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THE FRENCH RETREAT TO THE EBRO
While dealing with the operations of the French armies in the various provinces of Spain, we have observed that at every point the arrival of the news of Dupont’s disaster at Baylen produced notable results. It was this unexpected intelligence that drove the intrusive king out of Madrid within a week of his arrival, and ere the ceremonial of his proclamation had been completed. It brought back Bessières from the Esla to the Arlanzon, and raised the siege of Saragossa. Knowing of it Junot summoned his council of war at Torres Vedras with a sinking heart, and Duhesme lacked the confidence to try the ordeal of battle before Gerona. Beyond the Pyrenees its influence was no less marked. Napoleon had imagined that the victory of Rio Seco had practically decided the fate of the Peninsula, and at the moment of Baylen was turning his attention to Austria rather than to Spain. On July 25, five days after Dupont had laid down his arms, he was meditating the reinforcement of his army in Germany, and drafting orders that directed the garrisons of northern France on Mainz and Strasburg. To a mind thus preoccupied the news of the disaster in Andalusia came like a thunderclap. So far was the Spanish trouble from an end, that it was assuming an aspect of primary importance. If Austria was really intending mischief, it was clear that the Emperor would have two great continental wars on his hands at the same moment—a misfortune that had never yet befallen him. It was already beginning to be borne in upon him that the treachery at Bayonne had been a blunder as well as a crime. Hence came the wild rage that bursts out in the letters written upon the days following that on which the news of Baylen reached him at Bordeaux. ‘Has there ever, since the world began,’ wrote Bonaparte to Clarke, his minister of war, ‘been such a stupid, cowardly, idiotic business as this? Behold Mack and Hohenlohe justified! Dupont’s own dispatch shows that all that has occurred is the result of his own inconceivable folly.... The loss of 20,000 picked men, who have disappeared without even inflicting any considerable loss on the enemy, will necessarily have the worst moral influence on the Spanish nation.... Its effect on European politics will prevent me from going to Spain myself.... I wish to know at once what tribunal ought to try these generals, and what penalty the law can inflict on them for such a crime.’ A similar strain runs through his first letter to his brother Joseph after the receipt of the news—‘Dupont has soiled our banners. What folly and what baseness! The English will lay hands on his army. Such events make it necessary for me to go to Paris, for Germany, Poland, Italy, and all, are tied up in the same knot. It pains me grievously that I cannot be with you, in the midst of my soldiers.’ In other letters the capitulation is ‘a terrible catastrophe,’ ‘a horrible affair, for the cowards capitulated to save their baggage,’ and (of course) ‘a machination paid for with English gold. These imbeciles are to suffer on the scaffold the penalty of this great national crime.’ The Emperor did well to be angry, for the shock of Baylen was indeed felt to every end of Europe. But he should have blamed his own Macchiavellian brain, that conceived the plot of Bayonne, and his own overweening confidence, that launched Dupont with 20,000 half-trained conscripts (not, as he wrote to Clarke, with vingt mille hommes d’élite et choisis) on the hazardous Andalusian enterprise.
Meanwhile he had to face the situation: within a few hours of the moment when Villoutreys placed Dupont’s dispatch in his hands, he had so far got over the first spasms of his wrath that he was able to dictate a general plan for the reconcentration of his armies. We have compared the French forces in Spain to a broad wedge, of which the point, directed against the heart of the insurrection, was formed by the three divisions of Dupont’s corps. This point had now been broken off; but the Emperor, still clinging to the idea of the wedge, wished to preserve Madrid and to form in and about it a new army fit for offensive operations. With this force he would strike at the insurgents of Andalusia and Valencia when they marched on the capital, while Bessières in the valley of the Douro, and Verdier in the valley of the Ebro were still to preserve a forward position, and shield the army of the centre from the flank attacks of the Galicians and the Aragonese. The troops left around Madrid at the moment of the disaster of Baylen were parts of the three divisions of Moncey’s corps, one of Dupont’s, and the brigade which had escorted Joseph Napoleon from Burgos, together with 3,000 horse—a total of about 23,000 men. Bonaparte judged that this was not enough to resist the combined attack of Casta?os and of the Valencians and Murcians of Saint March and Llamas. Accordingly he intended that Bessières should lend the King two brigades of infantry—a deduction from his force which would compel him to fall back from Leon into Old Castile—and that Verdier should spare a brigade from the army in front of Saragossa, though it was none too strong for the task before it. Six battalions from the reserve at Bayonne were to make a forced march to Madrid to join the King. Thus reinforced up to 35,000 men, the corps at Madrid would be able, as the Emperor supposed, to make head against any combination of Spanish troops that could possibly be brought against it.
But all these arrangements were futile. Bonaparte at Bordeaux was separated from his brother at the Retiro by so many miles that his orders were grown stale before they reached their destination. His scheme was made out on August 2, but on the preceding day King Joseph and his whole army had evacuated Madrid. The terror of Baylen was upon them, and they were expecting every moment to find themselves attacked by Casta?os, who was as a matter of fact celebrating triumphal feasts at Seville. With a haste that turned out to be altogether unnecessary, Moncey’s corps, escorting the King, his court, and his long train of Spanish refugees, crossed the Somosierra and did not halt till they reached Aranda de Duero, in the plains of Old Castile. Napoleon was forced to make other plans in view of this retreat, whose moral consequences were hardly inferior in importance to those of Dupont’s capitulation. For both the Spanish nation and the courts of Europe looked upon the evacuation of Madrid as marking the complete downfall of Napoleon’s policy, and portending a speedy retirement of the invaders behind the Pyrenees. It is certain that if the spirit of Joseph and his advisers had been unbroken, they might have clung to the capital till the reinforcements which the Emperor was hurrying to their aid had arrived. It is probable that the 35,000 men, of whom Savary and Moncey could then have disposed, might have held Casta?os in check till the army from the Rhine had time to come up. Yet there is every excuse for the behaviour of the French commanders, for they could not possibly have known that the Spaniards would move with such astonishing slowness, or that they would refrain from hurling every available man on Madrid. And as a matter of fact the evacuation of the capital turned out in the end to be advantageous to Napoleon, for it inspired his adversaries with a foolish self-confidence which proved their ruin. If they had been forced to fight hard in New Castile, they would have been obliged to throw much more energy into the struggle, and could not have slackened their efforts under the false impression that the French were absconding in dismay to Bayonne.
When Bonaparte learnt that his brother had fled from Madrid and crossed the passes into Old Castile, he was forced to draw out a wholly different scheme from that which he had sketched on August 2. The King, he wrote, with Moncey’s corps, must take post at Aranda, where the Douro is crossed by the high-road from France to Madrid. His army should be strengthened to a force of 30,000 men: meanwhile Bessières and Verdier must protect his flanks. The former with 15,000 men should take Valladolid as his head quarters and guard against any attempt of Blake to resume the offensive. As to Verdier, since he had been instructed to abandon the siege of Saragossa—a grave blunder—he must be drawn back as far as Tudela on the Middle Ebro. From that point he would easily be able to ‘contain’ the tumultuary army of Palafox. If the Spaniards showed signs of pressing in on any part of the front, the King, Verdier, or Bessières—as the case might demand—must not hang back, but endeavour to shatter the vanguard of any advancing force by a bold stroke. At all costs the war must not be waged in a timid style—in short, to adopt a well-known military axiom, ‘the best defensive would be a vigorous local offensive.’ Meanwhile it should be known that enormous reinforcements were in march from the Rhine and the Elbe. This was indubitably correct, for on August 5 the 1st and 6th Corps of the ‘Grand Army,’ and two divisions of heavy cavalry, had been sent their orders to break up from their garrisons and set out for Spain. The Viceroy of Italy and the Princes of the Confederation of the Rhine had also been directed to send large contingents to the Peninsula: the troops from Italy were to move on Perpignan and strengthen the army of Catalonia; those from the German states were to march on Bayonne and join the main army. Somewhat later the Emperor directed still further masses of men to be drawn off from Germany, namely Marshal Mortier with the 5th Corps and two more divisions of dragoons, while the whole of the Imperial Guard came down from Paris on the same errand. There were still nearly 100,000 of the old army left in Spain, and the reinforcements would amount to 130,000 more, a force which when united would far surpass both in numbers and in quality any army that the Spaniards would be able to get together in the course of the next two months.
It was from Rochefort and on August 5 that Napoleon sent off his orders to his brother to stay his retreat at Aranda de Duero, and to keep Bessières at Valladolid and Verdier at Tudela. Once more the distances of space and time were too much for him. Before the dispatch from Rochefort came to hand, Joseph and Savary had already abandoned Aranda: they left it on the sixth and by the ninth were at Burgos. At that city they were met by Bessières, who according to the King’s orders had fallen back from the Esla to the Arlanzon. Napoleon’s elaborate scheme for the maintenance of the line of the Douro had thus fallen through, as completely as his earlier plan for the defence of Madrid. Seeing that his orders were clearly out of date, Moncey and Bessières agreed that they might be disregarded. The next line suitable for an army acting on the defensive was that of the Ebro, and to the banks of that river the dispirited army of France now withdrew.
The head quarters were established at Miranda: the troops of Bessières and Moncey were massed at that place and at Logro?o, with a strong detachment across the Ebro at Pancorbo, and some cavalry lying out as far as Burgos: Verdier’s army, after finally raising the siege of Saragossa, fell back on Milagro, the point where the Aragon falls into the Ebro. Thus some 70,000 men were concentrated on a comparatively short and compact front, covering the two great roads which lead to France by Vittoria and by Pampeluna. Against any frontal attack from the direction of Madrid the position was very strong. But a glance at the map shows that the flanks were not properly protected: there was nothing to prevent Blake from turning the extreme right by an advance into Biscay, or to prevent Palafox from turning the extreme left by a march on Pampeluna via Tafalla or Sanguesa. If either of these moves were made by a powerful force, the army on the Ebro would be compelled either to abandon its positions in order to go in pursuit, or else to leave them occupied by a detachment insufficient to resist a serious attack along the line of the high-road from Madrid. Both those operations were ultimately taken in hand by the Spaniards, but it was at too late an hour, when the reinforcements from Germany had begun to arrive, and when ample means were at the disposal of the French generals for repulsing flank attacks, without drawing off men from the line of the Ebro. The astounding slowness of the Spaniards, and the lamentable want of union between the commanders of the various provincial armies, ruined any chance that there might have been of success. The troops of King Joseph were safely installed in their defensive positions by August 15. On that day the leading columns of the Spanish army had only just arrived at Madrid. It was not till a month later that the number of troops brought forward to the line of the Ebro approached the total strength of the host of the intrusive King. The offensive operations of Blake and Palafox did not commence till the second half of September, when the columns of the ‘Grand Army’ were already drawing near to the Pyrenees, and all possible chance of success had long gone by. They were not developed till October, when the counter-stroke of the French was fully prepared. From August 15 down to the day of the battle of Zornoza (October 31) there are two months and a half of wasted time, during which the Spaniards did nothing more than stir up an ineffectual rising in Biscay and gradually push to the front scattered corps whose total did not amount to much more than 100,000 men. The troops of Bonaparte on the other hand—now under the orders of Jourdan, who arrived at Miranda on August 25—had little to do but to ward off the feeble attempts to cut their communications in Biscay, and to incorporate, brigade by brigade, the numerous reinforcements which kept marching in from Bayonne. For even ere the three veteran corps from Germany came to hand, there was a continuous stream of troops pouring across the Pyrenees. Most important, perhaps, of all the arrivals was that of Marshal Ney, the toughest and most resolute of all the Emperor’s fighting-men, who brought with him a spirit of enterprise and confidence which had long been wanting in the army of Spain.
CREATION OF THE ‘JUNTA GENERAL’
On August 1, Madrid had seen the last of the French: yet it was not till the thirteenth that the Spanish troops appeared before the gates of the capital. Even then it was not the victorious army of Andalusia which presented itself, but only the Valencian corps of Llamas, a mere division of 8,000 men, which would not have dared to push forward, had it not known that Joseph Bonaparte and all his train were now far on their way towards the Ebro. During the thirteen days which elapsed between his departure and the arrival of the Valencians there was a curious interregnum in Madrid. It took some time to convince the populace and the local authorities that the hated invaders were really gone, and that they were once more their own masters. Nothing reflects the state of public opinion better than the Madrid Gazette: down to August 1, it shows the hand of a French editor; ‘His Majesty’ means King Joseph, and all the foreign intelligence is coloured with French views. On August 2 the foreign influence begins to disappear, and we note a very cautious and tentative proclamation by the old ‘Council of Castile.’ That effete body, shorn by the French of most of its prominent members, had repeatedly yielded to the orders of Murat and Savary: it had carried out many decrees of the new executive, yet it had never actually recognized the legality of King Joseph’s accession. Indeed at the last moment it had striven, by feeble methods of evasion and delay, to avoid committing itself to this final step. But we may guess that, had there been no Baylen, the Council would finally have made up its mind to ‘swallow the pill’—if we may use once more Murat’s characteristic phrase. However, the flight of Joseph had saved it from being forced to range itself on the side of the traitors, and its members were able to stay behind in Madrid without fearing for their necks. In their first manifesto there is not a word that could have offended Savary, if he had returned the next day. It preaches the necessity of calm, order, and quiet: no one must stir up mobs, compromise the public safety, or vex his respectable neighbours. The rest of the paper on this and the two following days is filled up with essays on geography and political economy, lists of servants seeking places, and colourless foreign news many weeks old. Such piteous stuff was not likely to keep the people quiet: on August 4 a mob assembled, broke open the house of Don Luis Viguri (one of Godoy’s old confidants), murdered him, and dragged his body through the streets. Fearing that they too might be considered Afrancesados the Council published a second proclamation of the most abject kind. The ‘melancholy instance of insubordination’ of the previous day causes them ‘intolerable sorrow’ and is ‘unlikely to tend to public felicity.’ The loyal and generous citizens ought to wait for the working of the law and its ministers, and not to take the execution of justice into their own hands. The clergy, the local officials, every employer of labour, every father of a family, are begged to help to maintain peace and order. Then comes a page of notices of new books, and a short paper on the ethics of emigration! Of Ferdinand VII or Joseph I, of politics domestic or foreign, there is not a word. Two days later the Council at last makes up its mind, and, after a week of most uncomfortable sitting on the fence, suddenly bursts out into an ‘Address to the honourable and generous people of the capital of Spain,’ in the highest strain of patriotism: ‘Our loved King is in chains, but his loyal subjects have risen in his name. Our gallant armies have achieved triumphs over “the invincibles of Marengo, Austerlitz, and Jena.” All Europe stands surprised at their rapid victories. These fellow citizens of ours, crowned with the laurels of success, will soon be with us. Meanwhile the Council must beg the patriotic citizens of Madrid to abstain from riot and murder, and to turn their energies into more useful channels. Let them prostrate themselves before the altar in grateful thanks to God, and make preparations to receive and embrace the oncoming bands of liberators.’ Domestic intelligence becomes for the future a list of French atrocities, and of (sometimes apocryphal) victories in the remoter corners of Spain. Foreign intelligence is served up with an English rather than a French flavour. The arsenal of ‘Volovich’ is shipping scores of cannon and thousands of muskets for the use of the brave Spaniards, the treasures of Great Britain are to be poured into the hands of the insurrectionary Juntas, and so forth. All this comes a little late: the good intentions of the Council would have been more clear if they had been expressed on August 2 instead of August 7, when the French were still at Buitrago, rather than when they were far away beyond Aranda de Duero.
