone Bridge.’ Cannon were mounted at its southern end so as to sweep its whole length.
On June 15, Lefebvre-Desnouettes appeared before the city, driving before him some Spanish outposts which he had met upon the way. He resolved at once to carry the place by storm, a task which, considering the weakness of its walls, did not seem impossible, and all the more so because the gates stood open, each defended only by an earthwork containing two or three guns. The French general, neglecting the Monte Torrero and its commanding slopes, attacked only the western front between the gate of Portillo, near the Ebro, and the gate of Santa Engracia, close to the banks of the Huerba. His French brigade assailed the northern and his Polish regiment the southern half of this long line of walls and buildings. His two field-batteries were run up into the fighting line, to batter the earthworks and to reply to the Spanish guns. The only reserve which he kept in hand consisted of his brigade of cavalry.
The resistance offered to Lefebvre was of the most irregular sort: Palafox himself was not present, and his second-in-command, Bustamante, seems to have done little in the way of issuing orders. The 6,000 half-trained levies which had fought at Alagon had not recovered their organization, and were hopelessly mixed in the line of defence with 4,000 or 5,000 armed citizens of all ages and classes who had gone to the walls, each parish under the charge of two or three local leaders, who paid little obedience to the commands of the regular officers.
The Captain-General himself had started out that morning at the head of 150 dragoons, and 200 infantry, all regulars, by the road beyond the Ebro. He had told his subordinates that he was intending to raise in Upper Aragon a force with which he would fall on Lefebvre’s line of communications, and so compel him to abandon his attack on the city. But there is no doubt that he had really conceived grave doubts as to the possibility of Saragossa defending itself, and intended to avoid being captured within its walls. He wished to have the power of continuing the struggle outside, in case the French should penetrate into the city. On the morning after the fight at Alagon, bruised and wounded, he was in a pessimistic frame of mind, as his resolve shows. But there is no occasion to brand him, as does Napier, with timidity: his previous and his subsequent conduct preclude such a charge. It was merely an error of judgement: the Captain-General should have stayed behind to defend his capital, and have sent his brother Lazan, or some other officer whom he could trust, to raise the country-side in the rear of the French. His retirement might well have discouraged the Saragossans and led to deplorable results; but as a matter of fact, Lefebvre’s attack began so soon after he had ridden out over the bridge, that the news of his departure had not yet got abroad, and the populace were still under the impression that he was among them. It was not till the fighting was over that he was missed.
Lefebvre-Desnouettes before Saragossa was in exactly the same position as Moncey before Valencia, and acted in the same way, pushing forward a rather reckless attack on the city in full confidence that the Spaniards would not stand before an assault pressed home. He had, moreover, the advantages of being able to attack a wider front, of having no ditches and inundations to cramp his operations, and of dealing with walls even weaker than those of Valencia, and defended by artillery of which very few were pieces of heavy calibre.
The first attack was delivered in the most dashing, not to say foolhardy, style. At the gate of Santa Engracia a squadron of Polish lancers, who led the van, charged into and over the small battery which covered the ingress into the city. Their wild rush carried them right into the place, in spite of a dropping fire of musketry directed upon them from every house that they passed. Turning into a broad lane to the left, these headstrong horsemen rode forward, losing men at every step, till they were brought to a stand in the Plaza del Portillo, where the majority were shot down; a very few succeeded in escaping by the way along which they had come. The Polish infantry, which should have followed closely on the heels of the lancers, penetrated no further than the earthwork at the gate, where it got closely engaged with the Spaniards who held the neighbouring convent of Santa Engracia. Exposed in the open street to a heavy fire from behind walls and windows, the leading battalion gave way, and retired into the olive groves and buildings outside the gate.
Meanwhile the French brigade of Lefebvre’s division attacked the gates of Portillo and the Carmen and the adjoining cavalry barracks. At the last-named post they scaled the walls, which were particularly low and weak at this point, and got into the city. But at the gates the batteries in the narrow ingress held them back. After a sharp skirmish, a general rush of peasants, soldiers, and citizens, swept out the invaders from the cavalry barracks, and the front of defence was restored. Lefebvre would have done well to pause before renewing his assault: but (like Moncey at Valencia) he was loth to believe that the enemy would face a persistent attempt to break in. He accordingly ordered both the columns to renew their attacks: for some time it seemed likely that he might succeed, for the French forced both the Carmen and the Portillo gates and reoccupied the cavalry barracks, while the Poles burst in for a second time at Santa Engracia. But it proved impossible to make any further advance into the city, where every house was full of musketeers and the narrow lanes were blocked with artillery, which swept them from end to end. When it became clear that the enemy were making no further progress, the Spaniards rallied behind the Bull-Ring on the Portillo front, and in the convent of Santa Engracia on the southern front, and swept out the decimated battalions of Lefebvre by a determined charge.
It is not surprising to find that the assailants had suffered very heavily in such a desperate attack on walls and barricades teeming with defenders worked up to a high pitch of patriotic frenzy. Lefebvre lost 700 men, and left behind him at the Portillo gate several guns which had been brought up too close to the place, and could not be dragged off under the dreadful musketry fire from the walls, and the flanking discharges from the neighbouring castle of Aljafferia. The Spaniards, fighting under cover except at the moment of their final charges, had suffered comparatively little: their loss is estimated at not much over 300 men. They might well be proud of their success: they had certainly showed a heroic spirit in fighting so obstinately after three crushing defeats in the open field. That a practically unfortified town should defend itself by street-fighting was a new idea: and that peasants and citizens (there were not 900 regulars in the place) should not only hold out behind walls, but execute desperate charges en masse, would till that day have been regarded as impossible by any soldier of Napoleon. Every thinking man in the French army must have looked with some dismay on the results of the fight, not because of the loss suffered, for that was a mere trifle, but because of the prospect of the desperate national resistance which had evidently to be faced.
Meanwhile, Lefebvre-Desnouettes retired for some thousands of yards from the city, and pitched his camp facing its western front. He sent pressing letters asking for reinforcements both to Madrid and to Bayonne, and attempted no offensive action for ten days. If he sent a formal summons of surrender to the Saragossans, it was to waste time and allow fresh troops to arrive, rather than with any hope that he could intimidate the citizens. He was himself more likely to be attacked during the next few days than to make any forward movement. But he was already beginning to receive reinforcements: on June 21 there arrived two battalions of the 2nd Regiment of the Vistula, and more troops were behind.
Palafox, on the other hand, received much unexpected encouragement from the combat of the sixteenth. On receiving the news of it at Belchite on the following morning, he sent back his brother, the Marquis de Lazan, giving him the command of the city, and bidding him tell the Saragossans that he would endeavour to raise the siege in a very few days. There was already a considerable body of insurgents in arms in South-western Aragon, under the Baron de Versage, who had raised at Calatayud two battalions of new levies, and gathered in some fugitives from the Spanish garrison of Madrid. Palafox ordered the baron to join him with every man that he could bring, and their two detachments met at Almunia on June 21, and from thence marched towards Saragossa by the road which leads down the valley of the Xalon by Epila. At the last-named place they were only fifteen miles from Lefebvre-Desnouettes’ camp, and were already threatening the French communications with Logro?o and Vittoria. But their army was still very small—no more than 550 regular infantry, 1,000 men of Versage’s new regiments, 350 cavalry, and a couple of thousand levies of all kinds, among whom were noted a company of eighty armed Capuchin friars and a body of mounted smugglers.
The French general had now to make up his mind whether he would raise the siege and fall upon Palafox with his whole army, or whether he would dare to divide his scanty resources, and maintain the attack on the city with one part, while he sent a containing force against the Captain-General’s bands. He resolved to take the latter course—a most hazardous one considering the fact that he had, even with his last reinforcements, not much more than 6,000 sound men in his camp. He dispatched the Polish Colonel Chlopiski with the first regiment of the Vistula, one French battalion, a squadron of lancers and four guns to hold back Palafox, while with the 3,000 men that remained he executed several demonstrations against outlying parts of the defences of Saragossa, in order to distract the attention of the citizens.
This very risky plan was carried out with complete success. While the Saragossans were warding off imaginary attacks, Chlopiski made a forced march and fell upon Palafox at Epila on the night of June 23-24. The Aragonese army was completely surprised and routed in a confused engagement fought in the dark. Several hundred were cut up, and the town of Epila was sacked: Palafox fell back in disorder towards Calatayud and the mountains, while Chlopiski returned to the siege.
The Captain-General, much disconcerted by this disaster, resolved that he would fight no more battles in the open, but merely reinforce the city with the best of his soldiers and resist behind its walls. So sending back Versage and his levies to the hills, he made an enormous detour with his handful of veteran troops and a few hundred irregulars, and re-entered Saragossa by the northern side, which still remained open. He had great difficulty in holding his followers together, for many (and especially his untrustworthy cavalry) wished to retire on Valencia and to abandon the struggle in Aragon. But by appealing to their patriotism—‘he would give every man who insisted on it a passport for Valencia, but those who loved him would follow him’—he finally carried off the whole force, and took somewhat over 1,000 men back to the besieged city .
During his absence the condition of affairs in Saragossa had been considerably altered. On the one hand the defences had been much improved: the gates had been strongly stockaded, and the walls had been thickened with earth and sandbags, and furnished with a continuous banquette, which had hitherto been wanting. On the other hand the French were beginning to receive reinforcements: on the twenty-sixth General Verdier arrived with three battalions of his division (the second of Bessières’ corps) and two bataillons de marche, in all some 3,000 or 3,500 men. From this time forward small bodies of troops began to reach the besiegers at short intervals, including two more Polish battalions, one battalion of French regulars, two Portuguese battalions (the last of the unfortunate division which was on its way across Spain towards the Baltic), 1,000 National Guards of the Hautes Pyrénées and Basses Pyrénées, hastily sent across the frontier from Bayonne, and three squadrons of cavalry. What was more important than the mere numbers was that they brought with them siege-guns, in which Lefebvre had hitherto been entirely deficient. These pieces came from the citadel of Pampeluna, and were part of those resources of which the French had so treacherously taken possession in the preceding February.
Verdier on his arrival superseded Lefebvre-Desnouettes, who was considerably his junior, and took charge of the siege. His first act was to develop an attack on the Monte Torrero, the hill in the suburbs, beyond the Huerba, which dominates, at a distance of 1,800 yards, the southern front of the city. The Spaniards had neither encircled it with continuous lines, nor crowned it with any closed work. It was protected only by two small batteries and some trenches covering the most obvious points of attack. The garrison was composed of no more than 500 men, half peasants, half regulars of the Regiment of Estremadura, of which three weak battalions had arrived from Tarrega on the previous day (June 27). Verdier sent three columns, each of one battalion, against the more accessible parts of the position, and drove out the small defending force with ease. His task was made lighter by a piece of casual luck: on the night before the assault the main powder-magazine of the Saragossans, situated in the Seminary, was ignited by the carelessness of a workman, and blew up, killing many persons and wrecking the Seminary itself and many houses in its vicinity. A few hours after this disaster had taken place, and while the whole city was busy in extinguishing the conflagration, the French attack was delivered; hence the original garrison got no help from within the walls. But its own conduct was deplorably weak: the colonel in command headed the rush to the rear, a piece of cowardice for which he was imprisoned and (after the siege had been raised) was sent before a court-martial and shot.
On the evening of the twenty-eighth Verdier began to construct heavy breaching batteries on the slopes of the Monte Torrero, commanding all the southern side of the city. Others were thrown up on the south-western front, opposite the points which had been unsuccessfully assaulted twelve days before. On the thirtieth of June the works were armed with thirty siege-guns, four mortars, and twelve howitzers, which opened simultaneously on Saragossa at midnight, and continued to play upon the place for twenty-four hours, setting many houses on fire, and breaching the flimsy ramparts in half a dozen places. The old castle of the Aljafferia was badly injured, and the gates of Portillo and the Carmen knocked out of shape: there were also large gaps in the convent of the Augustinians, and in the Misericordia, whose back wall formed part of the enceinte. All the unarmed population was forced to take refuge in the cellars, or the more solidly built parts of the churches, while the fighting-men were trying to construct barricades behind the worst breaches, and to block up with sandbags, beams, and barrels all the lanes that opened upon them.
Palafox entered Saragossa on the morning of July 2, just in time to see Verdier launch his whole available infantry force upon the shattered western and southern fronts of the city. The assault was made under much more favourable conditions than that of June 16, since the strength of the storming columns was more than doubled, and the defences had been terribly mishandled by the bombardment. On the other hand the garrison was in no degree shaken in spirit: the fire of the last twenty-four hours had been much more dangerous to buildings than to men, and the results of the first assault had given the defenders a confidence which they had not felt on the previous occasion. Hence it came to pass that of the six columns of assault not one succeeded in making a permanent lodgement within the walls. Even the isolated castle of Aljafferia and the convent of San José, just outside the Porta Quemada, were finally left in the hands of the besieged, though the latter was for some hours held by the French. The hardest fighting was at the Portillo gate, where the assaulting battalions more than once reached the dilapidated earthwork that covered the ingress to the north-western part of the city. It was here that there occurred the well-known incident of the ‘Maid of Saragossa.’ The gunners at the small battery in the gate had been shot down one after another by the musketry of the assailants, the final survivors falling even before they could discharge the last gun that they had loaded. The infantry supports were flinching and the French were closing in, when a young woman named Agostina Zaragoza, whose lover (an artillery sergeant) had just fallen, rushed forward, snatched the lighted match from his dying hand, and fired the undischarged twenty-four-pounder into the head of the storming column. The enemy was shaken by a charge of grape delivered at ten paces, the citizens, shamed by Agostina’s example, rushed back to reoccupy the battery, and the assault was beaten off. Palafox states that the incident occurred before his own eyes: he gave the girl a commission as sub-lieutenant of artillery, and a warrant for a life-pension: she was seen a year later by several English witnesses, serving with her battery in Andalusia.
The fruitless attack of July 2 cost the French 200 killed and 300 wounded. The Saragossan garrison lost somewhat less, in spite of the bombardment, since they had been fighting under cover against enemies who had to expose themselves whenever they got near the wall. Verdier resolved for the future to shun attempts at escalade, and to begin a regular siege. He commenced on the third of July to construct parallels, for a main attack on the southern side of the place, and a secondary attack on the north-western. He also threw a detachment across the Ebro , to close the hitherto undisturbed access to the city through the suburb of San Lazaro and the stone bridge. The force which could be spared for this object from an army of no more than 12,000 or 13,000 men was not really sufficient to hold the left bank of the Ebro, and merely made ingress and egress difficult without entirely preventing it. On two or three occasions when considerable bodies of Spaniards presented themselves, the French could do no more than skirmish with them and try to cut off the convoys which they were bringing to the city. They could not exclude them, and for the whole remainder of the siege the communications of the Saragossans with the open country were never entirely closed.
By July 15, Verdier’s trenches were commencing to work up close to the walls, and the next ten days of the month were occupied in desperate struggles for the convents of San José, of the Capuchins and Trinitarians, which lie outside the city near the Carmen and Porta Quemada gates. By the twenty-fourth the French had occupied them, connected them with their approaches, and begun to establish in them breaching batteries. Another, but less powerful, attack was directed against the Portillo gate. The mortars and howitzers bombarded the city continuously from the first to the third. But it was not till the dawn of August 4 that the heavy guns were ready to begin their task of battering down the gates and walls of Saragossa. After five hours of steady firing the Spanish batteries were silenced, and several breaches had been made, mostly in or about the Convent of Santa Engracia, at the southernmost point of the city. The streets behind it had been terribly shattered by the previous bombardment, and many buildings destroyed, notably the central hospital, from which the Spaniards had to remove, under a terrible hail of shells, more than 500 sick and wounded, as well as a number of lunatics and idiots: the institution had been used as an asylum before the outbreak of the war. Many of these unfortunate creatures were destroyed by the besiegers’ fire, as were also no small number of the wounded and of their doctors and nurses.
Palafox and his brother the marquis remained near Santa Engracia, trying to encourage their followers to repair the barricades behind the breaches, and to loophole and strengthen those of the houses which still stood firm. But amid the dreadful and unceasing storm of projectiles it was hard to keep the men together, and most of the projected retrenchments were battered down before they could be finished. At two o’clock in the afternoon of the fourth, Verdier let loose his storming columns, composed of four Polish and nine French battalions. They were directed in three bodies against three separate breaches, the easternmost in the Convent of Santa Engracia, the second at the gate of the same name, the third more to the left, in the wall near the gate of the Carmen. All three were successful in forcing their way into the city: the defences had been completely shattered, and at one point 300 continuous yards of the outer wall had fallen. The Spaniards clung for some time to the cloisters and church of Santa Engracia, but were at last expelled or exterminated, and 1,000 yards of the enceinte with the adjoining buildings were in the hands of the French.
It was at this moment, apparently, that Verdier sent in a parlementaire with the laconic note—‘Head Quarters, Santa Engracia. Capitulation?’ To which Palafox returned the well-known reply—‘Head Quarters, Saragossa. War to the knife.’
All through the afternoon of the fourth of August, the French slowly pushed their way up the streets which lead northward towards the Coso, the main thoroughfare of Saragossa. They could only get forward by storming each house, and turning each barricade that offered resistance, so that their progress was very slow. While inflicting terrible losses on the Spaniards, they were also suffering very heavily themselves. But they drove a broad wedge into the city, till finally they reached and crossed the Coso, halfway between the southern wall and the river. In the streets beyond the Coso their impetus seemed to have exhausted itself: many of the men were too tired to press forward any longer; others turned aside to plunder the churches and the better sort of houses. Verdier tried to cut his way to the great bridge, so as to divide the defenders into two separate bodies, and was so far successful that many of the Spaniards began to troop off across the river into the suburb of San Lazaro. But he himself was wounded, his main column lost its way in the narrow side-streets, and the attack died down.
In the late afternoon there was almost a suspension of hostilities, and the firing slackened for a space. But at last the Aragonese, encouraged by the exhaustion of their enemies, began to resume the offensive. The fugitives who had crossed to the northern side of the Ebro were hustled together and driven back by their leaders, while a loaded gun was placed on the bridge to prevent their return. The garrison of the eastern front, which had not been seriously attacked, sent all the reinforcements that it could spare into the centre of the town. At dusk masses of Spaniards debouched from the neighbourhood of the two cathedrals, and began to assail the positions held by the French beyond the line of the Coso. The first charge into the open street is recorded to have been led by a monk and sixteen peasants, every one of whom were killed or wounded; but endless reinforcements poured out of every lane, and the exhausted French began to lose ground. The fighting was of that deadly sort in which the question has to be settled, whether the defenders of the houses in a street can shoot down their assailants, exposed in the roadway, before the latter can burst into each separate dwelling and exterminate its garrison in detail. Often the French held the upper stories long after the Spaniards had seized the ground floor, and the staircases had to be stormed one after the other. It was natural that in such struggles the defenders should receive no quarter. Though the fight raged with many variations of fortune in all the central parts of the city, there was after a time no doubt that the Aragonese were gaining ground. The French detachments which had penetrated furthest into the place were gradually cut off and exterminated; the main bodies of the columns drew back and strengthened themselves in two large stone buildings, the convents of San Francisco and San Diego. At nightfall they retained only a wedge-like section of the city, whose apex near San Francisco just touched the southern side of the Coso, while its base was formed by the line of wall between the gates of Santa Engracia and the Carmen.
The French had lost nearly 2,000 men in the struggle: the engineer Belmas gives the total as 462 killed and 1,505 wounded, more than a fifth of the troops which had actually been engaged in the assault. Among the Saragossans, who before the street-fighting began had been subjected to a severe bombardment for many hours, the casualties must have been nearly as great. But they could spare combatants more easily than their enemies: indeed they had more men than muskets, and as each defender fell there was a rush of the unarmed to get possession of his weapon.
During the night of August 4-5 both sides, fatigued though they were, set to work to cover themselves with barricades and works constructed with the débris of ruined houses. In the morning both French and Spaniards had rough but continuous lines of defence, those of the latter circling round those of the former, with nothing but the width of a narrow street between them. Wherever there was anything approaching an open space cannon had been brought up to sweep it. Where the houses still stood firm, communications had been made between them by breaking holes through the party walls. In the streets the corpses of both sides lay thick, for under the deadly cross-fire no one dared venture out to remove them: in a day or two the sanitary conditions would be horrible.
Meanwhile both besiegers and besieged were too exhausted to undertake any more serious operations, and the fighting sank to little more than a desultory fusillade between enemies equally well protected by their defences. Such interest as there was in the operations of August 5-6 lay outside the walls of Saragossa. On the afternoon of the day of the great assault a column of Spanish troops from Catalonia—two line battalions and 2,000 or 3,000 new levies and armed peasants—arrived at Villamayor on the north of the Ebro, only seven miles from the city. It escorted a much-desired convoy of ammunition, for the supplies in the city were running very low. While the fighting was still raging in the streets Palafox rode out of the suburb of San Lazaro with 100 dragoons and joined this force. On the next morning (August 5) he skirmished with the French troops which lay beyond the Ebro, and passed into the city one veteran battalion and a few wagons of munitions. He then proposed to attack the detached French brigade (that of Piré) with his whole remaining force on the next day, in order to clear the northern front, and to send the rest of his convoy—no less than 200 wagons—into Saragossa. But on the same night he received news of the battle of Baylen and the surrender of Dupont’s army. Moreover, he was informed that a division of the army of Valencia, under Saint-March, was on the way to reinforce him. This induced him to halt for two days, to see whether the French would not raise the siege without further fighting.
Verdier had got the same intelligence at the same hour, with orders to be ready to retreat at a moment’s notice, and to avoid entangling himself in further engagements. He was preparing to withdraw, when on the seventh he received supplementary dispatches from Madrid, with directions to hold on for the present, and to keep the Saragossans occupied, without, however, compromising himself too much. Accordingly he resumed the bombardment, and began to throw into the city an immense number of shells: for he saw that when his retreat was definitely ordered, he would not be able to carry off with him the vast stores of munitions that he had accumulated in his camp.
Map of Saragossa
Enlarge Saragossa.
Seeing that the French did not move, Palafox attacked the covering force on the left bank of the Ebro on August 8. His enemies were very inferior in numbers and had been told not to risk anything, considering the delicate state of affairs. Accordingly the relieving force crossed the river Gallego, pushed back Piré’s 2,000 men in a long skirmishing fight, and ultimately established themselves on ground just outside the suburb of San Lazaro: the convoy, under cover of the fighting, successfully entered the city over the great bridge. That night Verdier withdrew Piré’s brigade across the river, thus leaving the whole northern front of the place free from blockade. Clearly this could only mean that he was about to raise the siege, but for five days more he continued to ravage the central parts of the city with his bombs, and to bicker at the barricades with the Saragossans. But on the thirteenth the Spaniards noted that his camps seemed to be growing empty, and on the fourteenth a series of explosions told them that he was abandoning his siege works. Santa Engracia and the other points held inside the city were all destroyed on that day, and the ammunition which could not be carried off was blown up. The guns which had been pressed forward into the ruined streets were spiked and left behind, as it would have been impossible to extricate them under the Spanish fire. Of those in the outer batteries some were thrown into the canal, others disabled by having their trunnions knocked off, others merely spiked. Altogether no less than fifty-four pieces, all more or less injured, but many susceptible of repair, were left behind to serve as trophies for the Saragossans.
Finally Verdier withdrew by slow marches up the Ebro to Tudela, where he took post on August 17. He had lost in all over 3,500 men in his long-continued struggle with the heroic city. The Aragonese must have suffered at least as much, but the figures are of course impossible to verify. They said that their casualties amounted to no more than 2,000, but this must surely be an understatement, for Palafox says that by August 1 there were of his original 7,000 levies only 3,500 left under arms. Even allowing for heavy diminution by desertion and dispersion, this implies very serious losses in action, and these seven Aragonese battalions formed only a part of the garrison, which counted 13,000 men on August 13. Probably the unembodied citizens and peasants suffered in a still heavier proportion than troops which had received even a small measure of organization. If the whole losses came to 4,500 it would not be surprising—but nothing can be stated with certainty. Yet whatever were their sufferings, the Saragossans had turned over a new page in the history of the art of war. They had defended for two months an unfortified place, by means of extemporized barricades, retrenchments, and earthworks, and had proved their ability to resist even a formidable train of siege artillery. If the news of Dupont’s disaster had not arrived in time to save them, they would no doubt have succumbed in the end, as must any besieged place which is not sooner or later relieved from the outside. But meanwhile they had accomplished a rare feat: almost unaided by regular troops, almost destitute of trained artillerymen and engineers, they had held at bay a force which Napoleon at the commencement of the siege would have supposed to be equal to the task of conquering not only Aragon, but the whole eastern side of the Iberian Peninsula.
OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH: BATTLE OF MEDINA DE RIO SECO
While Lefebvre-Desnouettes and Verdier were making their long series of attacks on Saragossa, matters were coming to a head in the north-west of Spain. The army of Galicia had at last descended into the plains, and commenced to threaten the right flank of Bessières and the communications between Burgos and Madrid. This forward movement was due neither to the Galician Junta, nor to the officer whom they had placed in command of their army, but to the obstinate persistence of Cuesta, who had not in the least learnt the lesson of caution from his defeat at Cabezon, and was eager to fight a pitched battle with all the forces that could be collected in Northern Spain.
The resources at hand were not inconsiderable: in Galicia, or on the way thither from Portugal, were no less than thirty-nine battalions of regular infantry—though most of them were very weak: there were also thirteen battalions of embodied militia, some thirty guns, and a handful of cavalry (not more than 150 sabres). The Junta had placed in command, after the murder of the captain-general Filanghieri, a comparatively young general—Joachim Blake, one of those many soldiers of fortune of Irish blood who formed such a notable element in the Spanish army. When the insurrection broke out he had been merely colonel of the regiment named ‘the Volunteers of the Crown’: he had never had more than three battalions to manage before he found himself placed at the head of the whole Galician army. Though a most unlucky general—half a dozen times he seems to have been the victim of ill fortune, for which he was hardly responsible—Blake was in real merit far above the average of the Spanish commanders. He had neither the slackness nor the arrogance which were the besetting sins of so many of the Peninsular generals: and his dauntless courage was not combined with recklessness or careless over-confidence. He showed from the first very considerable organizing power: all his efforts were directed to the task of inducing the Junta and the people of Galicia to allow him to draft the crowds of recruits who flocked to his banner into the old regiments of the line and the militia, instead of forming them into new corps. With some trouble he carried his point, and was able to bring up to their full complement most of the old battalions: of new units very few were created. When he took the field it was only the old cadres thus brought up to strength that accompanied him, not raw and unsteady troops of new organization.
After hastily concentrating and brigading his army at Lugo, Blake led them to the edge of the mountains which divide Galicia from the plains of Leon. It was his original intention to stand at bay on the hills, and force the French to attack him. With this object he occupied the passes of Manzanal, Fuencebadon, and Puebla de Sanabria, the only places where roads of importance penetrate into the Galician uplands . His whole field force, distributed into four divisions and a ‘vanguard brigade’ of light troops, amounted to some 25,000 men fit for the field: in addition, 8,000 or 10,000 new levies were being organized behind him, but he refused—with great wisdom—to bring them to the front during his first movements.
On Blake’s left flank were other Spanish troops: the Junta of the Asturias had raised some 15,000 men: but these—unlike the Galician army—were utterly raw and untrained. Of old troops there was but one single militia battalion among them. The Junta had dispersed them in small bodies all along the eastern and southern side of the province, arraying them to cover not only the high road from Madrid and Leon to Oviedo, but every impracticable mule-path that crosses the Cantabrian Mountains. By this unwise arrangement the Asturian army was weak at every point: it was impossible to concentrate more than 5,000 men for the defence of any part of the long and narrow province. The fact was that the Junta looked solely to the defence of its own land, and had no conception that the protection of the Asturias should be treated as only a section of the great problem of the protection of the whole of Northern Spain.
While the Galicians and the Asturians were taking up this purely defensive attitude, they had forgotten to reckon with one factor in their neighbourhood. Right in front of them lay the old Captain-General of Castile, with the wrecks of the army that had been so signally routed at Cabezon. He had retired to Benavente on the Esla, and there had halted, finding that he was not pursued by Lasalle. Here he reorganized his scattered Castilian levies into three battalions, and raised three more in the province of Leon. He had still 300 or 400 regular cavalry, but not a single gun. Quite undismayed by his late defeat, he persisted in wishing to fight in the plain, and began to send urgent messages both to Blake and to the Juntas of Asturias and Galicia, begging them to send down their armies from the hills, and aid him in making a dash at Valladolid, with the object of cutting off Bessières’ communications with Madrid, and so disarranging the whole system of Napoleon’s plan for the conquest of Spain.
The Asturians, partly from a well-justified disbelief in Cuesta’s ability, partly from a selfish desire to retain all their troops for the defence of their own province, refused to stir. They sent the Captain-General a modest reinforcement, two battalions of the newly raised regiment of Covadonga, but refused any more aid. Instead, they suggested that Cuesta should fall back on Leon and the southern slope of the Asturian hills, so as to threaten from thence any advance of the French into the plains of Leon.
But the Galician Junta showed themselves less unyielding. Despite of the remonstrances of Blake, who was set on maintaining the defensive, and holding the passes above Astorga, they consented to allow their army to move down into the plain of Old Castile and to join Cuesta. After some fruitless remonstrances Blake moved forward with the bulk of his host, leaving behind him his second division to hold the passes, while with the other three and his vanguard brigade he marched on Benavente .
On July 10 the armies of Galicia and Castile met at Villalpando, and a brisk quarrel at once broke out between their commanders. Cuesta was for attacking the French at once: Blake pointed out that for an army with no more than thirty guns and 500 or 600 cavalry to offer battle in the plains was sheer madness. The Irish general had the larger and more effective army, but Cuesta was thirteen years his senior as lieutenant-general, and insisted on assuming command of the combined host in accordance with the normal rules of military precedence. After some fruitless resistance Blake yielded, and the whole Spanish army moved forward on Valladolid: all that Cuesta would grant on the side of caution was that the third Galician division, 5,000 strong, should be left as a reserve at Benavente. Even this was a mistake: if the two generals were to fight at all, they should have put every available man in line, and have endeavoured at all costs to induce the Asturians also to co-operate with them. They might have had in all for the oncoming battle 40,000 men, instead of 22,000, if the outlying troops had been collected.
A blow from the north-west was precisely what Napoleon at Bayonne and Savary at Madrid had been expecting for some weeks. Both of them were perfectly conscious that any check inflicted on Bessières in Old Castile would wreck the whole plan of invasion. So much of the marshal’s corps d’armée had been distracted towards Saragossa, that it was clearly necessary to reinforce him. From Madrid Savary sent up half of the troops of the Imperial Guard which had hitherto been in the capital—three battalions of fusiliers (first regiment) and three squadrons of cavalry. Napoleon afterwards blamed him severely for not having sent more, saying that from the mass of troops in and about Madrid he might have spared another complete division—that of Gobert, the second division of Moncey’s corps. Without its aid the Emperor half-expected that Bessières might be checked, if the Galicians came down in full force. He himself sent up from Bayonne nearly all the troops which were at that moment under his hand, ten veteran battalions just arrived from Germany, forming the division of General Mouton.
The reinforcements being hurried on to Bessières by forced marches, that general found himself on July 9 at the head of a force with which he thought that he might venture to attack Blake and Cuesta. If they had brought with them all their troops, and had called in the Asturians, it is probable that the marshal would have found himself too weak to face them: fortunately for him he had only five-ninths of the army of Galicia and Cuesta’s miserable levies in front of him. His own fighting force was formed of odd fragments of all the divisions which formed his corps d’armée: large sections of each of them were left behind to guard his communications with France, and others were before Saragossa. Bessières marched from Burgos with the brigade of the Imperial Guard: at Palencia he picked up Lasalle’s cavalry with half Mouton’s newly arrived division of veterans (the second brigade was left at Vittoria) and a small part of Merle’s division, which had been hastily brought over the mountains from Santander to join him. There was also present the larger half of Verdier’s division, of which the rest was now in Aragon with its commander.
On the evening of July 13, Lasalle’s light cavalry got in touch with the outposts of the Spaniards near Medina de Rio Seco, and reported that Blake and Cuesta were present in force. On the next morning Bessières marched before daybreak from Palencia, and just as the day was growing hot, discovered the enemy drawn up on rising ground a little to the east of the small town which has given its name to the battle. Blake had 15,000 infantry and 150 cavalry with twenty guns; Cuesta 6,000 infantry and 550 cavalry, but not a single cannon. They outnumbered Bessières by nearly two to one in foot soldiery, but had little more than half his number of horse, and only two-thirds as many guns.
A more prudent general than Cuesta would have refused to fight at all with an army containing in its ranks no less than 9,000 recruits, and almost destitute of cavalry. But if fighting was to be done, a wise man would at any rate have chosen a good position, where his flanks would be covered from turning movements and inaccessible to the enemy’s very superior force of horsemen. The old Captain-General cared nothing for such caution: he had merely drawn up his army on a gentle hillside, somewhat cut up by low stone walls, but practicable for cavalry at nearly every point. His flanks had no protection of any kind from the lie of the ground: behind his back was the town of Medina de Rio Seco, and the dry bed of the Sequillo river, obstacles which would tend to make a retreat difficult to conduct in orderly fashion. But a retreat was the last thing in Cuesta’s thoughts.
Map of Medina de Rio Seco
Enlarge Battle of Medina de Rio Seco. July 14, 1808.
Bad as was the position selected, the way in which it was occupied was still more strange. The Captain-General had divided his host into two halves, the one consisting of the first division of the army of Galicia and of the vanguard brigade, the other of the fourth Galician division and the raw ‘Army of Castile.’ Blake with the first-named force was drawn up in a short, compact formation, three lines deep, at the south-eastern front of the hill, the ‘Plateau of Valdecuevas,’ as it is called. His right looked down into the plain, his left, in the centre of the plateau, stood quite ‘in the air.’ But nearly a mile to his left rear, and quite out of sight, lay the other half of the army, just too far off to protect Blake’s exposed flank if it should be attacked, and in a very bad position for defending itself. Why Cuesta ranged his left wing (or second line, if it may so be called) low down on the reverse slope of the plateau, and in a place where it could not even see Blake’s corps, it is impossible to conceive. Tore?o hazards the guess that, in his arrogant confidence, he placed Blake where he would have to bear the stress of the battle, and might probably lose ground, intending to come up himself with the left wing and restore the fight when his colleague should be sufficiently humbled. Such a plan would not have been outside the scope of the old man’s selfish pride.
Bessières, marching up from the east, came in sight of the Spaniards in the early morning. He at once deployed his whole army, and advanced in battle array over the plain. In front was a slight cavalry screen of Lasalle’s chasseurs; next came Mouton’s division, deployed to the right, and Merle’s division, with Sabathier’s brigade, to the left of the country-road which leads, over the plateau, towards Medina de Rio Seco. The Imperial Guard, horse and foot, and the bulk of Lasalle’s cavalry brigade were in reserve behind the centre. On getting near the enemy’s position, Bessières soon discovered the two halves of the Spanish army and the broad gap which lay between them. His mind was at once made up: he proposed to contain Cuesta with a small force, and to fall upon and envelop Blake with the rest of his army before the Captain-General of Castile could come to his aid. This excellent plan was carried out to the letter, thanks to the incapacity of Cuesta.
Not far east of the plateau of Valdecuevas lay an isolated eminence, the mound of Monclin: on it the marshal drew up the greater part of his artillery (twenty guns) which began to batter Blake’s front line: the Galician batteries replied, and held their own though outnumbered by two to one. Then Sabathier’s eight weak battalions deployed and commenced a cautious attack upon Blake’s front: this was not to be pressed home for a time. Meanwhile Merle’s seven battalions pushed into the fight, continuing Sabathier’s line to the south-west and trying to envelop Blake’s southern flank. They forced the Galicians to throw back their right wing, and to keep continually extending it, in order to avoid being turned. The Spaniards fought not amiss, and for some hour or more the battle was almost stationary.
Meanwhile, far to the French right, Mouton’s five battalions were executing a cautious demonstration against Cuesta’s forces, across the northern folds of the plateau. The old general allowed himself to be completely occupied by this trifling show of attack, and made no movement to aid Blake’s wing. The gap between him and his colleague was not filled up. Then came the sudden development of Bessières’ plan: Sabathier and Merle were told to attack in earnest, and while Blake was deeply engaged with their fifteen battalions, Lasalle rode into the open space on the left of the Galicians, formed up the 22nd chasseurs à cheval at right angles to the Spanish line, and charged in furiously upon Blake’s flank. The unfortunate troops on whom the blow fell were deployed in line, and utterly unprepared for a cavalry shock from the side. The first battalion which received the attack broke at once and ran in upon the second: in a few minutes Blake’s whole left wing fell down like a pack of cards, each corps as it fled sweeping away that next to it. The French infantry, advancing at the same moment, ran in with the bayonet, seized the Spanish guns, and hustled the Galicians westward along the plateau in a mob. Blake’s troops were only saved from complete destruction by the steadiness of a Navarrese battalion, which formed square to cover the retreat, and at the cost of one-third of its strength allowed the other corps to get a long start in their flight. They retired due west, and crossed the Sequillo to the south of the town of Rio Seco before they could be rallied.