It is really astonishing to find that the Council made a bid for power, and attempted to assume the pose of a senate of warm-hearted patriots, after all its base servility to Murat and Savary during the last six months. Its president, Don Arias Mon y Velarde, actually had the audacity to write a circular-note to the various provincial Juntas of Spain, proposing that, as a single central government must obviously be established, they should send representatives to Madrid to concert with the Council on means of defence, and lend it the aid of their influence and authority. That such a discredited body should attempt to assume a kind of presidential authority over the local Juntas who had raised and directed the insurrection was absurd. The replies which were returned were of the most uncompromising kind: the Galician Junta taunted the Council with having been ‘the most active instrument of the Usurper.’ Palafox, speaking for Aragon, wrote that it ‘was a corporation which had not done its duty.’ The active and ambitious Junta of Seville wished to accuse the Council before the face of the Spanish people ‘of having subverted the fundamental laws of the realm, of having given the enemy every facility for seizing the domination of Spain, of having lost all legal authority and become null and void, and of being suspected of deliberate treason of the most atrocious sort possible.’ The Valencians voted that ‘no public body of any kind ought to enter into correspondence with the Council of Castile, or come to any understanding with it.’ All these rebuffs to the Council were well deserved, and it is clear that the provincial Juntas were entirely justified in their action. But it is to be feared that there lay at the bottom of their hearts not merely honest indignation at the impudent proposal that had been laid before them, but a not unnatural desire to cling as long as possible to their existing power and authority. In many of the provinces there was shown a most unworthy and unwise reluctance to proceed at once to the construction of a single governing body for Spain, even when the proposal was put forward not by a discredited corporation like the Council, but by men of undoubted patriotism.
The credit of starting a serious agitation for the erection of a ‘Supreme Junta’ must be given to the Murcians, whose councils were guided by the old statesman Florida Blanca, a survivor from the days of Charles III. As far back as June 22 they had issued a proclamation setting forth the evils of provincial particularism, and advocating the establishment of a central government. None of the other Juntas ventured openly to oppose this laudable design, and some of them did their best to further it. But there were others who clung to power, and were determined to surrender it at as late a date as they could manage. The Junta of Seville was far the worst: that body—as we have had occasion to mention in another place—was largely in the hands of intriguers, and had put forth unjustifiable claims to domination in the whole southern part of the realm, even usurping the title of ‘Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies.’ In their desire for self-aggrandizement they took most unjustifiable steps: they suppressed Florida Blanca’s Murcian proclamation, lest it might stir up an agitation in Andalusia in behalf of the establishment of a central government. But this was a comparatively venial sin: their worst act was to stay the march of Casta?os on Madrid after Baylen. The pretext used was that they wished to welcome the victorious general and his army with triumphal entries and feasts of rejoicing—things entirely out of place, so long as the French were still holding the capital of the realm. To his own entire dissatisfaction Casta?os was dragged back to Seville, there to display the captured guns and flags of the French, and to be received with salvos fired by patriotic ladies who had learnt the drill of the artilleryman. But he soon found to his disgust that the Junta was really aiming at the employment of his troops not for national purposes but for their own aggrandizement. They wished to speak with 40,000 men at their back, and were most reluctant to let the army pass the Sierra Morena, lest it should get out of their control. Their most iniquitous design was to overawe by armed force their neighbours, the Junta of Granada, who refused to recognize them as a central authority for Andalusia, and had given their assent to the Murcian proposal for the prompt formation of a national government. They were actually issuing orders for a division to march against the Granadans, when Casta?os—though a man of mild and conciliatory manners—burst out in wrath at the council board. Springing up from his chair and smiting the table a resounding blow, he exclaimed, ‘Who is the man that dares bid the troops march without my leave? Away with all provincial differences: I am the general of the Spanish nation, I am in command of an honourable army, and we are not going to allow any one to stir up civil war.’ Conscious that the regiments would follow the victor of Baylen, and refuse obedience to mere civilians, the Junta dropped their suicidal project. But they turned all their energy into devising pretexts for delaying the march of the army on Madrid. Their selfishness was undisguised: when Casta?os begged for leave to march on the capital without further delay, the Conde de Tilly (the most intriguing spirit among all the politicians of Seville) responded with the simple question, ‘And what then will become of us?’ He then moved that the Junta of Andalusia should concern itself with Andalusia and Portugal alone, and not interfere in what went on beyond the Sierra Morena. This proposal was a little too strong even for the narrow-minded particularists of the Junta: but though they let Casta?os go, they contrived excuses for delaying the march of the greater part of his army. He did not get to Madrid till August 23, more than a month after Baylen, and then brought with him only the single division of La Pe?a, about 7,000 strong. The other three divisions, those of Reding, Jones, and Coupigny, did not cross the Sierra Morena for many weeks after, and some of the troops had not even left Andalusia at the moment when the French resumed offensive operations in October. On various specious pretences the Junta detained many regiments at Seville and Cadiz, giving out that they were to form the nucleus of a new ‘army of reserve,’ which was still a mere skeleton three months after Baylen had been fought. If we compare the Andalusian army-list of November with that of July, we find that only seven new battalions had joined the army of Casta?os in time to fight on the Ebro. It is true that a new division had been also raised in Granada, and sent to Catalonia under General Reding, but this was due to the energy of the Junta of that small kingdom, which was far more active than that of Seville. Andalusia had 40,000 men under arms in July, and no more than 50,000 at the beginning of November, though the Junta had promised to have at least thirty reserve battalions ready before the end of the autumn, and had received from England enormous stores of muskets and clothing for their equipment.
In the northern parts of Spain there was almost as much confusion, particularism, and selfishness as in the south. The main sources of trouble were the rivalry of the Juntas of Asturias and Galicia, and the extravagant claims of the aged and imbecile Cuesta, in virtue of his position as Captain-General of Castile. It will be remembered that in June insurrectionary Juntas had been established at Leon and Valladolid, the former purporting to represent the kingdom of Leon, the latter the kingdom of Old Castile. Each had been under the thumb of Cuesta, who looked upon them as nothing more than committees established under his authority for the civil government of the provinces of the Douro. But the disaster of Medina de Rio Seco destroyed both the power and the credit of the Captain-General. Flying before the French, the Juntas took refuge in Galicia, where they settled down at Ponferrada for a few days, and then moved to Lugo, whither the Junta of Galicia came out to meet them. The three bodies, joining in common session, chose as their president Don Antonio Valdes, the Bailiff of the Knights of Malta, who was one of the representatives of Castile. They claimed to be recognized as the supreme civil government of Northern Spain, but their position was weakened by two mischances. The Asturian Junta refused to have anything to do with them, and persisted in remaining sovereign within the borders of its own principality. Even more vexatious was the conduct of Cuesta: though he was wandering in the mountains with only three or four thousand raw levies—the wrecks of Rio Seco—he refused to recognize any authority in the three federated Juntas, and pretended to revoke by his proclamation any powers vested in those of Castile and Leon. The fact was that he knew that they would lend support to his military rival Blake, and not to himself. He feigned to regard the Captains-General and the old Audiencias, or provincial tribunals, as the sole legitimate powers left in the kingdom, and to consider the Juntas as irregular assemblies destitute of any valid authority. In what a scandalous form he translated his theories into action, we shall soon see. Meanwhile he refused to co-operate with the troops of Galicia, and made no attempt to follow the retreating French. All his efforts were directed to increasing the numbers of the mass of raw levies which he called the ‘Army of Castile.’ But from the whole of the provinces over which he claimed authority he had only succeeded in scraping together 12,000 men by the middle of September, though as far as population went they represented nearly a sixth of the people of Spain.
The want of any central executive for directing the armies of the patriots had the most disastrous results. By September 1 Casta?os and Llamas had not more than 20,000 men at Madrid. Galluzzo’s army of Estremadura, which ought to have joined them long before, was still employed in its futile siege of Elvas. Cuesta was hanging back in Castile, as jealous of Casta?os as he had been of Blake. The only armies which were in touch with the French were Palafox’s troops on the Ebro and the Valencian division of Saint March, which the Junta of Valencia (showing more patriotism than most of their colleagues) had pushed up to Saragossa to aid the Aragonese. Blake, with the powerful army of Galicia, had descended to Astorga when Bessières retreated to Burgos. But from Astorga he advanced most cautiously, always clinging to the southern slope of the Cantabrian hills, in order to avoid the plains, where the cavalry of the French would have a free hand. It was not till September 10 that he had concentrated his main body at Reynosa, near the sources of the Ebro, where he was at last near enough to the front to be able to commence operations.
The whole month of August, it is not too much to say, was lost for military purposes because Spain had not succeeded in furnishing itself with a central government or a commander-in-chief. It had been wasted in constitutional debates of the most futile kind. To every one, except to certain of the more selfish members of the Juntas, it was clear that a way must be found out of the existing anarchy. Three courses seemed possible: one was to appoint a Regent, or a small Council of Regency, and to entrust to him (or to them) the conduct of affairs. The second was to summon the Cortes, the old national parliament of Spain. The third was to establish a new sort of central government, by inducing each of the existing Juntas to send deputies, with full powers of representation, to sit together as a ‘Supreme Central Junta’ for the whole realm. The project of appointing a Regent had at first many advocates: it occurred to both Casta?os and Palafox, and each (as it chanced) pitched upon the same individual as most worthy of the post. This was the Archduke Charles of Austria, the sole general in Europe who had won a military reputation of the first class while contending with the French. He would have been an excellent choice—if only he could have been secured. But it did not take much reflection to see that if Austria allowed her greatest captain to accept such a post, she would involve herself in instant war with Bonaparte, and if such a war broke out the Archduke would be wanted on the Danube rather than upon the Ebro. There was no other name likely to command general confidence. Some spoke of the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, the last prince of the Spanish royal house who remained in the realm. But he was an insignificant and incapable person, and much discredited by his dallyings with Murat in the days before the insurrection had begun. Clearly he would be no more than a puppet, worked by some astute person behind the viceregal throne. Other names suggested were those of the young Dom Pedro of Portugal (son of the Prince-Regent John), and of Prince Leopold, the son of Ferdinand IV of Sicily. The former was a grandson, the latter a nephew of Charles IV. Both therefore were near to the throne, but both were foreigners, young, untried in matters of state, and utterly unknown to the Spaniards. Dom Pedro’s claims were not strongly pushed, but the Sicilian court made a strenuous attempt to forward those of Prince Leopold. Their ambassador in London tried to enlist the support of the English Government for him: but Canning and Castlereagh were anxious to avoid any appearance of dictating orders to Spain, and firmly refused to countenance the project. Before their reply came to hand, King Ferdinand (or rather that old intriguer, his spouse, and her son-in-law the Duke of Orleans) sent the prince to Gibraltar, on a man-of-war which they had obtained from Mr. Drummond, the British minister at Palermo. By lending his aid to the plan this unwise diplomat almost succeeded in compromising his government. But most fortunately our representatives in Spain nipped in the bud this intrigue, which could not have failed to embroil them with the Juntas, none of whom had the least love for the Sicilian house. When the Thunderer arrived at Gibraltar Sir Hew Dalrymple—then just on the eve of starting for Portugal—refused to allow the prince to land, or to distribute the proclamations which he had prepared. These were the work of Leopold’s brother-in-law, Louis Philippe of Orleans, who had accompanied him from Palermo with the design of fishing in troubled waters, a craft of which he was to show himself in later days a past master. If Leopold should become regent, Orleans intended to be the ‘power behind the throne.’ Dalrymple detained the two princes at Gibraltar, and when he was gone Lord Collingwood took the same attitude of hostile neutrality. Tired of detention, Louis Philippe after a few days sailed for London, in the vain hope of melting the hearts of the British Cabinet. The Sicilian prince lingered some time, protesting against the fashion in which he was treated, and holding secret colloquies with deputations which came to him from many quarters in which the Junta of Seville was detested. But there was no real party in his favour. What benefit could come to Spain from the election of a youth of nineteen, whose very name was unknown to the people, and who could help them neither with men nor with money, neither with the statesmanship that comes from experience, nor with the military capacity that must be developed on the battle-field? After remaining long enough in Spanish waters to lose all his illusions, Prince Leopold returned to his mother in Sicily. There had never been any foundation for a persistent rumour that he was to be made co-regent along with the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and the Conde de Montijo. Not even the least intelligent members of the Juntas would have consented to hand over the rule of Spain to this strange triumvirate—an imbecile, a boy, and a turbulent intriguer. There was about as much chance that another vain project might be carried out—an invitation to General Dumouriez to take command of all the Spanish armies. Yet this plan too was seriously brought forward: the Frenchman would not have been unwilling, but the Spanish officers, flushed with their recent successes, were not the kind of people to welcome a foreign leader, and one whose last military exploit had been to desert his own army and go over to the enemy.
Much more specious, at first sight, than any project for the establishment of a regency, was the proposal mooted in many quarters for the summoning of the Cortes—whose name recalled so many ancient memories, and was connected with the days of constitutional freedom in the Middle Ages. But not only had the Cortes been obscured by the long spell of autocracy under the Hapsburg and Bourbon kings, but it was by its very constitution unsuited to represent a nation seeking for a new and vigorous executive. It was full of mediaeval anomalies: for example the Asturias had never been represented in it, but had possessed (like Wales in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) separate governmental machinery of its own. This might have been altered without much difficulty, but it was more fatal that the distribution of seats in the lower estates represented an archaic survival. Many decayed towns in Castile sent members to the Cortes, while on the other hand the warlike and populous province of Galicia had only one single vote. To rearrange the representation on a rational basis would take so long, and cause so much provincial jealousy, that it was recognized as practically impossible.