It was now the turn of Cuesta to suffer. The moment that Blake was disposed of, Bessières marched over the hill towards the other half of the Spanish army: leaving some of Lasalle’s cavalry and Sabathier’s brigade to pursue the routed corps, he formed the whole of his remaining troops in a line, bringing up the reserve of the Imperial Guard to make its centre, while Mouton formed the right wing and the two brigades of Merle the left. Cuesta, outnumbered and attacked down hill, would have done wisely to retreat and to seek for shelter in and behind the town of Rio Seco in his immediate rear. But he had prepared a new surprise for the enemy; as they descended upon him they were astonished to see his front line, the eight battalions which formed the fourth Galician division, form itself into columns of attack and slowly commence to climb the hill with the object of attacking their right and centre. Meanwhile Cuesta’s handful of cavalry rode out on the northern end of the line and fell upon the skirmishers of Mouton’s division, whom it chased back till it was met and driven off by the three squadrons of the Imperial Guard.
The uphill charge of the fourth Galician division was a fine but an utterly useless display of courage. They were attacking nearly double their own numbers of victorious troops, who outflanked them on both wings and tore them to pieces with a concentric fire of artillery to which they could not respond. The regiments at each end of the line were soon broken up, but in the centre two battalions of picked grenadiers actually closed with the French, captured four guns of the Imperial Guard, and forced back the supporting infantry of the same corps for a short space, till Bessières hurled upon them the three squadrons of the Guard-Cavalry, which broke them and swept them down hill again.
Seeing his attack fail, Cuesta bade his last reserve, the raw Castilian and Leonese levies, retreat behind the river and the town of Medina de Rio Seco, which they did without much loss, covered to a certain extent by the two Asturian battalions, the only part of Cuesta’s own force which was seriously engaged.
The ‘Army of Castile,’ therefore, had no more than 155 casualties, but the two Galician divisions had suffered heavily. They left behind them on the field nearly 400 dead, and over 500 wounded, with some 1,200 prisoners. The ten guns of Blake’s wing had all been captured, and with them several pairs of colours. In addition more than a thousand of the Galician recruits had dispersed, and could not be rallied. Altogether Blake’s army had lost over 3,000 men. The French, as might have been expected, had suffered comparatively little: they had 105 killed and 300 wounded, according to Foy; other historians give even smaller figures.
A vigorous pursuit might have done much further harm to the defeated Spaniards; but Bessières’ men had been marching since two in the morning, and fighting all through the mid-day. They were much fatigued, and their commander did not press the chase far beyond the river. But the town of Rio Seco was sacked from cellar to garret, with much slaying of non-combatants and outrages of all kinds, a fact very discreditable to the marshal, who could have stopped the plunder had he chosen.
The defeated generals met, a little to the west of the battle-field, and after a bitter altercation, in which Blake used the plainest words about Cuesta’s generalship, parted in wrath. The Galicians retired by the way they had come, and joined the division which had been left behind three days before; they then went back to the passes above Astorga, abandoning a considerable amount of stores at Benavente. Cuesta took the army of Castile to Leon, retiring on the Asturias rather than on Galicia.
Bessières’ well-earned victory was creditable to himself and his troops, but the way had been made easy for him by the astounding tactical errors of the Captain-General of Castile. The rank and file of the Spanish army had no reason to be ashamed of their conduct: it was their commander who should have blushed at the reckless way in which he had sacrificed his willing troops. Handled by Cuesta the best army in the world might have been defeated by inferior numbers.
The strategical results of the battle of Rio Seco were great and far-reaching. All danger of the cutting of the communications between Madrid and Bayonne was averted, and Napoleon, his mind set at rest on this point, could now assert that Dupont’s position in Andalusia was henceforth the only hazardous point in his great scheme of invasion. It would clearly be a very long time before the army of Galicia would again dare to take the offensive, and meanwhile Madrid was safe, and the attempt to conquer Southern Spain could be resumed without any fear of interruption. Bessières, after such a victory, was strong enough not to require any further reinforcements from the central reserve in and about the capital.
The most obvious result of Rio Seco was that King Joseph was now able to proceed on his way to Madrid, and to enter the city in triumph. After receiving the homage of the Spanish notables at Bayonne, and nominating a ministry, he had crossed the frontier on July 9. But he had been obliged to stop short at Burgos, till Bessières should have beaten off the attack of Blake and Cuesta: his presence there had been most inconvenient to the marshal, who had been forced to leave behind for his protection Rey’s veteran brigade of Mouton’s division, which he would gladly have taken out to the approaching battle.
When the news of Medina de Rio Seco arrived at Burgos, the usurper resumed his march on Madrid, still escorted by Rey’s troops. He travelled by short stages, stopping at every town to be complimented by reluctant magistrates and corporations, who dared not refuse their homage. The populace everywhere shut itself up in its houses in silent protest. Joseph’s state entry into Madrid on July 20 was the culminating point of the melancholy farce. He passed through the streets with a brilliant staff, between long lines of French bayonets, and amid the blare of military music. But not a Spaniard was to be seen except the handful of courtiers and officials who had accepted the new government. The attempts of the French to produce a demonstration, or even to get the town decorated, had met with passive disobedience. Like Charles of Austria when he entered Madrid in 1710, Joseph Bonaparte might have exclaimed that he could see ‘a court, but no people’ about him. But he affected not to notice the dismal side of the situation, assumed an exaggerated urbanity, and heaped compliments and preferment on the small section of Afrancesados who adhered to him.
The usurper had resolved to give himself as much as possible the air of a Spanish national king. Of all his Neapolitan court he had brought with him only one personage, his favourite Saligny, whom he had made Duke of San Germano. The rest of his household was composed of nobles and officials chosen from among the herd which had bowed before him at Bayonne. There were among them several of the late partisans of King Ferdinand, of whom some had frankly sold themselves to his supplanter, while others (like the Duke of Infantado) were only looking for an opportunity to abscond when it might present itself. The first list of ministers was also full of names that were already well known in the Spanish bureaucracy. Of the cabinet of Ferdinand VII, Cevallos the minister of Foreign Affairs, O’Farrill at the War Office, Pi?uela at the ministry of Justice, were base enough to accept the continuation of their powers by the usurper. Urquijo, who took the Secretaryship of State, was an old victim of Godoy’s, who had once before held office under Charles IV. Mazarredo, who was placed at the ministry of Marine, was perhaps the most distinguished officer in the Spanish navy. But Joseph imagined that his greatest stroke of policy was the appointment as minister of the Interior of Gaspar de Jovellanos, the most prominent among the Spanish liberals, whose reputation for wisdom and patriotism had cost him a long imprisonment during the days of the Prince of the Peace. The idea was ingenious, but the plan for strengthening the ministry failed, for Jovellanos utterly refused to take office along with a clique of traitors and in the cabinet of a usurper. Yet even without him, the body of courtiers and officials whom Joseph collected was far more respectable, from their high station and old experience, than might have been expected—a fact very disgraceful to the Spanish bureaucrats.
In less troublous times, and with a more legitimate title to the crown, Joseph Bonaparte might have made a very tolerable king. He was certainly a far more worthy occupant of the throne than any of the miserable Spanish Bourbons: but he was not of the stuff of which successful usurpers are made. He was a weak, well-intentioned man, not destitute of a heart or a conscience: and as he gradually realized all the evils that he had brought on Spain by his ill-regulated ambition, he grew less and less satisfied with his position as his brother’s tool. He made long and untiring efforts to conciliate the Spaniards, by an unwavering affability and mildness, combined with a strict attention to public business. Unfortunately all his efforts were counteracted by his brother’s harshness, and by the greed and violence of the French generals, over whom he could never gain any control. It is a great testimony in his favour that the Spanish people despised rather than hated him: their more violent animosity was reserved for Napoleon. His nominal subjects agreed to regard him as a humorous character: they laughed at his long harangues, in which Neapolitan phrases were too often mixed with the sonorous Castilian: they insisted that he was blind of one eye—which did not happen to be the case. They spoke of him as always occupied with the pleasures of the table and with miscellaneous amours—accusations for which there was a very slight foundation of fact. They insisted that he was a coward and a sluggard—titles which he was far from meriting. He was, they said, perpetually hoodwinked, baffled, and bullied, alike by his generals, his ministers, and his mistresses. But they never really hated him—a fact which, considering the manner of his accession, must be held to be very much to his credit.
But the first stay of the ‘Intrusive King,’ as the Spaniards called him, in his capital, was to be very short. He had only arrived there on July 20: his formal proclamation took place on the twenty-fourth. He had hardly settled down in the royal palace, and commenced a dispute with the effete ‘Council of Castile’—which with unexpected obstinacy refused to swear the oath to him and to the constitution of Bayonne—when he was obliged to take to flight. On the twenty-fourth rumours began to be current in Madrid that a great disaster had taken place in Andalusia, and that Dupont’s army had been annihilated. On the twenty-eighth the news was confirmed in every particular. On August 1, the King, the court, and the 20,000 French troops which still remained in and about the capital, marched out by the northern road, and took their way towards the Ebro. This retreat was the result of a great council of war, in which the energetic advice of Savary, who wished to fight one more battle in front of the capital, with all the forces that could be concentrated, was overruled by the King and the majority of the generals. ‘A council of war never fights,’ as has been most truly observed.
DUPONT IN ANDALUSIA: THE CAPITULATION OF BAYLEN
We left General Dupont at Andujar, on the upper course of the Guadalquivir, whither he had retired on June 19 after evacuating Cordova. Deeply troubled by the interruption of his communications with Madrid, and by the growing strength displayed by the Spanish army in his front, he had resolved that it was necessary to draw back to the foot of the Sierra Morena, and to recover at all costs his touch with the main French army in the capital. He kept sending to Murat (or rather to Savary, who had now superseded the Grand-Duke) persistent demands for new orders and for large reinforcements. Most of his messengers were cut off on the way by the insurgents, but his situation had become known at head quarters, and was engrossing much of Savary’s attention—more of it indeed than Napoleon approved. The Emperor wrote on July 13 that the decisive point was for the moment in Castile, and not in Andalusia, and that the best way to strengthen Dupont was to reinforce Bessières.
Such had not been Savary’s opinion: frightened at the isolation in which Dupont now lay, he sent to his assistance the second division of his corps, 6,000 men under General Vedel, all recruits of the ‘legions of reserve,’ save one single battalion of Swiss troops. The division was accompanied by Boussard’s cavalry, the 6th Provisional Dragoons, some 600 strong. Vedel made his way through La Mancha without difficulty, but on entering the Despe?a Perros defiles found his passage disputed by a body of insurgents—2,000 peasants with four antique cannon—who had stockaded themselves in the midst of the pass. A resolute attack scattered them in a few minutes, and on reaching La Carolina on the southern slope of the mountains Vedel got in touch with Dupont, who had hitherto no notice of his approach .
Instead of leaving the newly arrived division to guard the passes, Dupont called it down to join him in the valley of the Guadalquivir. With the assistance of Vedel’s troops he considered himself strong enough to make head against the Spanish army under Casta?os, which was commencing to draw near to Andujar. Keeping his original force at that town—a great centre of roads, but a malarious spot whose hospitals were already crowded with 600 sick,—he placed Vedel at Baylen, a place sixteen miles further east, but still in the plain, though the foot-hills of the Sierra Morena begin to rise just behind it. To assert himself and strike terror into the insurgents, Dupont ordered one of Vedel’s brigades to make a forced march to Jaen, the capital of a province and a considerable focus of rebellion. This expedition scattered the local levies, took and sacked Jaen, and then returned in safety to Baylen .
Meanwhile Casta?os was drawing near: he had now had a month in which to organize his army. Like Blake in Galicia, he had used the recruits of Andalusia to fill up the gaps in the depleted battalions of the regular army. But less fortunate than his colleague in the north, he had not been able to prevent the Juntas of Seville and Granada from creating a number of new volunteer corps, and had been obliged to incorporate them in his field army, where they were a source of weakness rather than of strength. His total force was some 33,000 or 34,000 men, of whom 2,600 were cavalry, for in this arm he was far better provided than was the army of the North. The whole was organized in four divisions, under Generals Reding, Coupigny, Felix Jones (an Irish officer, in spite of his Welsh name), and La Pe?a. In addition there was a flying brigade of new levies under Colonel Cruz-Murgeon, which was pushed forward along the roots of the mountains, at a considerable distance in front of the main body: it was ordered to harass Dupont’s northern flank and to cut his communications with Baylen and La Carolina.
With 16,000 or 17,000 men, including nearly 3,500 cavalry, Dupont ought to have been able to contain Casta?os, if not to beat him. The proportion of his forces to those of the enemy was not much less than that which Bessières had possessed at Medina de Rio Seco. But, unfortunately for himself and his master, Dupont was far from possessing the boldness and the skill of the marshal. By assuming not a vigorous offensive but a timid defensive along a protracted front, he threw away his chances. The line which he had resolved to hold was that of the Upper Guadalquivir, from Andujar to the next passage up the river, the ferry of Mengibar, eight miles from Baylen. This gave a front of some fifteen miles to hold: but unfortunately even when drawn out to this length the two divisions of Barbou and Vedel did not cover all the possible lines of attack which Casta?os might adopt. He might still march past them and cut them off from the defiles of the Morena, by going a little higher up the river and crossing it near Baeza and Ubeda. Dupont was wrong to take this line of defence at all: unless he was prepared to attack the army of Andalusia in the open, he should have retired to Baylen or to La Carolina, where he would have been able to cover the passes for as long as he might choose, since he could not have had either of his flanks turned.
Meanwhile he was gratified to hear that further reinforcements were being sent to him. Unreasonably disquieted about Andalusia, as Napoleon thought, Savary proceeded to send a third division to aid Dupont. This was Gobert’s, the second of Moncey’s corps: it started from Madrid not quite complete, and left strong detachments at the more important towns along the road through La Mancha. Though originally seventeen battalions strong, it reached the northern slope of the Sierra Morena with only ten. Savary had not intended it to go any further: he had told Dupont that it was to be used to cover his retreat, if a retreat became necessary, but not for active operations in Andalusia. But disregarding these directions Dupont commanded Gobert to cross the Morena and come down to join Vedel: this he did, bringing with him nine ‘provisional battalions’ and the second provisional regiment of cuirassiers, perhaps 5,000 men in all. There were now over 20,000 French on the south side of the mountain, a force amply sufficient to deal with Casta?os and his 33,000 Andalusians . But they were still widely scattered. Dupont lay at Andujar with 9,000 or 10,000 sabres and bayonets: Vedel was sixteen miles away at Baylen, with 6,000 men, of whom 2,000 under General Liger-Belair were pushed forward to the ferry of Mengibar. Gobert was at La Carolina, at the foot of the passes, with five battalions about him, and a sixth encamped on the summit of the defile. He had sent forward the remainder of his division (the four battalions of the sixth provisional regiment, and half the second provisional cuirassiers) to join Dupont at Andujar, so that he had not more than 2,800 bayonets and 350 cavalry with him.
Casta?os, meanwhile, had brought up his whole army, with the exception of the flying corps of Cruz-Murgeon, to a line close in front of Andujar: the heads of his columns were at Arjona and Arjonilla, only five miles from Dupont. On July 11 the Spanish generals held a council of war at Porcu?a, and drew out their plan of operations. Since the enemy seemed to be still quiescent, they resolved to attack him in his chosen position behind the river. Casta?os, in person—with the divisions of Jones and La Pe?a, 12,000 strong—undertook to keep Dupont employed, by delivering an attack on Andujar, which he did not intend to press home unless he got good news from his second and third columns. Meanwhile, six miles up the river, Coupigny with the second division, nearly 8,000 strong, was to attempt to cross the Guadalquivir by the ford of Villa Nueva. Lastly, Reding with the first division, the best and most numerous of the whole army, 10,000 strong, was to seize the ferry of Mengibar and march on Baylen. Here he was to be joined by Coupigny, and the two corps were then to fall upon the rear of Dupont’s position at Andujar, while Casta?os was besetting it in front. It was their aim to surround and capture the whole of the French division, if its general did not move away before the encircling movement was complete. Meanwhile the flying column of Cruz-Murgeon, about 3,000 strong, was to cross the Guadalquivir below Andujar, throw itself into the mountains in the north, and join hands with Reding and Coupigny behind the back of Dupont.
This plan, though ultimately crowned with success, was perilous in the highest degree. But Casta?os had seriously underestimated the total force of Dupont, as well as misconceived his exact position. He was under the impression that the main body of the French, which he did not calculate at more than 12,000 or 14,000 men, was concentrated at Andujar, and that there were nothing more than weak detachments at Mengibar, Baylen, or La Carolina. These, he imagined, could not stand before Reding, and when the latter had once got to the northern bank of the river, he would easily clear the way for Coupigny to cross. But as a matter of fact Vedel had 6,000 men at Mengibar and Baylen, with 3,000 more under Gobert within a short march of him. If the Spanish plan had been punctually carried out, Reding should have suffered a severe check at the hands of these two divisions, while Dupont could easily have dealt with Casta?os at Andujar. Coupigny, if he got across at Villa Nueva, while the divisions on each side of him were beaten off, would have been in a very compromised position, and could not have dared to push forward. But in this curious campaign the probable never happened, and everything went in the most unforeseen fashion.
On July 13 the Spanish plan began to be carried out, Reding marching for Mengibar and Coupigny for Villa Nueva. Casta?os kept quiet at Arjonilla, till his lieutenants should have reached the points which they were to attack. On the same day Dupont received the news of Moncey’s repulse before Valencia, and made up his mind that he must persevere in his defensive attitude, without making any attempt to mass his troops and fall upon the enemy in his front. Just at the moment when his enemies were putting the game into his hands, by dividing themselves into three columns separated from each other by considerable gaps, he relinquished every intention of taking advantage of their fault.
On July 14 Reding appeared in front of the ferry of Mengibar, and pushed back beyond the river the outlying pickets of Liger-Belair’s detachment. He made no further attempt to press the French, but Dupont, disquieted about an attack on this point, ordered Gobert to bring down the remains of his division to Baylen, to join Vedel. Next morning the Spaniards began to develop their whole plan: Casta?os appeared on a long front opposite Andujar, and made a great demonstration against the position of Dupont, using all his artillery and showing heads of columns at several points. Coupigny came down to the river at Villa Nueva, and got engaged with a detachment which was sent out from Andujar to hold the ford. Reding, making a serious attempt to push forward, crossed the Guadalquivir at Mengibar and attacked Liger-Belair. But Vedel came up to the support of his lieutenant, and when the Swiss general found, quite contrary to his expectation, a whole division deployed against him, he ceased to press his advance, and retired once more beyond the river.
Nothing decisive had yet happened: but the next day was to be far more important. The operations opened with two gross faults made by the French: Dupont had been so much impressed with the demonstration made against him by Casta?os, that he judged himself hopelessly outnumbered at Andujar, and sent to Vedel for reinforcements. He bade him send a battalion or two, or even a whole brigade, if the force that he had fought at Mengibar seemed weak and unenterprising. This was an error, for Casta?os only outnumbered the French at Andujar by two or three thousand men, and was not really to be feared. But Vedel made a worse slip: despising Reding overmuch, he marched on Baylen, not with one brigade, but with his whole division, save the original detachment of two battalions under Liger-Belair which remained to watch Mengibar. Starting at midnight, he reached Andujar at two on the afternoon of the sixteenth, to find that Casta?os had done no more than repeat his demonstration of the previous day, and had been easily held back. Cruz-Murgeon’s levies, which the Spanish general had pushed over the river below Andujar, had received a sharp repulse when they tried to molest Dupont’s flank. Coupigny had made an even feebler show than his chief at the ford of Villa Nueva, and had not passed the Guadalquivir.
But Reding, on the morning of the sixteenth, had woken up to unexpected vigour. He had forded the river near Mengibar, and fallen on Liger-Belair’s detachment for the second time. Hard pressed, the French brigadier had sent for succour to Baylen, whither Gobert had moved down when Vedel marched for Andujar. The newly arrived general came quickly to the aid of the compromised detachment, but he was very weak, for he had left a battalion at La Carolina and sent another with a squadron of cuirassiers to Li?ares, to guard against a rumoured movement of the Spaniards along the Upper Guadalquivir. He only brought with him three battalions and 200 cavalry, and this was not enough to contain Reding. The 4,000 men of the two French detachments were outnumbered by more than two to one; they suffered a thorough defeat, and Gobert was mortally wounded. His brigadier, Dufour, who took over the command, fell back on Baylen, eight miles to the rear. Next morning, though not pressed by Reding, he retired towards La Carolina, to prevent himself being cut off from the passes, for he credited a false rumour that the Spaniards were detaching troops by way of Li?ares to seize the Despe?a Perros.
Dupont heard of Gobert’s defeat on the evening of the sixteenth. It deranged all his plans, for it showed him that the enemy were not massed in front of Andujar, as he supposed, but had a large force far up the river. Two courses were open to him—either to march on Baylen with his whole army in order to attack Reding, and to reopen the communications with La Carolina and the passes, or to fall upon Casta?os and the troops in his immediate front. An enterprising officer would probably have taken the latter alternative, and could not have failed of success, for the whole French army in Andalusia save the troops of Belair and Dufour was now concentrated at Andujar, and not less than 15,000 bayonets and 3,000 sabres were available for an attack on Casta?os’ 12,000 men. Even if Coupigny joined his chief, the French would have almost an equality in numbers and a great superiority in cavalry and guns. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the Spaniards would have suffered a defeat, and then it would have been possible to expel Reding from Baylen without any danger of interference from other quarters.
But, in a moment of evil inspiration, Dupont chose to deprive himself of the advantage of having practically his whole army concentrated on one spot, and determined to copy the error of the Spaniards by splitting his force into two equal halves. He resolved to retain his defensive position in front of Andujar, and to keep there his original force—Barbou’s infantry and Frésia’s horse. But Vedel with his own men, the four battalions from Gobert’s division which were at Andujar, and 600 cavalry, was sent off to Baylen, where he was directed to rally the beaten troops of Dufour and Liger-Belair, and then to fall upon Reding and chase him back beyond the Guadalquivir.
On the morning, therefore, of July 17 Vedel set out with some 6,000 men and marched to Baylen. Arriving there he found that Dufour had evacuated the place, and had hurried on to La Carolina, on the false hypothesis that Reding had pushed past him to seize the passes. As a matter of fact the Spaniard had done nothing of the kind: after his success at Mengibar, he had simply retired to his camp by the river, and given his men twenty-four hours’ rest. It was a strange way to employ the day after a victory—but his quiescence chanced to have the most fortunate effect. Vedel, on hearing that Dufour had hastened away to defend La Carolina and the passes, resolved to follow him. He was so inexcusably negligent that he did not even send a cavalry reconnaissance towards Mengibar, to find out whether any Spanish force remained there. Had he done so, he would have found Reding’s whole division enjoying their well-earned siesta! In the direction of La Carolina and the passes there was no enemy save a small flanking column of 1,800 raw levies under the Count of Valdeca?as, which lay somewhere near Li?ares.
Map of the battle of Baylen
Enlarge Battle of Baylen July 19, 1808, at the moment of Dupont’s third attack.
Map of Andalusia
Enlarge Part of Andalusia, between Andujar and the Passes. July 19, 1808.
On the night of the seventeenth, Vedel and his men, tired out by a long march of over twenty miles, slept at Guarroman, halfway between Baylen and La Carolina. Dufour and Liger-Belair had reached the last-named place and Santa Elena, and had found no Spaniards near them. On the morning of the eighteenth Vedel followed them, and united his troops to theirs. He had then some 10,000 or 11,000 men concentrated in and about La Carolina, with one single battalion left at Guarroman to keep up his touch with Dupont. The latter had been entirely deceived by the false news which Vedel had sent him from Baylen—to the effect that Reding and his corps had marched for the passes, in order to cut the French communications with Madrid. Believing the story, he forwarded to his subordinate an approval of his disastrous movement, and bade him ‘instantly attack and crush the Spanish force before him, and after disposing of it return as quickly as possible to Andujar, to deal with the troops of the enemy in that direction.’ Unfortunately, as we have seen, there was no Spanish corps at all in front of Vedel; but by the time that he discovered the fact it was too late for him to rejoin Dupont without a battle. His troops were tired out with two night marches: there were no supplies of food to be got anywhere but at La Carolina, and he decided that he must halt for at least twelve hours before returning to join Dupont.