There remained therefore only the third plan for creating a supreme government in Spain—that which proposed that the various existing Juntas should each send deputies to some convenient spot, and that the union of these representatives should constitute a central authority for the whole realm. This scheme was not so clearly constitutional as the summoning of the Cortes would have been, nor did it provide for real unity of direction in so complete a way as would have been secured by the appointment of a single Regent. But it had the practical advantage of conciliating the various provincial Juntas: though they sacrificed their local sovereignty, they obtained at least the power of nominating their own masters. In each of them the more active and ambitious members hoped that they might secure for themselves the places of delegates to the new supreme assembly. Accordingly the Juntas were induced, one after another, to consent to the scheme. Public opinion ran so strongly in favour of unity, and the existing administrative chaos was so clearly undesirable, that it was impossible to protest against the creation of a Supreme Central Junta. Some of the provinces—notably Murcia, Valencia, and Granada—showed a patriotic spirit of self-abnegation and favoured the project from the first. Even Galicia and Seville, where the spirit of particularism was strongest, dared not openly resist the movement. There were malcontents who suggested that a federal constitution was preferable to a centralized one, and that it would suffice for the provinces to bind themselves together by treaties of alliance, instead of handing themselves over to a newly created executive. But even in Aragon, where federal union with Castile seemed more attractive to many than complete incorporation, the obvious necessity for common military action determined the situation. Every province of Spain at last adhered to the project for constructing a Supreme Central Junta. Even the narrow-minded politicians at Seville had to assume an attitude of hearty consent. But their reluctance peeped out in the suggestion which they made that the Junta should meet, not at Madrid, but at Ciudad Real or Almagro in La Mancha, places convenient to themselves, but obscure and remote in the eyes of inhabitants of Asturias or Galicia. Their aversion to Madrid was partly caused by its remoteness from their own borders, but much more by jealousy of the Council of Castile, which still hung together and exercised local authority in the capital. Other Juntas showed their aversion for the Council in the same way, and ultimately the place selected for the gathering of the new government was the royal residence of Aranjuez, which stands to Madrid much as do Versailles or Windsor to Paris and London. This choice was an obvious mistake: the central government of a country loses in dignity when it does not reside in the national capital. It seems to distrust its own power or its legality, when it exiles itself from its proper abode. At the best it casts a slur on the inhabitants of the capital by refusing to trust itself among them. Madrid, it is true, is not to Spain what Paris is to France, or London to England: it is a comparatively modern place, pitched upon by Philip II as the seat of his court, but destitute of ancient memories. Nevertheless, it was at least infinitely superior to Aranjuez as a meeting-place. On geographical or strategical grounds they are so close that no advantage accrues to one that does not belong to the other. But for political reasons the capital was distinctly preferable to the almost suburban palace. If the existence of the Council of Castile so much disturbed the Junta, it would have been quite possible to dissolve that discredited body. No one would have made any serious effort in its favour, even in the city of its abode.
THE ‘JUNTA GENERAL’ IN SESSION
The provincial Juntas, when once they had consented to sacrifice their local sovereignty, made no great delay in forwarding their representatives to the chosen meeting-place at Aranjuez. The number of deputies whom they sent to the Supreme Central Junta was thirty-five, seventeen provincial Juntas each contributing two, and the Canary Islands one. The Biscayan provinces, still wholly in the possession of the French, had no local body to speak for them, and could not therefore choose deputies. The number thus arrived at was not a very convenient one: thirty-five is too few for a parliament, and too many for an executive government. Moreover proportional representation was not secured; Navarre and the Balearic Islands were given too much weight by having two members each. Andalusia, having eight deputies for its four Juntas of Seville, Jaen, Granada, and Cordova, was over-represented when compared with Galicia, Aragon, and Catalonia, which had each no more than two. The quality of the delegates was very various: among the most notable were the ex-ministers Florida Blanca and Jovellanos, who represented respectively the better sides of the Conservative and the Liberal parties of Spain—if we may use such terms. The former, trained in the school of ‘benevolent despotism’ under Charles III, was a good specimen of the eighteenth-century statesman of the old sort—polite, experienced, energetic, a ripe scholar, and an able diplomat. But he was eighty years old and failing in health, and his return to active politics killed him in a few months. Jovellanos, a somewhat younger man, belonged in spirit to the end rather than the middle of the eighteenth century, and was imbued with the ideas of liberty and constitutional government which were afloat all over Europe in the early days of the French Revolution. He represented modern liberalism in the shape which it took in Spain. For this reason he had suffered many things at the hands of Godoy, and emerged from a long period of imprisonment and obscurity to take his place in the councils of the nation. Unhappily he was to find that his ideas were still those of a minority, and that bureaucracy and obscurantism were deeply rooted in Spain.
Of the other members of the Supreme Junta, the Bailiff Valdez and Francisco Palafox, fresh from his brother’s triumphs at Saragossa, were perhaps the best known. Among the rest we note a considerable number of clergy—two archbishops, a prior, and three canons—but not more than might have been expected in a country where the Church was so powerful. Military men were not so strongly represented, being only five in number, and three of these were militia colonels. The rest were mainly local notables—grandees, marquises, and counts predominated over mere commoners. Some of them were blind particularists, and a few—like the disreputable Conde de Tilly—were intriguers with doubtful antecedents. The whole body represented Spain well enough, but Spain with her weaknesses as well as her strong points. It was not a very promising instrument with which to achieve the liberation of the Peninsula, or to resist the greatest general in Europe. Considered as a government of national defence, it had far too little military knowledge: a haphazard assembly of priests, politicians, and grandees is not adapted for the conduct of a war of independence. Hence came the incredible blindness which led it to refuse to appoint a single commander-in-chief, and the obstinacy with which it buried itself in constitutional debates of the most futile sort when Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Spain.
The meeting of the Supreme Junta was fixed for September 25, but long ere that date came round the military situation was assuming new developments. The first modification in the state of affairs was caused by the abortive attempt of the Basque provinces to free themselves. The news of Baylen had caused as great a stir in the northern mountains as in the south or the east of Spain. But Biscay, Guipuzcoa, and Alava had considerable French garrisons, and the retreat of Joseph Bonaparte to the Ebro only increased the number of enemies in their immediate neighbourhood. It would have been no less patriotic than prudent for these provinces to delay their insurrection till it had some chance of proving useful to the general scheme of operations for the expulsion of the French from Spain. If they could have waited till Blake and Casta?os had reached the Ebro, and then have taken arms, they might have raised a most dangerous distraction in the rear of the French, and have prevented them from turning all their forces against the regular armies. But it was mad to rise when Blake was still at Astorga, and Casta?os had not yet reached Madrid. It could not have been expected that the local patriots should understand this: but grave blame falls on those who ought to have known better. The Duke of Infantado, who was acting under Blake, and Colonel Doyle, the English representative at that general’s head quarters, did their best to precipitate the outbreak in Biscay. They promised the Biscayan leaders that a division from Asturias should come to their aid, and that English arms and ammunition should be poured into their harbours. At the first word of encouragement all Biscay took arms : a great mass of insurgents collected at Bilbao, and smaller bands appeared along the line of the mountains, even as far as Valcarlos on the very frontier of France. But no external aid came to them: the Asturians—averse to every proposal that came from Galicia—did not move outside their own provincial boundary, and no other Spanish army was within striking distance. Bessières was able, at his leisure, to detach General Merlin with 3,000 men to fall on Bilbao. This brigade proved enough to deal with the main body of the Biscayan insurgents, who after a creditable fight were dispersed with heavy loss—1,200 killed, according to the French commander’s dispatch . Bilbao was taken and sacked, and English vessels bringing—now that it was too late—5,000 stand of arms for the insurgents, narrowly escaped capture in its harbour. All along the line of the Basque hills there was hanging and shooting of the leaders of the abortive rising. The only result of this ill-advised move was that Bessières was warned of the danger in his rear, and kept a vigilant eye for the future on the coastland. The Biscayans, as was natural, were much discouraged at the way in which they had been left in the lurch by their fellow countrymen, and at the inefficacy of their own unaided efforts. They were loth to rise a second time.
It was not till twenty days had passed since the fall of Bilbao that the first attempts at combined action were made by the Spanish generals. On September 5 there met at Madrid a council of war, composed of Casta?os, Cuesta, the Valencian General Llamas, and the representatives of Blake and Palafox—the Duke of Infantado and Calvo de Rozas, intendant-general of the army of Aragon. These officers met with much suppressed jealousy and suspicion of each other. The Duke had his eye on Cuesta, in accordance with the instructions of Blake. Casta?os and Cuesta were at daggers drawn, for the old Captain-General had just proposed a coup d’état against the Junta to the Andalusian, and had been repulsed with scorn. The representative of the army of Aragon had been charged to see that no one was put above the head of Palafox. When the meeting opened, Cuesta proposed that it should appoint a single general to direct all the forces of Spain. The others demurred: Cuesta was much their senior in the army-list, and they imagined—probably with truth—that he would claim the post of commander-in-chief for himself, in spite of the memories of Cabezon and Rio Seco. They refused to listen to his arguments, though it was certain that unity of command was in every way desirable. Nor was any disposition shown to raise Casta?os to supreme authority, though this was the obvious step to take, as he was the only general of Spain who had won a great battle in the open field. But personal and provincial jealousy stood in the way, and Casta?os himself, though not without ambition, was destitute of the arts of cajolery, and made no attempt to push his own candidature for the post of commander-in-chief. Perhaps he hoped that the Supreme Junta would do him justice ere long, and refrained for that reason from self-assertion before his colleagues. Nothing, therefore, was settled on September 5, save a plan for common operations against the French on the Ebro. Like all schemes that are formed from a compromise between the views of several men, this was not a very brilliant strategical effort: instead of providing for a bold stroke with the whole Spanish army, at some point on the long line between Burgos and Milagro, it merely brought the insurgent forces in half-a-dozen separate columns face to face with the enemy. Blake, with his own army and the Asturians, was to be asked to concentrate near Reynosa, at the sources of the Ebro, and to endeavour to turn Bessières’ flank and penetrate into Biscay. He would have 30,000 men, or more, but not a single complete regiment of cavalry. Next to him Cuesta was to operate against the front of Bessières’ corps, with his ‘Army of Castile,’ eight or nine thousand raw levies backed by about 1,000 horse. He undertook to make Burgo de Osma his point of starting. More to the east, Casta?os was to gather at Soria the four divisions of the army of Andalusia, but at present he had only that of La Pe?a in hand: the Junta of Seville was detaining the rest. Still more to the right, Llamas with his 8,000 Valencians and Murcians was to march on Tudela. Lastly Palafox, with the army of Aragon and the Valencian division of Saint March, was to keep north of the Ebro, and turn the left flank of Moncey’s corps by way of Sanguesa: he could bring about 25,000 men into line, but there were not more than five or six regular battalions among them; the rest were recent levies. When the army of Estremadura should come up (it was still about Elvas and Badajoz), it was to join Casta?os; and it was hoped that the English forces from Portugal might also be directed on the same point.
But meanwhile only 75,000 men were available in the first line; and this force, spread along the whole front from Reynosa to Sanguesa, and acting on wide external lines, was not likely to make much impression on the French. The numbers of the invaders were considerably greater than those of the patriot-armies. Jourdan had 70,000 men by September 1, and was being reinforced every day by fresh battalions, though the three corps from Germany were still far off. Before the Spaniards could move he appreciably outnumbered them, and he had the inestimable advantage of holding a comparatively short front, and of being able to concentrate on any point with far greater rapidity than was possible to his adversaries. Even had they thrown all their forces on one single point, the French, always using the ‘interior lines,’ could have got together in a very short time. The only weak point, indeed, in the French position was that Bessières’ vanguard at Burgos was too far forward, and in some peril of being enveloped between Blake and Cuesta. But this detachment, as we shall see, was ere long drawn back to the Ebro.
Before the campaign began the Spaniards obtained one notable advantage—the removal of Cuesta from command, owing to his own incredible arrogance and folly. It will be remembered that he regarded the Juntas of Leon and Castile as recalcitrant subordinates of his own, and had declared all their acts null and void. When they proceeded, like the other Juntas, to elect representatives for the meeting at Aranjuez, he waited till the deputies of Leon were passing near his camp, and then suddenly descended upon them. Don Antonio Valdez, the Bailiff of the Maltese Knights, and the Vizconde de Quintanilla, were arrested by his troopers and shut up in the castle of Segovia. He announced that they should be tried by court-martial, for failing in obedience to their Captain-General. This astonishing act of presumption drew down on him the wrath of the Supreme Junta, which was naturally eager to protect its members from the interference of the military arm. Almost its first act on assembling was to order him to appear at Aranjuez and to suspend him from command. Cuesta would have liked to resist, but knowing that his own army was weak and that Blake and Casta?os were his bitter enemies, he had to yield. He came to Aranjuez, and was superseded by General Eguia. Valdez and Quintanilla were immediately released, and took their seats in the Supreme Junta.
The sessions of that body had begun on September 25. Twenty-four members out of the designated thirty-five had assembled on that day, and after a solemn religious ceremony had re-proclaimed Ferdinand VII, and elected Florida Blanca as their President. They then proceeded to nominate a Cabinet, chosen entirely from outside their own body. Don Pedro Cevallos was to be Minister of Foreign Affairs: he had served Ferdinand VII in that capacity, but had smirched his reputation by his submission to Bonaparte after the treachery at Bayonne. However, his ingenious justification of his conduct, and his early desertion of King Joseph, were allowed to serve as an adequate defence. Don Antonio Esca?o was Minister of Marine, Don Benito Hermida Minister of Justice, Don Francisco de Saavedra Minister of the Interior. The most important place of all, that of Minister of War, was given to an utterly unknown person, General Antonio Cornel, instead of to any of the officers who had distinguished themselves during the recent campaigns. He was to be aided by a supreme council of war, consisting of six members of the Junta, three of whom were civilians without any military knowledge whatever. No intention of appointing a commander-in-chief was shown, and the Minister of War corresponded directly with all the generals in charge of the provincial armies. Nothing could have been more ill judged; from the want of a single hand at the helm all the oncoming operations were doomed to inevitable failure. The supreme direction was nominally entrusted to the obscure war-minister and his councillors, really it lay with the generals in the field, who obeyed orders from head quarters only just as much as they chose. Each played his own game, and the result was disaster.
A glance at the subjects which were discussed by the members of the Junta, during its first weeks of session, suffices to show the short-sightedness of their policy, and their utter inability to grasp the situation. They should have remembered that they were a government of national defence, whose main duty was the expulsion of the French from the soil of Spain. But military subjects furnished the smallest portion of their subjects of debate. They published indeed a manifesto to the effect that they intended to levy an army of 500,000 foot, and 50,000 horse—a much greater force than Spain in her most flourishing days could have raised or maintained. But this paper army was never seen in the field: less than a third of the number were under arms at the moment in December when the Junta had to fly from Aranjuez, before the advancing legions of Napoleon. Nor was it likely that a great army could be raised, equipped, and disciplined, while the central government was devoting the greater part of its attention to futilities. The most cruel comment on its work lies in the fact that its troops were ill furnished, badly armed, and half starved, at the moment when the provinces were doing their best to provide equipment, and every port in Spain was gorged with cannon, muskets, munitions, and stores sent from England—a great part of them destined to fall into the hands of the French. Partly from want of experience, but still more from want of energy, the Junta failed to use the national enthusiasm and the considerable resources placed at its disposal.
When we look at the main topics of its debates we begin to understand its failures. A good deal of time was spent in voting honorary distinctions to its own members. The President was to be addressed as ‘his highness,’ the Junta as a corporation was ‘its majesty,’ if we may use the ludicrous phrase. Each member became ‘his excellency’ and received the liberal salary of 120,000 reals (￡1,200), besides the right of wearing on his breast a gold plaque with an embossed representation of the eastern and western hemispheres. There was a good deal of dispensing of places and patronage in the army and the civil service among relatives and dependencies of ‘their excellencies,’ but not more perhaps than happens in other countries in war-time when a new government comes in. At least the changes led to the getting rid of a good many of Godoy’s old bureaucrats. The real fault of the Junta lay in its readiness to fall into factions, and fight over constitutional questions that should have been relegated to times of peace. Among the thirty-five members of the Junta a clear majority were, like their president, Florida Blanca, Spaniards of the old school, whose ideas of government were those of the autocratic sort that had prevailed under Alberoni and Charles III. They looked upon all innovations as tinged with the poison of the French Revolution and savouring of Jacobinism and infidelity. On the other hand there was a powerful minority, headed by Jovellanos and including Martin de Garay, the secretary of the Junta, the Marquis of Campo Sagrado, Valdes, Calvo de Rozas, and others, who held more modern views and hoped that the main result of the war would be to make Spain a constitutional monarchy of the English type. How far this dream was from realization was shown by the fact that among the first measures passed through the Supreme Junta were ordinances allowing the Jesuits (expelled long since by Charles III) to return to Spain, recreating the office of Inquisitor-General, and suspending the liberty of the press. Such measures filled the liberal section in the Junta with despair, by showing the narrow and reactionary views of the majority. But the greater part of the time spent in session by ‘its majesty’ was wasted on purely constitutional questions. Firstly there was a long polemic with the Council of Castile, whose hatred for the Junta took the form of starting doubts as to the legality of its constitution. It suggested that all constitutional precedents were against a body so numerous as thirty-five persons taking charge of the governance of the realm. Former councils of regency had been composed of three or five members only, and there was no legal authority for breaking the rule. The Council suggested that the only way out of the difficulty would be to call the Cortes, and that assembly would at once supersede the authority of the Supreme Junta. Instead of arguing with the Council of Castile, the new government would have done well to arrest or disperse that effete and disloyal body; but it chose instead to indulge in a war of manifestos and proclamations which led to nothing. To find the supreme government consenting to argue about its own legality was not reassuring to the nation. Moreover, Jovellanos and his followers spent much time in impressing on their colleagues that it was their duty to appoint a regency, and to cut down their own unwieldy numbers, as well as to provide machinery for the summoning of the Cortes at some not too distant date. To be reminded that they were no permanent corporation, but a temporary committee dressed in a little brief authority, was most unpleasant to the majority. They discussed from every point of view the question of the regency and the Cortes, but would not yield up their own supremacy. Indeed they proposed to begin legislation on a very wide basis for the reform of the constitution—business which should rather have been left to the Cortes, and which was particularly inappropriate to the moment when Napoleon was crossing the Pyrenees. The great manifesto of the Junta sets forth its intentions very clearly. ‘The knowledge and illustration of our ancient and constitutional laws; the changes which altered circumstances render necessary in their re-establishment; the reforms necessary in civil, criminal, and commercial codes; projects for improving public education; a system of regulated economy for the collection and distribution of the public revenue ... are the subjects for the investigation of wise and thoughtful men. The Junta will form different committees, each entrusted with a particular department, to whom all writings on matters of government and administration may be addressed. The exertions of each contributing to give a just direction to the public mind, the government will be enabled to establish the internal happiness of Spain.’ From another official document we learn that ‘among the most grave and urgent objects of the attention of the Central Junta will be the encouragement of agriculture, the arts, commerce, and navigation.’
Clearly nothing could be more inappropriate and absurd than that this government of national defence should turn its attention to subjects such as the reform of national education, or the encouragement of the arts. It is equally certain that if it should propose to ‘consider the changes necessary in our ancient laws,’ it would be going beyond its competence; for such business belonged only to a permanent and properly constituted national assembly, such as the Cortes. This was not the time for constitutional debates, nor was the Central Junta the body that should have started them. All their energies should have been devoted to the war. But misled as to the situation by the long quiescence of the French army on the Ebro, they turned their minds to every topic that should have been avoided, and neglected the single one that should always have been before their eyes. It was in vain that Calvo de Rozas, the Aragonese deputy, and a few more, tried to keep their colleagues to the point. The majority fell to debating on the subjects on which the despotic and the liberal theories of government clash, and spent themselves on discussions that were as heated as they were futile. Meanwhile the time that should have been turned to account was slipping away, and the army was not being reinforced. A glance at the field-states of the Spanish troops, comparing those of August 1 with those of November 1, sufficiently proves this. The provinces which had been recovered by the retreat of the French to the Ebro were not doing their duty. The wide and populous regions of Old Castile and Leon had sent 4,600 men to Rio Seco in July: in October they had less than 12,000 under arms. From New Castile there seem to have been raised nothing more than four battalions of Madrid Volunteers, a weak cavalry regiment, and two battalions of Cazadores de Cuenca and Tiradores de Castilla: at any rate no troops but these are to be found recorded in the lists of the armies that fought in October, November, and December, 1808. Even allowing that New Castile may have supplied recruits to its own corps of embodied militia serving with the Andalusian army, it is clear that, with a population of 1,200,000 souls, it ought to have done much more in raising new regiments. And this was the district in whose very midst the Junta was sitting! What little was done in Madrid seems to have been mainly the result of private enterprise: the Gazette for October is full of voluntary donations of horses, saddlery, and money, for the equipment of a corps of dragoons for the army of Old Castile, and of similar gifts received by Calvo de Rozas for the army of Aragon. But there are no signs of requisitions by the government for the purpose of raising an army of New Castile, which could certainly have been done. The kingdom with its five provinces ought to have given 40,000 men instead of 4,000: for Asturias, with only 370,000 souls, had raised 13,000: Aragon with 650,000 had placed no less than 32,000 levies in the field: and Estremadura with 420,000 had sent to the front 12,000 men by October, while keeping 10,000 more of undrilled recruits in its dép?ts. New Castile, as we have already had occasion to remark, had 1,200,000 inhabitants, and yet had only added to its original five battalions of militia six more of volunteers, and a single regiment of horse, at the moment when Napoleon’s armies came flooding across the Ebro. The Central Junta’s authority in Andalusia or Galicia was much limited by the survival of the ambitious local Juntas. But in Leon and the two Castiles there was, when once Cuesta had been got out of the way, no rival power in the field. No one was to blame but the central government, if the full resources of those regions were not utilized in September, October, and November. The English representatives at Madrid saw all this, and did their best to stir up the Junta. But it was not likely that mere foreigners would succeed, where Casta?os and the other more energetic Spanish officers had failed. Already in October the situation appeared most unpromising: ‘We have made repeated representations,’ wrote Mr. Stuart, the British minister, ‘and I have given in paper after paper, to obtain something like promptitude and vigour: but though loaded with fair promises in the commencement, we scarcely quit the members of the Junta before their attention is absorbed in petty pursuits and in wrangling, which impedes even the simplest arrangements necessary for the interior government of the country.... In short, we are doing what we can, not what we wish: and I assure you we have infamous tools to work with.’ Exactly the same impression is produced by a study of the dispatches of Lord William Bentinck, our military representative at Madrid, and of the diary of Sir Charles Vaughan, who carefully attended and followed the debates of the Central Junta at Aranjuez. It was clear to any dispassionate observer that time was being wasted, and that the best was not being done with the available material.
This was all the more inexcusable because the nation was thoroughly in earnest, and prepared to make any sacrifices. The voluntary contributions made both by provinces and by individuals were astounding when the poverty of Spain is taken into consideration. It was the energy and will to use them on the part of the leaders that was wanting. Moreover, England was pouring in supplies of all sorts: before November 16 she had sent at least 122,000 muskets and other military equipment of all kinds to the value of several hundred thousand pounds. Before the same date she had forwarded 4,725,000 dollars in hard cash, and Mr. Frere, the newly appointed minister, brought another million to Corunna.
Instead of utilizing every possible resource the government went on debating about things unessential, as if the war had been ended at Baylen. It would neither conduct the new campaign itself, nor appoint a single commander-in-chief to conduct it in its behalf. With absolute truth Colonel Graham wrote from the head quarters of the Army of the Centre that ‘the miserable system established by the Junta was at the bottom of all misfortunes. I pitied poor Casta?os and poor Spain, and came away disgusted to the greatest degree.’
AN EPISODE IN THE BALTIC
It will be remembered that one of Napoleon’s preliminary measures, in his long campaign against the freedom of Spain, had been the removal of the flower of her army to the shores of the Baltic. In the spring of 1807 the Marquis of La Romana, with fourteen battalions of infantry and five regiments of cavalry, all completed to war strength, had marched for Hamburg. After wintering in the Hanseatic towns, Mecklenburg, and Swedish Pomerania, this corps had been moved up early in 1808 into Denmark. It is clear that there was no military object in placing it there. The Danish fleet was gone, carried off by Lord Cathcart’s expedition in the previous September, and there was no probability that the English would return for a second visit, when they had completely executed their plan for destroying the naval resources of Denmark. France and Sweden, it is true, were still at war, but King Gustavus was so much occupied by the defensive struggle against the Russians in Finland, that it was unlikely that he would detach troops for an objectless expedition against the Danes. On the other hand the Anglo-Swedish fleet was so completely dominant in the Baltic and the Sound, that there was no possibility of launching an expedition from Denmark against Southern Sweden. Even between the various islands at the mouth of the Baltic, where the water-distances are very short, troops could only be moved at night, and with infinite precautions against being surprised on the passage by English frigates. Gothenburg and the other harbours of South-western Sweden served as convenient ports of call to the British squadron told off for the observation of the Cattegat, the two Belts, and the Sound. Nothing could be done against Sweden, unless indeed a frost of exceptional severity might close the waterway between Zealand and Scania. Even then an attempt to make a dash at Helsingborg or Malm? would involve so many difficulties and dangers that few generals would have cared to risk it.
La Romana’s corps formed part of an army under Marshal Bernadotte, whose sphere of command extended all over the south-western shores of the Baltic, and whose head quarters were sometimes at Schleswig and sometimes at Lübeck or Stralsund. He had considerable French and Dutch contingents, but the bulk of his force consisted of 30,000 Danes. In preparation for Napoleon’s scheme against the Spanish Bourbons, La Romana’s forces had been carefully scattered between Jutland and the Danish Isles, so that there was no large central body concentrated under the Marquis’s own hand. The garrisons of the Spanish regiments were interspersed between those of Danish troops, so that it would be difficult to get them together. In March, 1808, when the Emperor had at last shown his hand by the treacherous seizure of Pampeluna, Barcelona, and Figueras, the troops of La Romana were cantoned as follows. Six battalions were in the island of Zealand, mainly in and about the old royal residence of Roeskilde. Four battalions and two cavalry regiments were in Fünen, the central island of the Danish group, and with them La Romana himself, whose head quarters were at Nyborg. One battalion lay in the island of Langeland, close to the south coast of Fünen. In the mainland of Jutland were three cavalry regiments and three battalions of infantry, quartered in the little towns at the southern end of the Cattegat—Fredericia, Aarhuus, and Randers. In Zealand the 4,000 Spaniards were under the eyes of the main Danish army of observation against Sweden. In Fünen La Romana’s 4,500 horse and foot were cantoned in small detachments, while a solid body of 3,000 Danes garrisoned Odense in the centre of the island, separating the Spanish regiments one from another. In Langeland, along with the Catalonian light battalion, were a company of French grenadiers and about 800 Danes. The troops in Jutland were mixed up with a brigade of Dutch light cavalry and some Danish infantry. Napoleon’s own provident eye had been roving round Denmark, and he had himself given the orders for the dislocation of the Spanish corps in the fashion that seemed best calculated to make any common action impossible. To keep them in good temper he had recently raised the pay of the officers, and announced his intention of decorating La Romana with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. Bernadotte, by his desire, displayed the greatest confidence in his auxiliaries, and took a troop of the cavalry regiment Del Rey as his personal escort while moving about in Denmark.
In spite of all this, the Marquis and his officers began to grow uneasy in April, 1808, for the stream of dispatches and letters from Spain, which had been reaching them very regularly during the winter, began to dry up in the spring. When the first communication from the new ministry of Ferdinand VII reached La Romana he found that it contained a complaint that the home government had received no reports from the expeditionary force since January, and that fifteen separate dispatches sent to him from Madrid had failed to get any answer. The fact was that Napoleon had been systematically intercepting every document which the war minister at one end of the line, and the Marquis at the other, had been committing to the French post. The last dispatch had only come to hand because such an important announcement as that of the accession of King Ferdinand had been sent by the hands of a Spanish officer, whom Bonaparte or Fouché had not thought proper to arrest, though they had intercepted so much official correspondence. The Emperor himself had sent orders to Bernadotte that the news of the revolution at Aranjuez should be kept as long as possible from the Marquis and his troops: and so it came to pass that only a very few days after the events of March 19 became known in Denmark, there followed the deplorable intelligence of the treachery of Bayonne and of the Madrid insurrection of May 2. These tidings produced the same feelings in Nyborg and Fredericia that they had caused at Seville or Corunna. But on the shores of the Baltic, further north than any Spanish troops had ever been before, the expeditionary corps felt itself helpless and surrounded by enemies. Yet as Joseph O’Donnell, then one of La Romana’s staff, observed: ‘The more they tried to persuade us that Spain was tranquil, and had settled down to enjoy an age of felicity under Napoleon, the more clearly did we foresee the scenes of blood, strife, and disaster which were to follow these incredible events.’
On June 24 there reached Nyborg the intelligence which showed the whole of Napoleon’s schemes completed: it was announced to La Romana that Joseph Bonaparte had been proclaimed King of Spain, and he was ordered to transmit the news to his troops, and to inform them in General Orders that they were now serving a new master. The only commentary on this astonishing information which the Spanish officers could procure consisted of the nauseous banalities of the Moniteur concerning the ‘regeneration of Spain.’
A very few days later the first ray of hope shone upon the humbled and disheartened general. One of the earliest ideas of the British Government, on hearing of the Spanish insurrection, had been to open communications with the troops in Denmark. Casta?os, in his first interview with the Governor of Gibraltar, had expressed his opinion that they would strike a blow for liberty if only they were given the chance. The fleet of Sir Richard Keates so completely commanded the Baltic that it would be possible to rescue the Spanish expeditionary force, if only it were willing and able to cut its way to the coast. But it was necessary to find out whether the Marquis was ready to risk his neck in such an enterprise, and whether he could depend on the loyalty of his troops.
To settle this all-important question some agent must be found who would undertake to penetrate to La Romana’s head quarters, a task of the most uninviting kind, for it was quite uncertain whether the Spaniard would eagerly join in the plan, or whether he would make up his mind to espouse the cause of Napoleon, and hand over his visitor to the French police. To find a man who knew the Continent well enough to move about without detection, and who would take the risk of placing himself at La Romana’s mercy, in case his offers were refused, did not seem easy. But the right person was pitched upon by Sir Arthur Wellesley just before he sailed for Portugal. He recommended to Canning a Roman Catholic priest of the name of James Robertson. This enterprising ecclesiastic was a Scot who had spent most of his life in a monastery at Ratisbon, but had lately come to England and was acting as tutor in the house of an English Catholic peer. He had some time before offered himself to Wellesley as a man who knew Germany well, and was prepared to run risks in making himself useful to the Government.