Meanwhile, on the morning of the eighteenth, Reding’s 9,500 men, of whom 750 were cavalry, had been joined by Coupigny and the second Andalusian division, which amounted to 7,300 foot and 500 horse. Advancing from Mengibar to attack Baylen, they found to their surprise that the place was unoccupied: Vedel’s rearguard had left it on the previous afternoon. Reding intended to march on Andujar from the rear on the next day, being under the full belief that Vedel was still with Dupont, and that the troops which had retired on La Carolina were only the fragments of Gobert’s force. For Casta?os and his colleagues had drawn up their plan of operations on the hypothesis that the enemy were still concentrated at Andujar.
Reding therefore, with some 17,000 men, encamped in and about Baylen, intending to start at daybreak on July 19, and to fall on Dupont from behind, while his chief assailed him in front. But already before the sun was up, musket-shots from his pickets to the west announced that the French were approaching from that direction. It was with the head and not with the rear of Dupont’s column that Casta?os’ first and second divisions were to be engaged, for the enemy had evacuated Andujar, and was in full march for Baylen.
On the night of the seventeenth Dupont had received the news that Vedel had evacuated Baylen and gone off to the north-east, so that a gap of thirty miles or more now separated him from his lieutenant. He had at first been pleased with the move, as we have seen: but presently he gathered, from the fact that Casta?os did not press him, but only assailed him with a distant and ineffective cannonade, that the main stress of the campaign was not at Andujar but elsewhere. The Spanish army was shifting itself eastward, and he therefore resolved that he must do the same, though he would have to abandon his cherished offensive position, his entrenchments, and such part of his supplies as he could not carry with him. Having made up his mind to depart, Dupont would have done wisely to start at once: if he had gone off early on the morning of the eighteenth, he would have found Reding and Coupigny not established in position at Baylen, but only just approaching from the south. Probably he might have brushed by their front, or even have given them a serious check, if he had fallen on them without hesitation.
But two considerations induced the French general to wait for the darkness, and to waste fourteen invaluable hours at Andujar. The first was that he hoped by moving at night to escape the notice of Casta?os, who might have attacked him if his retreat was open and undisguised. The second was that he wished to carry off his heavy baggage train: not only had he between 600 and 800 sick to load on his wagons, but there was an enormous mass of other impedimenta, mainly consisting of the plunder of Cordova. French and Spanish witnesses unite in stating that the interminable file of 500 vehicles which clogged Dupont’s march was to a very great extent laden with stolen goods. And it was the officers rather than the men who were responsible for this mass of slow-moving transport.
It was not therefore till nine in the evening of the eighteenth that the French general thought fit to move. After barricading and blocking up the bridge of Andujar—he dared not use gunpowder to destroy it for fear of rousing Casta?os—he started on his night march. He had with him thirteen battalions of infantry and four and a half regiments of cavalry, with twenty-four guns, in all about 8,500 foot soldiers and 2,500 horse, allowing for the losses which he had sustained in sick and wounded during the earlier phases of the campaign. His march was arranged as follows:—Chabert’s infantry brigade led the van: then came the great convoy: behind it were the four Swiss battalions under Colonel Schramm, which had lately been incorporated with the French army. These again were followed by Pannetier’s infantry brigade and Dupré’s two regiments of chasseurs à cheval. The rearguard followed at some distance: it was composed of two and a half regiments of heavy cavalry, placed under the command of General Privé, with the one veteran infantry battalion which the army possessed, the 500 Marines of the Guard, as also six compagnies d’élite picked from the ‘legions of reserve.’ From the fact that Dupont placed his best troops in this quarter, it is evident that he expected to be fighting a rearguard action, with Casta?os in pursuit, rather than to come into contact with Spanish troops drawn up across his line of march. He was ignorant that Reding and Coupigny had occupied Baylen on the previous day—a fact which speaks badly for his cavalry: with 2,500 horsemen about him, he ought to have known all that was going on in his neighbourhood. Probably the provisional regiments, which formed his whole mounted force, were incapable of good work in the way of scouting and reconnaissances.
The little town of Baylen is situated in a slight depression of a saddle-backed range of hills which runs southward out from the Sierra Morena. The road which leads through it passes over the lowest point in the watershed, as is but natural: to the north and south of the town the heights are better marked: they project somewhat on each flank, so that the place is situated in a sort of amphitheatre. The hill to the south of Baylen is called the Cerrajon: those to the north the Cerro del Zumacar Chico, and the Cerro del Zumacar Grande. All three are bare and bald, without a shrub or tree: none of them are steep, their lower slopes are quite suitable for cavalry work, and even their rounded summits are not inaccessible to a horseman. The ground to the west of them, over which the French had to advance, is open and level for a mile and a half: then it grows more irregular, and is thickly covered with olive groves and other vegetation, so that a force advancing over it is hidden from the view of a spectator on the hills above Baylen till it comes out into the open. The wooded ground is about two and a half miles broad: its western limit is the ravine of a mountain torrent, the Rumblar (or Herrumblar, as the aspirate-loving Andalusians sometimes call it). The road from Andujar to Baylen crosses this stream by a bridge, the only place where artillery can pass the rocky but not very deep depression.
It is necessary to say a few words about the ground eastward from Baylen, as this too was not unimportant in the later phases of the battle. Here the road passes through a broad defile rather than a plain. It is entirely commanded by the heights on its northern side, where lies the highest ground of the neighbourhood, the Cerro de San Cristobal, crowned by a ruined hermitage. The difference between the approach to Baylen from the west and from the east, is that on the former side the traveller reaches the town through a semicircular amphitheatre of upland, while by the latter he comes up a V-shaped valley cut through the hills.
Reding and Coupigny were somewhat surprised by the bicker of musketry which told them that the French had fallen upon their outposts. But fortunately for them their troops were already getting under arms, and were bivouacking over the lower slopes of the hills in a position which made it possible to extemporize without much difficulty a line of battle, covering the main road and the approaches to Baylen. They hastily occupied the low amphitheatre of hills north and south of the town. Reding deployed to the right of the road, on the heights of the Cerro del Zumacar Chico, Coupigny to its left on the Cerrajon. Their force was of a very composite sort—seventeen battalions of regulars, six of embodied militia, five of new Andalusian levies. The units varied hopelessly in size, some having as few as 350 men, others as many as 1,000. They could also dispose of 1,200 cavalry and sixteen guns. The greater part of the latter were placed in battery on the central and lowest part of the position, north and south of the high road and not far in front of Baylen. The infantry formed a semicircular double line: in front were deployed battalions near the foot of the amphitheatre of hills; in rear, higher up the slope or concealed behind the crest, was a second line in columns of battalions. The cavalry were drawn up still further to the rear. Finally, as a necessary precaution against the possible arrival of Vedel on the scene from La Carolina, Reding placed seven battalions far away to the east, on the other side of Baylen, with cavalry pickets out in front to give timely notice of any signs of the enemy in this quarter. These 3,500 men were quite out of the battle as long as Dupont was the only enemy in sight.
Before it was fully daylight General Chabert and his brigade had thrust back the Spanish outposts. But the strength of the insurgent army was quite unknown to him: the morning dusk still lay in the folds of the hills, and he thought that he might possibly have in front of him nothing but some flying column of insignificant strength. Accordingly, after allowing the whole of his brigade to come up, Chabert formed a small line of attack, brought up his battery along the high road to the middle of the amphitheatre, between the horns of the Spanish position, and made a vigorous push forward. He operated almost entirely to the south of the road, where, opposite Coupigny’s division, the hill was lower and the slope gentler than further north.
To dislodge 14,000 men and twenty guns in position with 3,000 men and six guns was of course a military impossibility. But Chabert had the excuse that he did not, and could not, know what he was doing. His attempt was of course doomed to failure: his battery was blown to pieces by the Spanish guns, acting from a concentric position, the moment that it opened. His four battalions, after pushing back Coupigny’s skirmishing line for a few hundred yards, were presently checked by the reserves which the Spaniard sent forward. Having come to a stand they soon had to retire, and with heavy loss. The brigade drew back to the cover of the olive groves behind it, leaving two dismounted guns out in the open.
Behind Chabert the enormous convoy was blocking the way as far back as the bridge of the Rumblar. Five hundred wagons with their two or four oxen apiece, took up, when strung along the road, more than two and a half miles. Dupont, who rode up at the sound of the cannon, and now clearly saw the Spanish line drawn up on a front of two miles north and south of the road, realized that this was no skirmish but a pitched battle. His action was governed by the fact that he every moment expected to hear the guns of Casta?os thundering behind him, and to find that he was attacked in rear as well as in front. He accordingly resolved to deliver a second assault as quickly as possible, before this evil chance might come upon him. With some difficulty the Swiss battalions, Dupré’s brigade of light cavalry, and Privé’s dragoons pushed their way past the convoy and got into the open. They were terribly tired, having marched all night and covered fifteen miles of bad road, but their general threw them at once into the fight: Pannetier’s brigade and the Marines of the Guard were still far to the rear, at or near the bridge of the Rumblar.
Dupont’s second attack was a fearful mistake: he should at all costs have concentrated his whole army for one desperate stroke, for there was no more chance that 6,000 men could break the Spanish line than there had been that Chabert’s 3,000 could do so. But without waiting for Pannetier to come up, he delivered his second attack. The four Swiss battalions advanced to the north of the road, Chabert’s rallied brigade to the south of it: to the right of the latter were Privé’s heavy cavalry, two and a half regiments strong, with whom Dupont intended to deliver his main blow. They charged with admirable vigour and precision, cut up two Spanish battalions which failed to form square in time, and cleared the summit of the Cerrajon. But when, disordered with their first success, they rode up against Coupigny’s reserves, they failed to break through. Their own infantry was too far to the rear to help them, and after a gallant struggle to hold their ground, the dragoons and cuirassiers fell back to their old position. When they were already checked, Chabert and Schramm pushed forward to try their fortune: beaten off by the central battery of the Spanish line and its infantry supports, they recoiled to the edge of the olive wood, and there reformed.
The French were now growing disheartened, and Dupont saw disaster impending over him so closely that he seems to have lost his head, and to have retained no other idea save that of hurling every man that he could bring up in fruitless attacks on the Spanish centre. He hurried up from the rear Pannetier’s brigade of infantry, leaving at the bridge of the Rumblar only the single battalion of the Marines of the Guard. At eight o’clock the reinforcements had come up, and the attack was renewed. This time the main stress was at the northern end of the line, where Pannetier was thrown forward, with orders to drive Reding’s right wing off the Cerro del Zumacar Grande, while the other battalions renewed their assault against the Spanish centre and left. But the exhausted troops on the right of the line, who had been fighting since daybreak, made little impression on Coupigny’s front, and Reding’s last reserves were brought forward to check and hold off the one fresh brigade of which Dupont could dispose.
The fourth attack had failed. The French general had now but one intact battalion, that of the Marines of the Guard, which had been left with the baggage at the bridge over the Rumblar, to protect the rear against the possible advent of Casta?os. As there were still no signs of an attack from that side, Dupont brought up this corps, ranged it across the road in the centre of the line, and drew up behind it all that could be rallied of Chabert’s and Pannetier’s men. The whole formed a sort of wedge, with which he hoped to break through the Spanish centre by one last effort. The cavalry advanced on the flanks, Privé’s brigade to the south, Dupré’s to the north of the road. Dupont himself, with all his staff around him, placed himself at the head of the marines, and rode in front of the line, waving his sword and calling to the men that this time they must cut their way through .
All was in vain: the attack was pressed home, the marines pushed up to the very muzzles of the Spanish cannon placed across the high road, and Dupré’s chasseurs drove in two battalions in Reding’s right centre. But the column could get no further forward: the marines were almost exterminated: Dupré was shot dead: Dupont received a painful (but not dangerous) wound in the hip, and rode to the rear. Then the whole attack collapsed, and the French rolled back in utter disorder to the olive groves which sheltered their rear. The majority of the rank and file of the two Swiss regiments in the centre threw up the butts of their muskets in the air and surrendered—or rather deserted—to the enemy.