Under the belief that the Spaniards were still quartered in the Hanse towns and Holstein, Canning sent for Robertson and asked him whether he would undertake this dangerous mission to Northern Germany. The priest accepted the offer, and was dispatched to Heligoland, where Mr. Mackenzie, the British agent in this lately seized island, found him a place on board a smuggling vessel bound for the mouth of the Weser. He was safely landed near Bremerhafen and made his way to Hamburg, only to find that the Spaniards had been moved northward into the Danish isles. This made the mission more dangerous, as Robertson knew neither the country nor the language. But he disguised himself as a German commercial traveller, and laid in a stock of chocolate and cigars—things which were very rare in the North, as along with other colonial produce they were proscribed by the Continental System, and could only be got from smugglers. It was known that the Spanish officers felt deeply their privation of the two luxuries most dear to their frugal race, so that it seemed very natural that a dealer in such goods should attempt to find a market among them.
Getting to Nyborg without much difficulty, the priest took his fate in his hands, and introduced himself to La Romana with a box of cigars under one arm and a dozen packets of chocolate under the other. When they were alone, he threw himself on the Marquis’s confidence, owning that he was a priest and a British subject, not a German or a commercial traveller. The Spaniard was at first suspicious and silent, thinking that he had to deal with an agent provocateur of the French Government, who was trying to make him show his hand. Robertson had no written vouchers for his mission—they would have been too dangerous—but had been given some verbal credentials by Canning, which soon convinced La Romana of his good faith. The Marquis then owned that he was disgusted with his position, and felt sure that Napoleon had plotted the ruin of Spain, though what exactly had happened at Bayonne he had not yet been able to ascertain. Robertson next laid before him Canning’s offer—that if the expeditionary force could be concentrated and got to the coast, the Baltic fleet should pick it up, and see that it was landed at Minorca, Gibraltar, the Canaries, in South America, or at any point in Spain that the Marquis might select.
La Romana asked for a night to talk the matter over with his staff, and next day gave his full consent to the plan, bidding the priest pass the word on to Sir Richard Keates, and discover the earliest day on which transports could be got ready to carry off his men. Robertson tried to communicate with a British frigate which was hovering off the coast of Fünen, but was arrested by Danish militiamen while signalling to the ship from a lonely point on the beach. His purpose was almost discovered, and he only escaped by a series of ingenious lies to the militia colonel before whom he was taken by his captors. Moving further south, he again tried to get in touch with Sir Richard Keates, and this time succeeded. The news was passed to London, and transports were prepared for the deliverance of the Spaniards. Canning also sent to Fünen an agent of the Asturian Junta, who would be able to give his countrymen full news of the insurrection that had taken place in June.
Meanwhile La Romana had sounded his subordinates, and found them all eager to join in the plan of evasion, save Kindelan, the brigadier-general commanding the troops in Jutland, who showed such unpatriotic views that the officer sent to confer with him dropped the topic without revealing his commission. The plan which the Marquis had formed was rather ingenious: Bernadotte was about to go round the garrisons in his command on a tour of inspection. It was agreed that under the pretext of holding a grand field-day for his benefit, all the scattered Spanish troops in Fünen should be concentrated at Nyborg. The regiments in Zealand and Jutland were to join them, when the arrival of the British fleet should be reported, by seizing the Danish small craft in the harbours nearest to them, and crossing over the two Belts to join their commander.
An unfortunate contretemps, however, interfered to prevent the full execution of the scheme. Orders came from Paris that all the Spanish troops were to swear allegiance to Joseph Bonaparte, each corps parading at its head quarters for the purpose on July 30 or 31. This news caused grave disorders among the subordinate officers and the men, who were of course in complete ignorance of the plan for evasion. La Romana and his councillors held that the ceremony had better be gone through—to swear under compulsion was not perjury, and to refuse would draw down on the Spanish corps overwhelming numbers of Danes and French, so that the whole scheme for escape would miscarry. Accordingly the troops in Jutland and Fünen went through the ceremony in a more or less farcical way—in some cases the men are said to have substituted the name Ferdinand for the name Joseph in their oath, while the officers took no notice of this rather startling variation.
But in Zealand things went otherwise: the two infantry regiments of Guadalajara and Asturias, when paraded and told to take the oath, burst out into mutiny, drove off those of their own officers who tried to restrain them, killed the aide-de-camp of the French General Fririon, who was presiding at the ceremony, and threatened to march on Copenhagen. Next day they were surrounded by masses of Danish troops, forced to surrender, disarmed, and put in confinement in small bodies at various points in the island .
This startling news revealed to Bernadotte the true state of feeling in the Spanish army, and he wrote to La Romana to announce that he was about to visit the Danish Isles in order to inquire into the matter. Fortunately there came at the same moment news from England that the time for escape was at hand. On August 4, only three days after the mutiny at Roeskilde, the brigantine Mosquito, having on board Rafael Lobo (the emissary of the Asturian deputies), reached the Baltic, and communicated by night with some of the Spanish officers on the island of Langeland. The British fleet had sailed, and the time for action had arrived.
Accordingly La Romana gave the word to the officers in each garrison to whom the secret had been entrusted. On August 7, the troops in Fünen concentrated, and seized the port of Nyborg: the Danes were completely taken by surprise, and no resistance was made save by a gallant and obstinate naval officer commanding a brig in the harbour. He fired on the Spaniards, and would not yield till an English frigate and five gunboats ran into the port and battered his vessel to pieces.
On August 8 the troops in Jutland struck their blow: the infantry regiment of Zamora at Fredericia seized a number of fishing-vessels, and ferried itself over into Fünen with no difficulty. General Kindelan, the only traitor in the camp, had been kept from all knowledge of what was to happen: when he saw his troops on the move, and received an explanatory note from La Romana putting him in possession of the state of affairs, he feigned compliance in the plan, but disguised himself and fled to the nearest French cantonment, where he gave enemy a full account of the startling news. The cavalry regiments Infante and Del Rey had the same luck as their comrades of Zamora: they seized boats at Aarhuus, and, abandoning their horses, got across unopposed to Fünen. Their comrades of the regiment of Algarve were less lucky: they were delayed for some time by the indecision of their aged and imbecile colonel: when Costa, their senior captain, took command and marched them from Horsens towards the port of Fredericia, it was now too late. A brigade of Dutch Hussars, warned by Kindelan, beset them on the way and took them all prisoners. Costa, seeing that the responsibility would fall on his head, blew out his brains at the moment of surrender.
Romana had concentrated in Fünen nearly 8,000 men, and was so strong that the Danish general at Odense, in the centre of the island, dared not meddle with him. On August 9, 10, and 11 he passed his troops over to the smaller island of Langeland, where the regiment of Catalonia had already disarmed the Danish garrison and seized the batteries. Here he was safe, for Langeland was far out to sea, and he was now protected from the Danes by the English warships which were beginning to gather on the spot. A few isolated men from Zealand, about 150 in all, succeeded in joining the main body, having escaped from their guards and seized fishing-boats: but these were all that got away from the regiments of Asturias and Guadalajara, the mutineers of July 31.
For ten days Langeland was crammed with 9,000 Spanish troops, waiting anxiously for the expected British squadron. On the twenty-first, however, Admiral Keates appeared, with three sail of the line and several smaller craft. On these and on small Danish vessels the whole army was hastily embarked: they reached Gothenburg in Sweden on August 27, and found there thirty-seven large transports sent from England for their accommodation. After a long voyage they reached the Spanish coast in safety, and the whole expeditionary corps of the North, now 9,000 strong, was concentrated at Santander by October 11. The infantry was sent to take part in the second campaign of General Blake. The dismounted cavalry were ordered to move to Estremadura, and there to provide themselves with horses. La Romana himself was called to Madrid to interview the Junta, so that his troops went to the front under the charge of his second in command, the Count of San Roman, to take part in the bloody fight of Espinosa.
FRENCH AND SPANISH PREPARATIONS
While the Supreme Junta was expending its energy on discussing the relative merits of benevolent despotism and representative government, and while Casta?os fretted and fumed for the moving up of reinforcements that never arrived, the French Emperor was getting ready to strike. It took many weeks for the veteran divisions from Glogau and Erfurt, from Bayreuth and Berlin, to traverse the whole breadth of the French Empire and reach the Pyrenees. While they were trailing across the Rhineland and the plains of France, well fêted and fed at every important town, their master employed the time of waiting in strengthening his political hold on Central Europe. We have seen that he was seriously alarmed at the possibility of an Austrian war, and alluded to it in his confidential letters to his kinsfolk. But the court of Vienna was slow to stir, and as August and September slipped by without any definite move on the Danube, Bonaparte began to hope that he was to be spared the dangerous problem of waging two European wars at the same time. Meanwhile he assumed an arrogant and blustering tone with the Austrian Government, warning them that though he was withdrawing 100,000 men from Germany, he should replace them with new levies, and was still strong enough to hold his own. Metternich gave prudent and evasive answers, and no immediate signs of a rupture could be discerned. But to make matters sure, the Emperor hastened to invite his ally the Emperor Alexander of Russia to meet him at Erfurt. The ostensible object of the conference was to make a final effort to induce the British Government to accept terms of peace. Its real meaning was that Bonaparte wished to reassure himself concerning the Czar’s intentions, and to see whether he could rely upon the support of Russia in the event of a new Austrian war. There is no need to go into the details of the meeting (September 27 to October 14), of the gathering of four vassal kings and a score of minor princes of the Confederation of the Rhine to do homage to their master, of the feasts and plays and reviews. Suffice it to say that Napoleon got what he wanted, a definite promise from the Czar of an offensive and defensive alliance against all enemies whatsoever: a special mention of Austria was made in the tenth clause of the new treaty. In return Alexander obtained leave to carry out his designs against Finland and the Danubian principalities: his ally was only too glad to see him involved in any enterprise that would distract his attention from Central Europe. The Emperor Francis II hastened to disarm the suspicions of Napoleon by sending to Erfurt an envoy charged with all manner of pacific declarations: they were accepted, but the acceptance was accompanied by a message of scarcely concealed threats, which must have touched the court of Vienna to the quick. Strong in his Russian alliance, Bonaparte chose rather to bully than to cajole the prince who, by the strangest of chances, was destined within eighteen months to become his father-in-law. The quiet reception given to his hectoring dispatches showed that, for the present at least, nothing need be feared from the side of Austria. The Emperor’s whole attention could be turned towards Spain. After telling off a few more regiments for service beyond the Pyrenees, and giving leave to the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine to demobilize their armies, he left Erfurt and came rushing back across Germany and France to Paris; he stayed there ten days and then started for Bayonne, where he arrived on the twentieth day after the termination of the conference .
Meanwhile the ostensible purpose of that meeting had been carried out, by the forwarding to the King of England of a joint note in which France and Russia offered him peace on the basis of Uti Possidetis. It was a vague and grandiloquent document, obviously intended for the eye of the public rather than for that of the old King. The two Emperors expatiated on the horrors of war and on the vast changes made of late in the map of Europe. Unless peace were made ‘there might be greater changes still, and all to the disadvantage of the English nation.’ The Continental System was working untold misery, and the cessation of hostilities would be equally advantageous to Great Britain and to her enemies. King George should ‘listen to the voice of humanity,’ and assure the happiness of Europe by consenting to a general pacification.
Though well aware of the hollowness of these protestations, which were only intended to throw on England the odium of continuing the war, the British Cabinet took them into serious consideration. The replies to the two powers were carefully kept separate, and were written, not in the name of the King (for the personal appeal to him was merely a theatrical device), but in that of the ministry. To Russia a very polite answer was returned, but the question on which the possibility of peace rested was brought straight to the front. Would France acknowledge the existing government of Spain as a power with which she was prepared to treat? Canning, who drafted the dispatch, was perfectly well aware that nothing was further from the Emperor’s thoughts, and could not keep himself from adding an ironical clause, to the effect that Napoleon had so often spoken of late of his regard for the dignity and welfare of the Spanish people, that it could not be doubted that he would consent. The late transactions at Bayonne, ‘whose principles were as unjust as their example was dangerous to all legitimate sovereigns,’ must clearly have been carried through without his concurrence or approbation.
The reply to France was still more uncompromising. ‘The King,’ it said, ‘was desirous for peace on honourable terms. The miserable condition of the Continent, to which allusion had been made, was not due to his policy: a system devised for the destruction of British commerce had recoiled on its authors and their instruments.’ But the distress even of his enemies was no source of pleasure to the King, and he would treat at once, if the representatives of Sweden, Portugal, Sicily, and Spain were admitted to take part in the negotiations. It was to be specially stipulated that the ‘Central Junta of Government’ at Madrid was to be a party to any treaty of peace.
The two British notes brought the replies from St. Petersburg and Paris that Canning expected. Count Romanzoff, writing for the Czar, could only state that his master had acknowledged Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain, and could not recognize the existence of any other legal authority in that kingdom. But if this point (the only really important one) could be got over, the Russian Government was ready to treat on a basis of Uti Possidetis, or any other just and honourable terms. The French reply was, as was natural, couched in very different language. Napoleon had been irritated by Canning’s sarcastic allusions to the failure of the Continental System: he thought the tone of the British note most improper and insulting—‘it comes from the same pen which the English ministry employs to fabricate the swarm of libels with which it inundates the Continent. Such language is despicable, and unworthy of the imperial attention.’
Considering the offensive and bullying tone which Bonaparte was wont to use to other powers—his note written to Austria a few days before was a fair example of it—he had little reason to be indignant at the epigrams of the English minister. Yet the latter might perhaps have done well to keep his pen under control, and to forget that he was not writing for the Anti-Jacobin, but composing an official document. Even though Napoleon’s offer was hollow and insincere, it should have been met with dry courtesy rather than with humorous irony.
Of course Bonaparte refused to treat the Spaniards as a free and equal belligerent power. He had declared his brother King of Spain, and had now reached that pitch of blind autolatry in which he regarded his own fiat as the sole source of legality. In common honour England could not abandon the insurgents; for the Emperor to allow his brother’s claim to be ignored was equally impossible. In his present state of mind he would have regarded such a concession to the enemy as an acknowledgement of disgraceful defeat. It was obvious that the war must go on, and when the Emperor suggested that England might treat with him without stipulating for the admission of the Junta as a party to the negotiations, he must have been perfectly well aware that he was proposing a dishonourable move which the ministry of Portland could not possibly make. His suggestions as to a separate treaty with England on the basis of Uti Possidetis were futile: he intended that they should be declined, and declined they were. But he had succeeded in his end of posing before the French nation and the European powers as a lover of peace, foiled in his devices by the unbending arrogance of Great Britain. This was all that he had desired, and so far his machinations attained their object.
Long before the English replies had been sent off to Champagny and Romanzoff, the much-delayed campaign on the Ebro had commenced. All through the months of August and September the French had behaved as if their adversaries were acting on proper military principles, and might be expected to throw their whole force on the true objective point. Jourdan and his colleagues had no reason to foresee that the Spanish Government would launch out into the hideous series of blunders which, as a matter of fact, were committed. That no commander-in-chief would be appointed, that the victorious troops of Baylen would be held back for weeks in Andalusia, that no strenuous effort would be made to raise new armies in Leon and the two Castiles, were chances that seemed so improbable that King Joseph and his advisers did not take them into consideration. They expected that the Spaniards would mass the armies of Andalusia, Estremadura, Castile, and Aragon, and endeavour to turn their left flank on the side of Sanguesa and Pampeluna, or that (the other rational course) they would send the Asturians, the Andalusians, and the Castilians to join Blake, and debouch down the line of the Upper Ebro, from Reynosa on to Vittoria and Miranda. In the first case 70,000, and in the latter case 80,000 men would be flung against one flank of the French position, and it would be necessary to concentrate in hot haste in order to hold them back. But, as a matter of fact, the Spanish forces did not even come up to the front for many weeks, and when they did appear it was, as we have seen, not in the form of one great army concentrated for a stroke on a single point, but as a number of weak and isolated columns, each threatening a different part of the long line that lay along the Ebro from Miranda to Milagro. When feeble demonstrations were made against so many separate sections of his front, Jourdan supposed that they were skilful feints, intended to cover some serious attack on a weak spot, and acted accordingly, holding back till the enemy should develop his real plan, and refusing to commit himself meanwhile to offensive operations on a serious scale. It must be confessed that the chaotic and inconsequent movements of the Spaniards bore, to the eye of the observer from the outside, something like the appearance of a deep plan. On August 27 the Conde de Montijo, with a column of the Aragonese army, felt his way up the Ebro as far as the bridge of Alfaro, nearly opposite the extreme left flank of the French at Milagro. When attacked by Lefebvre-Desnouettes at the head of a few cavalry and a horse-battery, the Spanish general refused to stand, and retreated on Tudela. Marshal Moncey then pressed him with an infantry division, but Montijo again gave back. The French thought that this move must be a mere diversion, intended to attract their attention to the side of Aragon, for Montijo had acted with such extreme feebleness that it was unnatural to suppose that he was making anything but a feint. They were quite wrong however: Palafox had told the count to push as far up the Ebro as he could, without any thought of favouring operations by Blake or Casta?os, the former of whom was at this moment not far in front of Astorga, while the latter was still at Madrid. Montijo had given way simply because his troops were raw levies, and because there were no supports behind him nearer than Saragossa. It was to no effect, therefore, that King Joseph, after the fighting in front of Alfaro and Tudela, moved his reserves up the river to Miranda, thinking that the real attack must be coming from that side. There was no real attack intended, for the enemy had not as yet brought any considerable force up to the front.
It was not till nearly three weeks later that the Spaniards made another offensive move. This time Blake was the assailant. On September 10 he had at last concentrated the greater part of his army at Reynosa—the centre of roads at the source of the Ebro, of which we have already had to speak on several occasions. He had with him four divisions of the army of Galicia, as well as a ‘vanguard brigade’ and a ‘reserve brigade’ of picked troops from the same quarter. Close behind him were 8,000 Asturians under General Acevedo. The whole came to 32,000 men, but there were no more than 400 cavalry with the corps—a fact which made Blake very anxious to keep to the mountains and to avoid the plains of Old Castile. He had left behind him in Galicia and about Astorga more than 10,000 men of new levies, not yet fit to take the field. There were also some 9,000 Asturians in similar case, held back within the limits of their own principality.
In the elaborate plan of operations which had been sketched out at Madrid on September 5, it will be remembered that Blake’s army was intended to co-operate with those of Casta?os and of Eguia. But he paid no attention whatever to the promises which his representative, Infantado, had made in his name, and executed an entirely different movement: there was no commander-in-chief to compel him to act in unison with his colleagues. The Castilian and Estremaduran armies were not ready, and Casta?os had as yet only a feeble vanguard facing the enemy on the Central Ebro, his rear divisions being still far back, on the road from Andalusia. Blake neither asked for nor received any assistance whatever from his colleagues, and set out in the most light-hearted way to attack 70,000 French with his 32,000 Galicians and Asturians.
His plan was to threaten Burgos with a small portion of his army, while with the main body he marched on Bilbao, in order to rouse Biscay to a second revolt, and to turn the right flank of the French along the sea-shore. Accordingly he sent his ‘vanguard’ and ‘reserve’ brigades towards Burgos, by the road that passes by O?a and Briviesca, while with four complete divisions he moved on Bilbao. On the twentieth his leading column turned out of that town General Monthion, who was in garrison there with a weak brigade of details and detachments.
Here at last, as it seemed to Joseph Bonaparte and to Jourdan, was the long-expected main attack of the Spaniards. Accordingly they concentrated to their right, with the object of meeting it. Bessières evacuated Burgos and drew back to the line of the Upper Ebro. He there replaced the King’s reserve, and the incomplete corps that was forming at Miranda and Vittoria under the command of Marshal Ney: thus these troops became available for operations in Biscay. Ney, with two small infantry divisions, marched on Bilbao by way of Durango: Joseph, with the reserve, followed him. But when the Marshal reached the Biscayan capital, the division of Blake’s army, which had occupied it for the last six days, retired and took up a defensive attitude in the hills above Valmaceda, twenty miles to the west. Here it was joined by a second division of the Galician army, and stood fast in a very difficult country abounding in strong positions. Ney therefore held back, unwilling to attack a force that might be 30,000 strong (for all that he knew) with the 10,000 men that he had brought. Clearly he must wait for King Joseph and the reserve, in case he should find that Blake’s whole army was in front of him.
But the King and his corps failed to appear: Bessières had sent to inform him that Blake, far from having moved his whole army on to Bilbao, had still got the bulk of it in positions from which he could march down the Ebro and attack Miranda and Vittoria. This was to a certain extent true, for the first and second divisions of the Galician army were now at Villarcayo, on the southern side of the Cantabrian hills, a spot from which they could march either northward to Bilbao or eastward to Miranda. Moreover, Blake’s ‘reserve’ and ‘vanguard’ brigades were still about Frias and O?a, whither they had been pushed before the French evacuated Burgos. Bessières, therefore, had much to say in favour of his view, that the point of danger was in the Ebro valley and not in Biscay. King Joseph, convinced by his arguments, left Ney unreinforced, and took post with the 6,000 men of the central reserve at Vittoria. His conclusion that Bilbao was not the true objective of the Spaniards was soon confirmed by other movements of the enemy. The feeble columns of Casta?os were at last showing on the Central Ebro, and Palafox was on the move on the side of Aragon.
Under the idea that all Blake’s Biscayan expedition had been no more than a feint and a diversion, and that the real blow would be struck on the Ebro, Jourdan and the King now directed Ney to come back from Bilbao and to take up his old positions. The Marshal obeyed: leaving General Merlin with 3,000 men in the Biscayan capital, he returned with 7,000 bayonets to La Guardia, on the borders of Alava and Navarre. His old head quarters at Logro?o, beyond the Ebro, had been occupied by the head of one of Casta?os’s columns. He did not attack this force, but merely encamped opposite it, on the northern bank of the river .
Map of part of northern Spain
Enlarge Part of Northern Spain.
It is now time to review the position and forces of the Spanish armies, which were at last up in the fighting line. Blake’s 32,000 Asturians and Galicians were divided into two masses, at Valmaceda and Villarcayo, on the two sides of the Cantabrian hills. They were within three marches of each other, and the whole could be turned either against Biscay or against Vittoria, as the opportunity might demand. But between Blake and the central divisions of the Spanish army there was a vast gap. This, at a later period of the campaign, was filled up by bringing forward the 12,000 men of the Estremaduran army to Burgos: but this force, insufficient as it was for the purpose, had not reached the front: in the middle of October it had not even arrived at Madrid. There seems to have been at Burgos nothing more than a detached battalion or two, which had occupied the place when Bessières drew back towards the Ebro. Of all the Spanish forces, the nearest organized corps on Blake’s right consisted of the main body of this same army of Castile. This division, for it was no more, consisted of about 10,000 or 11,000 men: it contained a few regular corps (Regiment of Cantabria, a battalion of Grenadiers, the Leon Militia) which had been lent to it by the army of Andalusia, and twelve raw Leonese and Castilian battalions, of the new levy which Cuesta had raised. There were also some 800 cavalry with it. The commander was now Pignatelli, for Eguia (who had originally been told off to the post) had fallen sick. This small and inefficient force was at Logro?o on the Central Ebro, having taken possession of that place when it was evacuated by Marshal Ney in the last week of September. A little further down the river lay the 2nd Division of the army of Andalusia, which, under the orders of Coupigny, had taken a creditable part in the battle of Baylen. Released by the Junta of Seville in September, it had at last gone forward and joined Casta?os. But it was somewhat changed in composition, for three of its original fourteen battalions had been withdrawn and sent to Catalonia, while three new Andalusian corps had replaced them. Its commander was now General Grimarest, Coupigny having been told off to another sphere of duty. The division numbered about 6,000 bayonets, with 400 or 500 cavalry, and a single battery. It occupied Lodosa, on the north bank of the Ebro, some twelve miles down-stream from Logro?o. Quite close to its right there lay at Calahorra the 4th Division of the army of Andalusia, under La Pe?a—a somewhat stronger force—about 7,500 foot, with 400 horse and two batteries. The only remaining division of Casta?os’ ‘Army of the Centre’ consisted of the Murcian and Valencian corps under Llamas. This had entered Madrid 8,000 strong on August 13, but one of its regiments had been left behind at Aranjuez to guard the Junta. It now consisted of no more than 7,000 men, and lay at Tudela, in close touch with La Pe?a’s Andalusians. The total, therefore, of Casta?os’ army in the second half of October did not amount to more than 31,000 foot and 3,000 horse. The 1st and 3rd divisions of the Andalusian army, long detained beyond the Morena by the Junta of Seville, were but just commencing to arrive at Madrid: of their 15,000 men less than half reached the front in November, in time to take their share in the rout of Tudela. Even these were not yet at Casta?os’ disposition in October.
The right wing of the Spanish army of the Ebro consisted of the raw and half-organized masses composing the army of Aragon. Palafox had succeeded in getting together a great body of men from that loyal province, but he had not been able to form them into a force fit to take the field. Owing to the way in which Aragon had been stripped of regular troops before the commencement of the war, there was no solid body round which the new levies could be organized, and no supply of trained officers to drill or discipline the thousands of eager recruits. It would seem that in all no less than 32,000 were raised, but no force in any degree approaching these numbers took the field. Every village and every mountain valley had contributed its partida or its company, but with the best of wills Palafox had not yet succeeded in incorporating all these small and scattered units into regiments and brigades. Many of them had not even been armed: very few had been properly clothed and equipped. Nevertheless no fewer than thirty-nine battalions in a state of greater or less organization were in existence by the end of October. They varied in strength to the most extraordinary degree: many were no more than 300 strong, one or two were enormous and ran up to 1,300 or 1,400 bayonets. Of the whole thirty-nine battalions only three belonged to the old regular army, and these corps—whose total numbers only reached 2,350 men—had been largely diluted with raw recruits. Of the remainder some belonged to the tercios who had taken arms in June, and had served through the first siege of Saragossa, but a large number had only been raised after Verdier had retired from before the city in August. It would seem that the total of Palafox’s Aragonese, who went to the front for the campaign of October and November, was about 12,000 men. The rest were left behind at Saragossa, being not yet organized or equipped for field service.
But Palafox had also in his army troops which did not belong to his native kingdom. These were the Murcians and Valencians of Saint March and O’Neille, who after taking part in the campaign against Moncey, had not marched with Llamas to Madrid, but had turned off to aid in raising the siege of Saragossa. Saint March had brought with him fourteen battalions and a cavalry regiment, O’Neille had with him three more infantry corps. The total of their force reached 11,200 bayonets and 620 sabres. Adding these to the best of his own Aragonese levies, Palafox sent out 23,000 men: of these only about 800 were cavalry. A force such as this, backed by the mass of unorganized levies at Saragossa, was barely sufficient to maintain a defensive position on the frontiers of Aragon. But the Junta, with great unwisdom, came to the conclusion that Palafox was strong enough not only to hold his own against the French in his immediate front, but to spare some troops to reinforce the army of Catalonia. By their orders he told off six battalions—some 4,000 men—who were placed under the command of his brother, the Marquis of Lazan, and dispatched to Lerida with the object of aiding the Captain-General of Catalonia to besiege Duhesme in Barcelona.
Nor was this the only force that was drawn off from the main theatre of the war in order to take part in helping the Catalans, who had hitherto proved quite strong enough to help themselves. The Junta directed Reding, the victor of Baylen, to take command of all the Granadan troops in the army of Andalusia, and lead them to Tortosa with the object of joining Lazan. With Reding there marched nearly 15,000 men: to raise this force all the regiments belonging to the kingdom of Granada had been drafted out from the 1st and 2nd Divisions of Casta?os’ army, which were thus mutilated before they reached the Ebro. To those comparatively veteran troops were added eight new battalions of raw levies—the regiments of Baza, Almeria, Loxa, and Santa Fé. Starting on their long march from Granada on October 8, the head of Reding’s column had only reached Murcia on October 22, and was thus hopelessly distant from any point where it could have been useful when the campaign began. Nor was this the last detachment which the Junta directed on Catalonia: it sent thither part of the prisoners from Lisbon, whom the Convention of Cintra had delivered—3,500 of the men who had once formed the division of Caraffa. Laguna, who now held the command, landed from English transports at La Rapita near Tortosa on October 25, and marched from thence on Tarragona.
It is safe to say that of these 23,000 men transferred to Catalonia from Aragon, Granada, and Portugal, every man ought to have been pushed forward to help Casta?os on the Ebro, and not distracted to the side-issue at Barcelona. It was mad to send them thither when the main force facing Jourdan and King Joseph did not yet amount to 75,000 men. Catalonia, with such small aid as the Balearic Islands could give, was strong enough to defend herself against the motley hordes of Duhesme and Reille.
At the moment when the feeble offensive of Casta?os and Palafox began, on the line of the Ebro, the French had some 65,000 men ranged opposite them, while a reserve of 10,000 was formed at Bayonne, and the leading columns of the ‘Grand Army’ from Germany were only ten or twelve marches away. Napoleon had, by a decree issued on September 7, recast the form of his army of Spain. It was in the future to consist of seven army corps. The 1st, 4th, and 5th were to be composed of old divisions from the Rhine and the Elbe. Of the forces already on the spot Bessières’ troops were to form the 2nd Corps, Moncey’s the 3rd, the still incomplete divisions under Ney the 6th. The army of Catalonia, where St. Cyr was superseding Reille, formed the 7th Corps. Junot’s army from Portugal, when it once more appeared upon the scene, made the 8th, but in September Napoleon did not yet know of its fate, and it only received its number and its place in the host at a much later date. Many alterations of detail were made in the brigades and divisions that formed the new 2nd and 3rd Corps. All the bataillons de marche were abolished, and their men drafted into the old regiments. The fifteen ‘provisional regiments,’ which had composed the whole of Moncey’s and a considerable part of Bessières’ strength, were taken into the regular establishment of the army, and renumbered as the 114th-120th of the Line and the 33rd Léger, two provisional regiments being told off to form each of the new bodies. There was a certain amount of shifting of units, but in the main the brigades and divisions of these two corps remained intact.