At this moment, just as the firing died down at the front, a lively fusillade was heard from another quarter. Cruz-Murgeon’s light column, from the side of the mountains, had come down upon the Rumblar bridge, and had begun to attack the small baggage-guard which remained with the convoy. All was up. Cruz-Murgeon was the forerunner of La Pe?a, and Dupont had not a man left to send to protect his rear. The battalions were all broken up, the wearied infantry had cast themselves down in the shade of the olive groves, and could not be induced even to rise to their feet. Most of them were gasping for water, which could not be got, for the stream-beds which cross the field were all dried up, and only at the Rumblar could a drink be obtained. Not 2,000 men out of the original 11,000 who had started from Andujar could be got together to oppose a feeble front to Reding and Coupigny. It was only by keeping up a slow artillery fire, from the few pieces that had not been silenced or dismounted, that any show of resistance could be made. When the attack from the rear, which was obviously impending, should be delivered, the whole force must clearly be destroyed.
Wishing at least to get some sort of terms for the men whom he had led into such a desperate position, Dupont at two o’clock sent his aide-de-camp, Captain Villoutreys, one of the Emperor’s equerries, to ask for a suspension of hostilities from Reding. He offered to evacuate Andalusia, not only with his own troops but with those of Vedel and Dufour, in return for a free passage to Madrid. This was asking too much, and if the Spanish general had been aware of the desperate state of his adversary, he would not have listened to the proposal for a minute. But he did not know that La Pe?a was now close in Dupont’s rear, while he was fully aware that Vedel, returning too late from the passes, was now drawing near to the field from the north. His men were almost as exhausted as those of Dupont, many had died from sunstroke in the ranks, and he did not refuse to negotiate. He merely replied that he had no power to treat, and that all communications should be made to his chief, who must be somewhere in the direction of Andujar. He would grant a suspension of arms for a few hours, while a French and a Spanish officer should ride off together to seek for Casta?os.
Dupont accepted these terms gladly, all the more so because La Pe?a’s division had at last reached the Rumblar bridge, and had announced its approach by four cannon-shots, fired at regular intervals, as a signal to catch Reding’s ear. It was with the greatest difficulty that the commander of the fourth Andalusian division could be got to recognize the armistice granted by his colleague; he saw the French at his mercy, and wanted to fall upon them while they were still in disorder. But after some argument he consented to halt. Captain Villoutreys, accompanied by the Spanish Colonel Copons, rode through his lines to look for Casta?os.
The Spanish commander-in-chief had displayed most blameworthy torpidity on this day. He had let Dupont slip away from Andujar, and did not discover that he was gone till dawn had arrived. Then, instead of pursuing at full speed with all his forces, he had sent on La Pe?a’s division, while he lingered behind with that of Felix Jones, surveying the enemy’s empty lines. The fourth division must have marched late and moved slowly, as it only reached the Rumblar bridge—twelve miles from Andujar—at about 2 p.m. It could easily have been there by 8 or 9 a.m., and might have fallen upon Dupont while he was delivering one of his earlier attacks on the Baylen position.
At much the same moment that Villoutreys and Copons reached Casta?os at Andujar, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, the second half of the French army at last appeared upon the scene. General Vedel had discovered on the eighteenth that he had nothing to fear from the side of the passes. He therefore called down all Dufour’s troops, save two battalions left at Santa Elena, united the two divisions at La Carolina, and gave orders for their return to Baylen on the following morning. Leaving the bivouac at five o’clock Vedel, with some 9,000 or 9,500 men, marched down the defile for ten miles as far as the village of Guarroman, which he reached about 9.30 or 10 a.m. The day was hot, the men were tired, and though the noise of a distant cannonade could be distinctly heard in the direction of Baylen, the general told his officers to allow their battalions two hours to cook, and to rest themselves. By some inexplicable carelessness the two hours swelled to four, and it was not till 2 p.m. that the column started out again, to drop down to Baylen. An hour before the French marched, the cannonade, which had been growling in the distance all through the mid-day rest, suddenly died down. Vedel was in nowise disturbed, and is said to have remarked that his chief had probably made an end of the Spanish corps which had been blocking the road between them.
After this astonishing display of sloth and slackness, Vedel proceeded along the road for ten miles, till he came in sight of the rear of the Spanish position at Baylen. His cavalry soon brought him the news that the troops visible upon the hillsides were enemies: they consisted of the brigade which Reding had told off at the beginning of the day to hold the height of San Cristobal and the Cerro del Ahorcado against a possible attack from the rear. It was at last clear to Vedel that things had not gone well at Baylen, and that it was his duty to press in upon the Spaniards, and endeavour to cut his way through to his chief. He had begun to deploy his troops across the defile, with the object of attacking both the flanking hills, when two officers with a white flag rode out towards him. They announced to him that Dupont had been beaten, and had asked for a suspension of hostilities, which had been granted. La Pe?a’s troops had stayed their advance, and he was asked to do the same.
Either because he doubted the truth of these statements, or because he thought that his appearance would improve Dupont’s position, Vedel refused to halt, and sent back the Spanish officers to tell Reding that he should attack him. This he did with small delay, falling on the brigade opposed to him with great fury. Boussard’s dragoons charged the troops on the lower slopes of the Cerro del Ahorcado, and rode into two battalions who were so much relying on the armistice that they were surprised with their arms still piled, cooking their evening meal. A thousand men were taken prisoners almost without firing a shot. Cassagnes’ infantry attacked the steep height of San Cristobal with less good fortune: his first assault was beaten off, and Vedel was preparing to succour him, when a second white flag came out of Baylen. It was carried by a Spanish officer, who brought with him De Barbarin, one of Dupont’s aides-de-camp. The general had sent a written communication ordering Vedel to cease firing and remain quiet, as an armistice had been concluded, and it was hoped that Casta?os would consent to a convention. The moment that his answer was received it should be passed on; meanwhile the attack must be stopped and the troops withdrawn.
Vedel obeyed: clearly he could do nothing else, for Dupont was his hierarchical superior, and, as far as he could see, was still a free agent. Moreover, De Barbarin told him of the very easy terms which the commander-in-chief hoped to get from Casta?os. If they could be secured it would be unnecessary, as well as risky, to continue the attack. For La Pe?a might very possibly have annihilated the beaten division before Vedel could force his way to its aid, since horse and foot were both ‘fought out,’ and there was neither strength nor spirit for resistance left among them. Vedel therefore was justified in his obedience to his superior, and in his withdrawal to a point two miles up the La Carolina road.
Meanwhile Villoutreys, the emissary of Dupont, had reached the camp of Casta?os at Andujar late in the afternoon, and laid his chief’s proposals before the Spaniard. As might have been expected, they were declined—Dupont was in the trap, and it would have been absurd to let him off so easily. No great objection was made to the retreat of Vedel, but Casta?os said that the corps caught between La Pe?a and Reding must lay down its arms. Early next morning (July 20) Villoutreys returned with this reply to the French camp.
Dupont meanwhile had spent a restless night. He had gone round the miserable bivouac of his men, to see if they would be in a condition to fight next morning, in the event of the negotiations failing. The result was most discouraging: the soldiers were in dire straits for want of water, they had little to eat, and were so worn out that they could not be roused even to gather in the wounded. The brigadiers and colonels reported that they could hold out no prospect of a rally on the morrow. Only Privé, the commander of the heavy-cavalry brigade, spoke in favour of fighting: the others doubted whether even 2,000 men could be got together for a rush at the Spanish lines. When an aide-de-camp, whom Vedel had been allowed to send to his chief, asked whether it would not be possible to make a concerted attack on Reding next morning, with the object of disengaging the surrounded division, Dupont told him that it was no use to dream of any such thing. Vedel must prepare for a prompt retreat, in order to save himself; no more could be done.
At dawn, nothing having been yet settled, La Pe?a wrote to Dupont threatening that if the 1,000 men who had been captured by Vedel on the previous day were not at once released, he should consider the armistice at an end, and order his division to advance. The request was reasonable, as they had been surprised and taken while relying on the suspension of arms. Dupont ordered his subordinate to send them back to Reding’s camp. Casta?os meanwhile was pressing for a reply to his demand for surrender: he had brought up Felix Jones’s division to join La Pe?a’s in the early morning, so that he had over 14,000 men massed on the right bank of the Rumblar and ready to attack. Dupont was well aware of this, and had made up his mind to surrender when he realized the hopeless demoralization of his troops. Early in the morning he called a council of war; the officers present, after a short discussion, drew up and signed a document in which they declared that ‘the honour of the French arms had been sufficiently vindicated by the battle of the previous day: that in accepting the enemy’s terms the commander-in-chief was yielding to evident military necessity: that, surrounded by 40,000 enemies, he was justified in averting by an honourable treaty the destruction of his corps.’ Only the cavalry brigadier Privé, refused to put his name to the paper, on which appear the signatures of three generals of division, of the officers commanding the artillery and engineers, of two brigadiers, and of three commanders of regiments.
After this formality was ended Generals Chabert and Marescot rode out from the French camp and met Casta?os. They had orders to make the best terms they could: in a general way it was recognized that the compromised division could not escape surrender, and that Vedel and Dufour would probably have to evacuate Andalusia and stipulate for a free passage to Madrid. The Spaniards were not, as it seems, intending to ask for much more. But while they were haggling on such petty points as the forms of surrender, and the exemption of officers’ baggage from search, a new factor was introduced into the discussion. Some irregulars from the Sierra Morena came to Casta?os, bringing with them as a prisoner an aide-de-camp of Savary. They had secured his dispatch, which was a peremptory order to Dupont to evacuate Andalusia with all his three divisions, and fall back towards Madrid. This put a new face on affairs, for Casta?os saw that if he conceded a free retreat to Vedel and Dufour, he would be enabling them to carry out exactly the movement which Savary intended. To do so would clearly be undesirable: he therefore interposed in the negotiations, and declared that the troops of these two generals should not be allowed to quit Andalusia by the road which had been hitherto proposed. They must be sent round by sea to some port of France not immediately contiguous with the Spanish frontier.
Chabert and Marescot, as was natural, declaimed vehemently against this projected change in the capitulation, and declared that it was inadmissible. But they were answered in even more violent terms by the turbulent Conde de Tilly, who attended as representative of the Junta of Seville. He taunted them with their atrocities at the sack of Cordova, and threatened that if the negotiations fell through no quarter should be given to the French army. At last Casta?os suggested a compromise: he offered to let Dupont’s troops, no less than those of Vedel, return to France by sea, if the claim that the latter should be allowed to retreat on Madrid were withdrawn. This was conceding much, and the French generals accepted the proposal.
Accordingly Casta?os and Tilly, representing the Spaniards, and Chabert and Marescot, on behalf of Dupont, signed preliminaries, by which it was agreed that the surrounded divisions should formally lay down their arms and become prisoners of war, while Vedel’s men should not be considered to have capitulated, nor make any act of surrender. Both bodies of men should leave Andalusia by sea, and be taken to Rochefort on Spanish vessels. ‘The Spanish army,’ so ran the curiously worded seventh article of the capitulation, ‘guarantees them against all hostile aggression during their passage.’ The other clauses contain nothing striking, save some rather liberal permissions to the French officers to take away their baggage—each general was to be allowed two wheeled vehicles, each field officer or staff officer one—without its being examined. This article caught the eye of Napoleon, and has been noted by many subsequent critics, who have maintained that Dupont and his colleagues, gorged with the plunder of Cordova, surrendered before they needed, in order to preserve their booty intact. That they yielded before it was inevitable we do not believe: but far more anxiety than was becoming seems to have been shown regarding the baggage. This anxiety finds easy explanation if the Spanish official statement, that more than ￡40,000 in hard cash, and a great quantity of jewellery and silver plate was afterwards found in the fourgons of the staff and the superior officers, be accepted as correct.
The fifteenth clause of the capitulation had contents of still more doubtful propriety: it was to the effect that as many pieces of church plate had been stolen at the sack of Cordova, Dupont undertook to make a search for them and restore them to the sanctuaries to which they belonged, if they could be found in existence. The confession was so scandalous, that we share Napoleon’s wonder that such a clause could ever have been passed by the two French negotiators; if they were aware that the charge of theft was true (as it no doubt was), shame should have prevented them from putting it on paper: if they thought it false, they were permitting a gratuitous insult to the French army to be inserted in the capitulation.
While the negotiations were going on, Dupont sent secret orders to Vedel to abscond during the night, and to retreat on Madrid as fast as he was able. Chabert and Marescot had of course no knowledge of this, or they would hardly have consented to include that general’s troops in the convention. In accordance with his superior’s orders, and with the obvious necessities of the case, Vedel made off on the night of July 20-21, leaving only a screen of pickets in front of his position, to conceal his departure from the Spaniards as long as was possible. On the return of his plenipotentiaries to his camp on the morning of the twenty-first, Dupont learnt, to his surprise and discontent, that they had included Vedel’s division in their bargain with Casta?os. But as that officer was now far away—he had reached La Carolina at daybreak and Santa Elena by noon—the commander-in-chief hoped that his troops were saved.