On or about October 8-10 Bessières lay at Miranda and Murguia, guarding against any possible descent of Blake from Villarcayo upon the Upper Ebro. Ney was at La Guardia, facing Pignatelli’s Castilians, who occupied his old head quarters at Logro?o. Moncey had thrown back his left to guard against a possible descent of Palafox upon Navarre, and was behind the line of the river Aragon, with his right at Estella, his centre at Falces and Tafalla, and his left facing Sanguesa, where it was opposed by the advanced division of the army of Palafox under O’Neille. For the Captain-General of Aragon, pleased with a plan proposed to him by Colonel Doyle, the English military attaché in his camp, had resolved to make a long turning movement under the roots of the Pyrenees, exactly parallel to that which Blake was executing at the other end of the line. With this object he sent out from Saragossa, on September 29, O’Neille with a division of Aragonese strengthened by a few Murcian and Valencian battalions, and numbering some 9,000 bayonets. This detachment, marching in a leisurely way, reached Sanguesa on the Upper Aragon, but there stopped short, on getting information that Moncey’s corps lay before it in some strength. Palafox then sent up in support a second division, Saint March’s Murcians and Valencians, who advanced to Egea and there halted. There was considerable bickering all through the second half of October on this line, but Sanguesa remained in the hands of the Spaniards, Moncey being too much distracted by the movements of Casta?os in the direction of Tudela to dare to concentrate his whole force for a blow at Saint March and O’Neille. The latter, on the other hand, had realized that if they pressed further forward towards Pampeluna, as their commander-in-chief had originally intended, they would leave Moncey so much in their rear that he could cut them off both from Saragossa and from the Army of the Centre. Here then matters had come to a deadlock; but the position was all in favour of the French, who lay compactly in the centre, while O’Neille and Saint March were separated from Casta?os by a gap of sixty miles, and Blake on the other wing was about seventy (as the crow flies) from the army of Castile.
THE PRELIMINARY FIGHTING: ARRIVAL OF NAPOLEON
By the middle of October the French and Spanish armies were in presence of each other along the whole line of the Ebro, and it seemed certain that one or other of them must at last take the offensive. Both were still in expectation of reinforcements, but those which the Spaniards could expect to receive within the next few weeks were comparatively unimportant, while their adversaries knew that more than 100,000 men from Germany were due at Bayonne in the last days of October. Clearly it was for Casta?os and his colleagues to make a move now or never. The wasted months of August and September could not be recalled, but there was still time to attack Bessières, Ney, and Moncey, before the arrival of the Emperor and the three veteran corps from the Elbe.
Matters lay thus when the Spanish generals resolved on a perfectly new and wildly impracticable scheme. Casta?os had come to the conclusion—a thoroughly sound one—that his 34,000 men were too few to make a frontal attack on the French on the line between Miranda and Calahorra. He left Madrid on October 13, deeply chagrined to find that the Central Junta had no intention of making him commander-in-chief. Instead of being able to issue orders to the other generals, he must meet them on equal terms and endeavour to cajole them into adopting a common plan of operations. Accordingly he rode to Saragossa to visit Palafox, and after long and not very friendly converse drew out a new plan. The Army of the Centre was to shift itself down the Ebro, leaving the troops of Pignatelli (the ‘Army of Castile’) and of Grimarest (the 2nd Andalusian division) to ‘contain’ Ney and Bessières. The rest were to concentrate at Tudela, where they were to be joined by as many battalions of the Aragonese levies at Saragossa as could take the field. With some 25,000 or 30,000 men at the highest estimate, Casta?os and Palafox were to fall upon Moncey’s flank at the bridge of Caparrosa. Meanwhile O’Neille and Saint March, with the advanced divisions of the army of Aragon, were to break up from Sanguesa, march round Pampeluna by the foot-hills of the Pyrenees, and place themselves across the road to France. Moncey was thus to be surrounded, and a second Baylen was to ensue! Indeed, if Blake could be persuaded to push forward once more to Bilbao, and thence into Guipuzcoa, the whole army of King Joseph (as it was hoped) might be cut off and made prisoners. Eighty thousand men, according to this strange scheme, starting from bases 200 miles apart, were to surround 65,000 French in a most difficult mountain country. Meanwhile the enormous gap between Blake’s right and Casta?os’ left was to remain wholly unguarded, for the army of Estremadura was still in the far distance; while nothing was to be left opposite Bessières and Ney save Pignatelli’s disorderly ‘Army of Castile,’ and Grimarest’s 6,000 Andalusians.
But before the scheme for the cutting off of Moncey had even begun to be carried out, Casta?os and Palafox had a rude awakening. They were themselves attacked by the army which they were so confidently proposing to surround. King Joseph, emboldened by the long delay of his adversaries in advancing, had several times discussed with Jourdan, Bessières, and Ney schemes for taking the offensive. Indeed he had sketched out in September no less than five separate plans for bringing the enemy to an action, and it is probable that he might have tried one of them if he had been allowed a free hand. Napoleon, however, having determined to come to Spain in person, put an embargo on any comprehensive scheme for an advance on Madrid, and restricted his brother to minor operations.
But there was nothing in the Emperor’s instructions which forbade a blow on a small scale, if the Spaniards should grow too daring. There was now a good excuse for such a move, for both Pignatelli and Grimarest had been trespassing beyond the Ebro. They seem to have moved forward quite contrary to the intentions of Casta?os, who at this moment was proposing to refuse battle with his left and centre, and to draw the bulk of his army southward to Tudela. But his two divisional generals pushed so far forward, that they at last drew upon themselves most undesired attentions from the French marshals. Pignatelli had thrown troops across the Ebro to Viana: Grimarest had pushed detachments still further forward into Navarre, to Mendavia, Sesma, and Lerin. Joseph and Jourdan resolved to drive back these outlying posts, and to find out what was behind them. About 25,000 men were put in movement against the 16,000 Spaniards who had so rashly crossed the river. Moncey marched against Grimarest with two divisions: Ney with a similar force fell upon Pignatelli, while Bessières sent a division down the southern bank of the Ebro by Haro and Briones, to threaten the line of retreat of the army of Castile across the bridge of Logro?o.
Against such forces the Spaniards could do nothing: on the twenty-fifth Ney marched on Viana, and drove in Pignatelli’s advanced guard. On the following day he opened a fierce cannonade upon Logro?o from across the river, while at the same time Bonnet’s division, sent by Bessières, marched upon the town from the hither side of the Ebro. Pignatelli was a craven, and his Castilian levies proved to be the worst of all the material which the Spaniards had brought to the front. General and army vanished in the night, without even stopping to blow up the great bridge, though they had mined it and laid the train in due form. Ney’s officers crossing at dawn found all prepared, except the sappers who should have applied the match! Neither Ney nor Bonnet got in touch with the flying horde: but in sheer panic Pignatelli abandoned his guns by the roadside, and did not stop till he had joined Casta?os at Cintruenigo, near Tudela. His hurried retreat was wholly unnecessary, for the French did not move beyond Logro?o, and Casta?os was able to send out next morning a brigade which picked up the deserted guns and brought them in without molestation. Rightly indignant, the Commander-in-chief removed Pignatelli from his post, and distributed his demoralized battalions among the divisions of Grimarest, La Pe?a, and Llamas, leaving in separate existence only a single brigade of six battalions under Cartaojal, which mainly consisted of the few regular battalions that had been lent to Pignatelli to stiffen his raw levies. Thus the ‘Army of Castile’ ceased to exist.
On the same day that the Castilians were routed by Ney, the 2nd Andalusian division was severely handled by Moncey. When that Marshal advanced against Lerin and Sesma with the divisions of Morlot and Maurice Mathieu, Grimarest withdrew beyond the Ebro, abandoning by some oversight his vanguard. This force, commanded by a resolute officer, Colonel Cruz-Murgeon, was enveloped at Lerin by the division of Morlot. The colonel shut himself up in the mediaeval castle of that town, and defended himself for two days, in hopes that he might be succoured. But his chief had fled beyond the river, and could not be induced to return by any appeals. On October 27 Cruz-Murgeon had to surrender, after two-thirds of his troops had been killed or wounded. Their obstinate defence was the more creditable because they were all new levies, consisting of a single Andalusian battalion (Tiradores de Cadiz) and a few Catalan volunteers. Marshal Moncey then occupied Lodosa and its bridge, but made no attempt to follow Grimarest, who was able to rejoin his chief without further loss.
Casta?os was greatly disturbed by the vigorous offensive movement of Ney and Moncey. Seeing the French so strong and so confident, he was struck with sudden qualms as to the advisability of the movement on Caparrosa and Pampeluna, which he and Palafox had agreed to carry out. He proposed to his colleague that they should drop their plan for surrounding Moncey, and attempt no more than an attack on his flanks at Caparrosa and Sanguesa. Meanwhile he concentrated the greater part of his army at Calahorra and Tudela . The initiative had passed to the French, and if Ney and Moncey did not seize the opportunity for an advance against the Army of the Centre, it was merely because they knew that Napoleon was now close at hand—he reached Bayonne four days later—and would not wish them to attempt anything decisive without his orders.
Meanwhile there arrived from Madrid a deputation from the Supreme Junta, consisting of Francisco Palafox (the younger brother of the Captain-General), of Coupigny, Reding’s colleague at the victory of Baylen, and the intriguing Conde de Montijo. The Junta were indignant that Casta?os had not made bricks without straw. Though they had not given him any appreciable reinforcements, they had expected him to attack the French and win a great victory beyond the Ebro. Conscious that the deputies came to him in no friendly spirit, Casta?os nevertheless received them with all respect, and laid before them the difficulties of his situation. Joseph Palafox came up from Saragossa to join the conference, and after a long and stormy meeting—this was the conference which so disgusted Colonel Graham—it was decided to resume offensive operations . The idea was a mad one, for six days before the council of war was held two French army corps, those of Victor and Lefebvre, had crossed the Bidassoa and entered Spain. There were now 110,000 instead of 65,000 enemies in front of the Spanish armies. Moreover, and this was still more important, Napoleon himself had reached Bayonne on November 3.
Nevertheless it was resolved once more to push forward and fall upon Moncey. Casta?os was to leave one division at Calahorra, and to bring the rest of his army over the Ebro to attack the bridge of Caparrosa: O’Neille and Saint March were to come down from Sanguesa to co-operate with him: Joseph Palafox was to bring up the Aragonese reserves from Saragossa. The only sign of prudence that appeared was that the council of war agreed not to commence the attack on Moncey till they had learnt how Blake and the army of Galicia were faring in Biscay. For that general had, as they knew, commenced some days before his second advance on Bilbao. Since the armies on the Central Ebro hung back, it was in the distant region on the coast that the first important collision between the Spaniards and the French reinforcements from Germany was to take place. For a fortnight more there was comparative quiet in front of Tudela and Caparrosa. Meanwhile Casta?os, prostrated by an attack of the gout, took to his bed, and the Army of the Centre was abandoned for a few days to the tender mercies of the deputation from Madrid.
There is a strange contrast when we turn from the study of the rash and inconsiderate plans of the Spanish generals to mark the movements of Napoleon. The Emperor had left Erfurt on October 14: on the nineteenth he had reached Paris, where he stayed for ten days, busied not only with the ‘logistics’ of moving the columns of the ‘Grand Army’ across France, but with all manner of administrative work. He had also to arrange the details of the conscription: though he had raised in 1807 the enormous mass of new levies of which we had to speak in an earlier chapter, he now asked for 140,000 men more. Of these, 80,000 were to be drawn from the classes of 1806-9, which had already contributed so heavily to the army. The balance was to be taken from the class of 1810, whose members were still fifteen months below the legal age. From these multitudes of young soldiers every regiment of the army of Spain was to be brought up to full strength, but the majority were destined to reinforce the depleted armies of Germany and Italy, which had been thinned of veterans for the Peninsular War.
On October 25 Bonaparte presided at the opening of the Legislative Assembly, and made a characteristic harangue to its members. He painted the situation of the Empire in the most roseate colours. ‘The sight of this great French family, once torn apart by differences of opinion and domestic hatreds, but now so tranquil, prosperous, and united, had sensibly touched his soul. To be happy himself he only required the assurance that France also was happy. Law, finance, the Church, every branch of the state, seemed in the most flourishing condition. The Empire was strong in its alliances with Russia, the Confederation of the Rhine, Denmark, Switzerland, and Naples. Great Britain, it was true, had landed some troops in the Peninsula, and stirred up insurrections there. But this was a blessing in disguise. The Providence which had so constantly protected the arms of France, had deigned to strike the English ministry with blindness, and to induce them to present an army on the Continent where it was doomed to inevitable destruction. In a few days the Emperor would place himself at the head of his troops, and, with the aid of God, would crown in Madrid the true King of Spain, and plant his eagles on the forts of Lisbon.’
Four days later Bonaparte quitted Paris, and passing hastily through Orleans and Bordeaux reached Bayonne at three o’clock in the morning of November 3. The corps of Victor and Lefebvre, with two divisions of dragoons, were several days ahead of him, and had already crossed the Bidassoa. The Imperial Guard and the divisions destined for Ney, as well as a great mass of cavalry, were just converging on the frontier. Mortier’s corps was not very far off: Junot’s army from Portugal had already landed at Quiberon and Rochefort, and was being directed on Bordeaux. All the machinery for the great blow was now ready.
Napoleon profoundly despised the Spanish army and the Spanish generals. His correspondence is full of contemptuous allusions to them: ‘ever since he served at Toulon he knew them for the worst troops in Europe.’ ‘Nothing could be so bad as the Spaniards—they are mere rabble—6,000 French can beat 20,000 of them.’ ‘The whole Spanish army could not turn 15,000 good troops out of a position that had been properly occupied.’ Nevertheless he had determined to run no risks: the second Peninsular campaign must not end like the first, in a fiasco and a humiliating retreat. It was for this reason that the Emperor had massed more than 250,000 good troops against the tumultuary levies of the Junta—a force which, in his private opinion, was far more than enough to sweep the whole of his adversaries into the sea before the year 1808 should have run out. Any expedition in which he himself took part must, for the sake of his prestige, be conducted from beginning to end in a series of spectacular triumphs. It was better to use a larger army than was absolutely necessary, in order to make his blows sufficiently heavy, and to get the Spanish business over as rapidly as possible. If the whole Peninsula were overrun in a few months, and resistance had been completely beaten down ere the winter was over, there would be no chance of that intervention on the part of Austria which was the only danger on the political horizon.
Napoleon, therefore, drew out his plans not merely for a triumphant advance on Madrid, but for the complete annihilation of the Spanish armies on the Ebro and in Biscay. From a careful study of the dispatches of his lieutenants, he had realized the existence of the great gap in the direction of Burgos between the armies of Blake and of Casta?os. His plan of campaign, stated shortly, was to burst in through this gap, so as to separate the Spanish armies on his left and right, and then to wheel troops outwards in both directions so as to surround and annihilate them. Both Blake and Palafox were, at this moment, playing the game that he most desired. The further that the former pressed onward into Biscay, the nearer that the latter drew to the roots of the Pyrenees, the more did they expose themselves to being encompassed by great masses of troops breaking out from Burgos and Logro?o to fall upon their flank and rear. When the Emperor drew up his scheme he knew that Blake was in front of Zornoza, and that the bulk of the army of Aragon was at Sanguesa. Meanwhile the French advanced divisions were in possession of Miranda, Logro?o, and Lodosa, the three chief passages over the Upper Ebro. A glance at the map is sufficient to show that the moment that the Emperor and his reserves reached Vittoria the Spanish armies were in the most perilous position. It would suffice to order a march on Burgos on the one hand and on Tudela on the other, and then the troops of Aragon and Galicia would not merely be cut off from any possible retreat on Madrid, but run grave danger of annihilation. A further advance of the French would probably thrust the one against the Pyrenees, and roll the other into the Bay of Biscay.