The anger of the Spaniards at discovering the evasion of the second French division may easily be imagined. Reding, who was the first to become aware of it, sent down an officer into Dupont’s camp, with the message that if Vedel did not instantly return, he should regard the convention as broken, and fall upon the surrounded troops: he should give no quarter, as he considered that treachery had been shown, and that the armistice had been abused. Dupont could not hope to make a stand, and was at the enemy’s mercy. He directed his chief of the staff to write an order bidding Vedel to halt, and sent it to him by one of his aides-de-camp, accompanied by a Spanish officer. This did not satisfy Reding, who insisted that Dupont should write an autograph letter of his own in stronger terms. His demand could not be refused, and the two dispatches reached Vedel almost at the same hour, as he was resting his troops at Santa Elena before plunging into the passes.
Vedel, as all his previous conduct had shown, was weak and wanting in initiative. Some of his officers tried to persuade him to push on, and to leave Dupont to make the best terms for himself that he could. Much was to be said in favour of this resolve: he might have argued that since he had never been without the power of retreating, it was wrong of his superior to include him in the capitulation. His duty to the Emperor would be to save his men, whatever might be the consequences to Dupont. The latter, surrounded as he was, could hardly be considered a free agent, and his orders might be disregarded. But such views were far from Vedel’s mind: he automatically obeyed his chief’s dispatch and halted. Next day he marched his troops back to Baylen, in consequence of a third communication from Dupont.
On July 23 Dupont’s troops laid down their arms with full formalities, defiling to the sound of military music before the divisions of La Pe?a and Jones, who were drawn up by the Rumblar bridge. On the twenty-fourth Vedel’s and Dufour’s troops, without any such humiliating ceremony, stacked their muskets and cannon on the hillsides east of Baylen and marched for the coast. When the two corps were numbered it was found that 8,242 unwounded men had surrendered with Dupont: nearly 2,000 more, dead or wounded, were left on the battle-field; seven or eight hundred of the Swiss battalions had deserted and disappeared. With Vedel 9,393 men laid down their arms. Not only did he deliver up his own column, but he called down the battalion guarding the Despe?a Perros pass. Even the troops left beyond the defiles in La Mancha were summoned to surrender by the Spaniards, and some of them did so, though they were not really included in the capitulation, which was by its wording confined to French troops in Andalusia. But the commanders of three battalions allowed themselves to be intimidated by Colonel Cruz-Murgeon, who went to seek them at the head of a few cavalry, and tamely laid down their arms.
The Spaniards had won their success at very small cost. Reding’s division returned a casualty list of 117 dead and 403 wounded, in which were included the losses of the skirmish of July 16 as well as those of the battle of the nineteenth. Coupigny lost 100 dead and 894 wounded. La Pe?a’s and Cruz-Murgeon’s columns, which had barely got into touch with the French when the armistice was granted, cannot have lost more than a score or two of men. The total is no more than 954. There were in addition 998 prisoners captured by Vedel when he attacked from the rear, but these were, of course, restored on the twentieth, in consequence of the orders sent by Dupont, along with two guns and two regimental standards.
Casta?os, a man of untarnished honour, had every intention of carrying out the capitulation. The French troops, divided into small columns, were sent down to the coast, or to the small towns of the Lower Guadalquivir under Spanish escorts, which had some difficulty in preserving them from the fury of the peasantry. It was necessary to avoid the large towns like Cordova and Seville, where the passage of the unarmed prisoners would certainly have led to riots and massacres. At Ecija the mob actually succeeded in murdering sixty unfortunate Frenchmen. But when the troops had been conducted to their temporary destinations, it was found that difficulties had arisen. The amount of Spanish shipping available would not have carried 20,000 men. This was a comparatively small hindrance, as the troops could have been sent off in detachments. But it was more serious that Lord Collingwood, the commander of the British squadron off Cadiz, refused his permission for the embarkation of the French. He observed that Casta?os had promised to send Dupont’s army home by water, without considering whether he had the power to do so. The British fleet commanded the sea, and was blockading Rochefort, the port which the capitulation assigned for the landing of the captive army. No representative of Great Britain had signed the convention, and she was not bound by it. He must find out, by consulting his government, whether the transference of the troops of Dupont to France was to be allowed.
On hearing of the difficulties raised by Collingwood, Casta?os got into communication with Dupont, and drew up six supplementary articles to the convention, in which it was stipulated that if the British Government objected to Rochefort as the port at which the French troops were to be landed, some other place should be selected. If all passage by sea was denied, a way by land should be granted by the Spaniards. This agreement was signed at Seville on August 6, but meanwhile the Junta was being incited to break the convention. Several of its more reckless and fanatical members openly broached the idea that no faith need be kept with those who had invaded Spain under such treacherous pretences. The newspapers were full of tales of French outrages, and protests against the liberation of the spoilers of Cordova and Jaen.
Matters came to a head when Dupont wrote to Morla, the Captain-General of Andalusia, to protest against further delays, and to require that the first division of his army should be allowed to sail at once . He received in reply a most shameless and cynical letter. The Captain-General began by declaring that there were no ships available. But he then went on to state that no more had been promised than that the Junta would request the British to allow the French troops to sail. He supposed that it was probable that a blank refusal would be sent to this demand. Why should Britain allow the passage by sea of troops who were destined to be used against her on some other point of the theatre of war? Morla next insinuated that Dupont himself must have been well aware that the capitulation could not be carried out. ‘Your Excellency’s object in inserting these conditions was merely to obtain terms which, impossible as they were to execute, might yet give a show of honour to the inevitable surrender.... What right have you to require the performance of these impossible conditions on behalf of an army which entered Spain under a pretence of alliance, and then imprisoned our King and princes, sacked his palaces, slew and robbed his subjects, wasted his provinces, and tore away his crown?’
After a delay of some weeks Lord Collingwood sent in to the Junta the reply of his government. It was far from being of the kind that Morla and his friends had hoped. Canning had answered that no stipulations made at Baylen could bind Great Britain, but that to oblige her allies, and to avoid compromising their honour, she consented to allow the French army to be sent back to France, and to be landed in successive detachments of 4,000 men at some port between Brest and Rochefort (i.e. at Nantes or L’Orient). It is painful to have to add that neither the Junta of Seville nor the Supreme Central Junta, which superseded that body, took any steps to carry out this project. Dupont himself, his generals, and his staff, were sent home to France, but their unfortunate troops were kept for a time in cantonments in Andalusia, then sent on board pontoons in the Bay of Cadiz, where they were subjected to all manner of ill usage and half-starved, and finally dispatched to the desolate rock of Cabrera, in the Balearic Islands, where more than half of them perished of cold, disease, and insufficient nourishment. Vedel’s men were imprisoned no less than Dupont’s, and the survivors were only released at the conclusion of the general peace of 1814.
So ended the strange and ill-fought campaign of Baylen. It is clear that Dupont’s misfortunes were of his own creation. He ought never to have lingered at Andujar till July was far spent, but should either have massed his three divisions and fallen upon Casta?os, or have retired to a safe defensive position at Baylen or La Carolina and have waited to be attacked. He might have united something over 20,000 men, and could have defied every effort of the 35,000 Spaniards to drive him back over the Sierra Morena. By dividing his army into fractions and persisting in holding Andujar, he brought ruin upon himself. But the precise form in which the ruin came about was due less to Dupont than to Vedel. That officer’s blind and irrational march on La Carolina and abandonment of Baylen on July 17-18 gave the Spaniards the chance of interposing between the two halves of the French army. If Vedel had made a proper reconnaissance on the seventeenth, he would have found that Reding had not marched for the passes, but was still lingering at Mengibar. Instead, however, of sweeping the country-side for traces of the enemy, he credited a wild rumour, and hurried off to La Carolina, leaving the fatal gap behind him. All that followed was his fault: not only did he compromise the campaign by his march back to the passes, but when he had discovered his mistake he returned with a slowness that was inexcusable. If he had used ordinary diligence he might yet have saved Dupont on the nineteenth: it was his halt at Guarroman, while the cannon of Baylen were thundering in his ears, that gave the last finishing touch to the disaster. If he had come upon the battle-field at ten in the morning, instead of at five in the afternoon, he could have aided his chief to cut his way through, and even have inflicted a heavy blow on Reding and Coupigny. A careful study of Vedel’s actions, from his first passage of the Sierra Morena to his surrender, shows that on every possible occasion he took the wrong course.
But even if we grant that Vedel made every possible mistake, it is nevertheless true that Dupont fought his battle most unskilfully. If he had marched on the morning instead of the night of July 18, he probably might have brushed past the front of Reding and Coupigny without suffering any greater disaster than the loss of his baggage. Even as things actually fell out, it is not certain that he need have been forced to surrender. He had 10,000 men, the two Spanish generals had 17,000, but had been forced to detach some 3,500 bayonets to guard against the possible reappearance of Vedel. If Dupont had refused to waste his men in partial and successive attacks, and had massed them for a vigorous assault on the left wing of the Spaniards, where Coupigny’s position on the slopes of the Cerrajon was neither very strong nor very well defined, he might yet have cut his way through, though probably his immense baggage-train would have been lost. It is fair, however, to remember that this chance was only granted him because Casta?os, in front of Andujar, was slow to discover his retreat and still slower to pursue him. If that officer had shown real energy, ten thousand men might have been pressing Dupont from the rear before eight o’clock in the morning.
As it was Dupont mismanaged all the details of his attack. He made four assaults with fractions of his army, and on a long front. The leading brigades were completely worn out and demoralized before the reserves were sent into action. The fifth assault, in which every man was at last brought forward, failed because the majority of the troops were already convinced that the day was lost, and were no longer capable of any great exertions. It is absurd to accuse Dupont of cowardice—he exposed his person freely and was wounded—and still more absurd to charge him (as did the Emperor) with treason. He did not surrender till he saw that there was no possible hope of salvation remaining. But there can be no doubt that he showed great incapacity to grasp the situation, lost his head, and threw away all his chances.
As to the Spaniards, it can truly be said that they were extremely fortunate, and that even their mistakes helped them. Casta?os framed his plan for surrounding Dupont on the hypothesis that the main French army was concentrated at Andujar. If this had indeed been the case, and Dupont had retained at that place some 15,000 or 17,000 men, the turning movement of Reding and Coupigny would have been hazardous in the extreme. But the French general was obliging enough to divide his force into two equal parts, and his subordinate led away one of the halves on a wild march back to the passes. Again Reding acted in the most strange and unskilful way on July 17; after defeating Liger-Belair and Dufour he ought to have seized Baylen. Instead, he remained torpid in his camp for a day and a half: this mistake led to the far more inexcusable error of Vedel, who failed to see his adversary, and marched off to La Carolina. But Vedel’s blindness does not excuse Reding’s sloth. On the actual day of battle, on the other hand, Reding behaved very well: he showed considerable tenacity, and his troops deserve great credit. It was no mean achievement for 13,000 or 14,000 Spaniards, their ranks full of raw recruits and interspersed with battalions levied only five weeks before, to withstand the attack of 10,000 French, even if the latter were badly handled by their general. The Andalusians had good reason to be proud of their victory, though they might have refrained from calling Dupont’s Legions of Reserve and provisional regiments the ‘invincible troops of Austerlitz and Friedland,’ as they were too prone to do. They had at least succeeded in beating in the open field and capturing a whole French army, a thing which no continental nation had accomplished since the wars of the Revolution began.
NOTE
Sir Charles Vaughan, always in search of first-hand information, called on Casta?os and had a long conversation with him concerning the Convention. I find among his papers the following notes:—
‘Among other particulars of the surrender, General Casta?os stated that the French General Marescot had the greatest influence in bringing it about. The great difficulty was to persuade them to capitulate for Vedel’s army as well as Dupont’s. A letter had been intercepted ordering Vedel back to Madrid, and another ordering Dupont to retire. This letter had considerable effect with the French: but the offer of carrying away their baggage and the plunder of the country was no sooner made, than the two generals desired to be permitted to retire and deliberate alone. After a few minutes they accepted the proposal. But General Casta?os, to make the article of as little value as possible, got them to insert the clause that the French officers should be allowed to embark all their baggage, &c., according to the laws of Spain. He well knew that those laws forbid the exportation of gold and silver. The consequence was that the French lost all their more valuable plunder when embarking at Puerto Santa Maria.’