For this reason it was the Emperor’s wish that his lieutenants should refrain from attacking Blake and Palafox till he himself was ready to march on Burgos. For any premature advance against the Spaniards might force them to retreat from their dangerous advanced positions, and fall back the one on Reynosa the other on Saragossa, where they would be much less exposed.
The distribution of the ‘Grand Army’ was to be as follows. Lefebvre with the 4th Corps was to present himself in front of Blake between Durango and Zornoza, and to hold him fast without pressing him. Moncey with the 3rd Corps, in a similar way, was to ‘contain’ Palafox and Casta?os from his posts at Lodosa, Caparrosa, and Tafalla. Meanwhile Victor, with the newly arrived 1st Corps, was to endeavour to get into Blake’s rear, by the road Vittoria—Murguia—Ordu?a. The main body of the army, consisting of the troops of Bessières and Ney, King Joseph’s reserve, the Imperial Guard, and four divisions of cavalry, was to march on Burgos. Napoleon knew that there was no large body of Spaniards in that place: he expected to find there Pignatelli’s ‘Army of Castile,’ but this force (as we have seen) had ceased to exist, having been drafted with ignominy into the ranks of the army of Andalusia. As a matter of fact Burgos was now occupied by a new force from the second line—the long-expected army of Estremadura, some 12,000 strong, which had at last come up from Madrid and taken its place at the front. But Napoleon’s reasoning still held good: any Spanish army that might chance to be at Burgos must be overwhelmed by the enormous mass of troops that was about to be hurled upon it. The moment that it was disposed of, Ney with the 6th Corps was to wheel to the east, and march by Aranda and Soria, so as to place himself between Casta?os and Palafox and Madrid. Then he would turn their flank at Tarazona and Tudela, and—in conjunction with Moncey—drive them northward against the Pyrenees. In a similar way, upon the other flank, the 2nd Corps was to wheel to the north-west and march from Burgos on Reynosa, there to intercept Blake, if he had not already been cut off by Victor’s shorter turning movement. Meanwhile the Emperor with the rest of his army, followed by the new reserves (Mortier’s corps and other troops) which were due from France, would march straight from Burgos on Madrid, force the defiles of the Somosierra and Guadarrama, and seize the Spanish capital. He was well aware that there would be no serious hostile force in front of him, since the armies of Blake, Palafox, and Casta?os were all provided for. He does not seem to have known of the army of Estremadura, or to have had any idea that the English forces from Portugal might conceivably be on their way to cover Madrid. There is no mention of Sir John Moore and his host in the imperial dispatches till December 5.
All being ready, Bonaparte rode out of Bayonne on November 4, having stayed there only thirty-six hours. Before leaving he had received one vexatious piece of news: Lefebvre, in direct disobedience to his orders, had attacked Blake on October 31, and forced him back beyond Bilbao. This made the plan for the cutting off of the army of Galicia a little more difficult, since the Spaniards were now forty miles further back, and not nearly so much exposed as they had been hitherto. But it was still not impossible that Victor might succeed in circumventing them, and forcing them into the Bay of Biscay.
It is impossible to withhold our admiration from the Emperor’s simple yet all-embracing plan of operations. It is true that the campaign was made more easy by the fact that he was dealing with raw and undisciplined armies and inexpert generals. It is also clear that he rightly reckoned on having two men in the field against every one whom the Spaniards could produce. But the excellence of a scheme is not to be judged merely by the difficulties in its way; and military genius can be displayed in dealing with an easy as well as with a dangerous problem. Half a dozen other plans for conducting the invasion of Spain might have been drawn up, but it is impossible to see that any better one could have been constructed. In its main lines it was carried out with complete success: the armies of the Junta were scattered to the winds, and Madrid fell almost without a blow.
It was only when the capital had been occupied, and the troops of Blake and Belvedere, of Casta?os and Palafox were flying devious over half the provinces of Spain, that the difficulties of the Peninsular War began to develop themselves. Napoleon had never before had any experience of the character of guerilla warfare, or the kind of resistance that can be offered by a proud and revengeful nation which has made up its mind never to submit to the conqueror. In his complete ignorance of Spain and the Spaniards, he imagined that he had a very simple campaign to conduct. The subjugation of the Peninsula was to him an ordinary military problem, like the invasion of Lombardy or of Prussia, and he went forth in cheerful confidence to ‘plant the eagles of France on the forts of Lisbon,’ and to ‘drive the Britannic leopard from the soil of the Peninsula, which it defiles by its presence.’ But the last chapter of this story was to be told not at Lisbon but at Toulouse: and ‘the Beneficent Providence which had deigned to strike the British ministry with such blindness that they had been induced to send an army to the Continent,’ had other designs than Bonaparte supposed.
THE MISFORTUNES OF JOACHIM BLAKE: ZORNOZA AND ESPINOSA DE LOS MONTEROS
The campaign of November 1808 was fought out upon three separate theatres of war, though every movement of the French armies which engaged in it formed part of a single plan, and was properly linked to the operations which were progressing upon other sections of the front. The working out of Napoleon’s great scheme, therefore, must be dealt with under three heads—the destruction of Blake’s ‘Army of the Left’ in the north-west; the rout of the armies of Andalusia and Aragon upon the banks of the Ebro; and the central advance of the Emperor upon Burgos and Madrid, which completed the plan.
We must first deal with the misfortunes of Blake and his Galician host, both on chronological grounds—it was he who first felt the weight of the French arms—and also because Napoleon rightly attached more importance to the destruction of this, the most formidable of the Spanish armies, than to the other operations which he was carrying out at the same moment.
It will be remembered that after his first abortive expedition against Bilbao, and his retreat before Ney , Blake had fallen back to Valmaceda. Finding that he was not pursued, he drew up to that point the divisions which he had hitherto kept in the upper valley of the Ebro, and prepared to advance again, this time with his whole army massed for a bold stroke. On October 11 he again marched into Biscay, and drove out of Bilbao the division of General Merlin, which Ney had left behind him to hold the line of the Nervion. On the twelfth this small force fell back on Zornoza and Durango, and halted at the latter place, after having been reinforced from King Joseph’s reserve at Vittoria. Verdier headed the succours, which consisted of three battalions of the Imperial Guard, two battalions of the 118th Regiment, two battalions of Joseph’s own Royal Guards, and the 36th Regiment, which had just come up from France. When strengthened by these 7,000 men, Merlin considered himself able to make a stand, and took up a strong position in front of Durango, the important point at which the roads from Bayonne and from Vittoria to Bilbao meet.
When committing himself to his second expedition into Biscay, Blake was not wholly unaware of the dangers of the step, though he failed to realize them at their full value, since (in common with the other Spanish generals) he greatly underrated the strength of the French army on the Ebro. He intended to carry out his original plan of cutting off Bessières and King Joseph from their retreat on Bayonne, by forcing the position of Durango, and seizing the high-road at Bergara; but he was aware that an advance to that point had its dangers. As long as his divisions had lain in or about Villarcayo and Valmaceda, he had a perfectly clear line of retreat westward in the event of a disaster. But the moment that he pushed forward beyond Bilbao, he could be attacked in flank and rear by any troops whom the King might send up from the valley of the Ebro, by the two mountain-roads which run from Vittoria to the Biscayan capital. One of these is the main route from Vittoria to Bilbao via Murguia and Ordu?a. The other is a more obscure and difficult path, which leads across the rough watershed from Vittoria by Villareal and Villaro to Bilbao. Aware of the fact that he might be assailed by either of these two passes, Blake told off a strong covering force to hold them. Half of Acevedo’s Asturian division, 4,000 strong, was placed at Ordu?a: the other half, with the whole of Martinengo’s 2nd Division of Galicia, 8,500 bayonets in all, took its post in the direction of Villaro. These detachments were eminently justifiable, but they had the unfortunate result of enfeebling the main force that remained available for the stroke at the French in front of Durango. For that operation Blake could only count on his 1st, 3rd, and 4th Divisions, as well as the ‘Vanguard’ and ‘Reserve’ Brigades—a total of 18,000 men.
Blake had seized Bilbao on October 11: it is astonishing therefore to find that he made no forward movement till the twenty-fourth. By this sluggishness he sacrificed his chance of crushing Merlin before he could be reinforced, and—what was far worse—allowed the leading columns of the ‘Grand Army’ to reach Irun. If he had pressed forward on the twelfth or thirteenth, they would still have been many marches away, trailing across Guyenne and Gascony. Having once put his hand to such a dangerous man?uvre as that of pushing between the French flank and the northern sea, Blake was most unwise to leave the enemy time to divine his object and to concentrate against him. A rapid stroke at Durango and Bergara, so as to cut the great high-road to France in the rear of Bessières, was his only chance. Such an attempt would probably have landed him in ultimate disaster, for the enemy (even before the ‘Grand Army’ arrived) were far more numerous than he supposed. He had valued them at 40,000 men, while they were really 64,000 strong. But having framed the plan, he should at least have made a strenuous attempt to carry it out. It is possible to explain but not to excuse his delay: his army was not equipped for a winter campaign, and the snow was beginning to lie on the upper slopes of the Cantabrian hills and the Pyrenees. While he was vainly trying to obtain great-coats and shoes for his somewhat tattered army, from the Central Junta or the English, and while he was accumulating stores in Bilbao, the days slipped by with fatal rapidity.
It was not till October 24 that he at last moved forward from Bilbao, and committed himself to the now hopeless task of clearing the way to Durango and Bergara. On that day his advanced guard drove Merlin’s outlying posts from their positions, and came face to face with the French main body, drawn out on the hillsides of Baquijano, a few miles in front of Durango. The enemy expected him to attack next day, but he had just received confused notices from the peasantry to the effect that enormous reinforcements had reached Irun and San Sebastian, and were within supporting distance of the comparatively small force with which he had hitherto been dealing. This information threw him back into the condition of doubt and hesitation from which he had for a moment emerged, and he proceeded to halt for another full week in front of the Durango position. Yet it was clear that there were only two rational alternatives before him: one was to attack Merlin and Verdier before they could draw succour from the newly arrived corps. The other was to fall back at once to a position in which he could not be enveloped and outflanked, i.e. to retire behind Bilbao, holding that town with nothing more than a small detachment which could easily get away if attacked. But Blake did nothing, and waited in the supremely dangerous post of Zornoza, in front of Durango, till the enemy fell upon him at his leisure.
The troops whose arrival at Irun had been reported consisted of the two leading divisions of the 4th Corps, that of Lefebvre, and of the whole of the 1st Corps, that of Victor. The former, arriving as early as October 18, only seven days after Blake captured Bilbao, marched westward, and replaced Merlin and Verdier in the Durango position. The troops of these two generals were directed by King Joseph to rejoin their proper commanders when relieved, so Verdier led the Guards back to the central reserve, while Merlin reported himself to Ney, at La Guardia. To compensate Lefebvre for their departure, and for the non-arrival of his third division, that of Valence, which still lay far to the rear, Villatte’s division of the 1st Corps was sent to Durango. Marshal Victor himself, with his other two divisions, took the road to Vittoria, and from thence, at the King’s orders, transferred himself to Murguia, on the cross-road over the mountains to Bilbao. Here he was in a position to strike at Blake’s rear, after driving off the 4,000 men of Acevedo’s Asturian division, who (as it will be remembered) had been told off by the Spanish General to cover this road.
King Joseph, inclining for once to a bold stroke, wished to push Victor across the hills on to Bilbao, while Lefebvre should advance along the high-road and drive Blake into the trap. Bessières at the same moment might move a division by Ordu?a and Oquendo, and place himself at Valmaceda, which Blake would have to pass if he escaped from Victor at Bilbao. This plan was eminently sound, for there was no doubt that the two marshals, who had at their disposal some 35,000 men, could easily have brushed out of their way the two divisions under Acevedo and Martinengo which Blake had left behind him in the passes. Nothing could have prevented them from seizing Bilbao and Valmaceda, and the Spanish army would have been surrounded and captured. At the best some part of it might have escaped along the coast-road to Santander, if its commander detected ere it was too late the full danger of his position.
This scheme, however, was not carried out: Bessières, Victor, and Ney showed themselves opposed to it: Napoleon had announced that he intended ere long to appear in person, and that he did not wish to have matters hurried before his arrival. His obsequious lieutenants refused to concur in any great general movement which might not win his approval. Victor, in particular, urged that he had been ordered to have the whole of the 1st Corps concentrated at Vittoria, and that if he marched northward into Biscay he would be violating his master’s express command. Joseph and Jourdan, therefore, resolved to defer the execution of their plan for the annihilation of Blake, and sent orders to Lefebvre to maintain his defensive position at Durango, and make no forward movement. In so doing they were acting exactly as the Emperor desired.
They had forgotten, however, to reckon with the personal ambition of the old Duke of Dantzig. Lefebvre, in spite of his many campaigns, had never before had the chance of fighting on his own account a pitched battle of the first class. The Spanish army had been lying before him for a week doing nothing, its commander being evidently afraid to attack. Its force was not very great—indeed it was outnumbered by that of the Marshal whose three divisions counted not less than 21,000 bayonets. Noting with the eye of an old soldier Blake’s indecision and obvious timidity, he could not resist the temptation of falling upon him. Notwithstanding the King’s orders, he resolved to strike, covering his disobedience by a futile excuse to the effect that he had observed preparations for taking the offensive on the part of the enemy, and that his outposts had been attacked.
Blake’s army lay before him, posted in three lines, with the village of Zornoza to its rear. In front, on a range of comparatively low hills, was the ‘Vanguard Brigade,’ drawn up across the road with the 1st Division of Galicia to its left on somewhat higher ground. They were supported by the 3rd and 4th Divisions, while the ‘Reserve Brigade’ occupied the houses of Zornoza to the rear of all. There were only six guns with the army, as Blake had sent the rest of his artillery to the rear, when advancing into the mountains: this single battery lay with the Vanguard on the lower heights. The whole amounted to 19,000 men, a slight reinforcement having just come to hand by the arrival of the 1st Catalonian Light Infantry, the advanced guard of La Romana’s army from the Baltic. That general, having landed at Santander on October 11, had reorganized his force as the ‘5th Division of the army of Galicia’ and sent it forward under his senior brigadier, the Conde de San Roman. But only the single Catalonian battalion had passed Bilbao at the moment when Lefebvre delivered his attack.
The plan of the Marshal’s advance was quite simple. The division of Villatte drove in the front line of the Spanish right, and then spread itself out on a long front threatening to turn Blake’s flank. That of Sebastiani, formed in a single dense column, marched along the high-road at the bottom of the valley to pierce the Spanish centre; meanwhile Leval’s Germans attacked the left wing of the enemy, the 1st Division of the army of Galicia. A dense fog, a common phenomenon in the Pyrenees in the late autumn, hid the advance of the French, so that they were close upon the front line of Blake’s army before they were observed. The first line was easily driven in, but the whole army rallied on the heights of San Martin and stood at bay. Lefebvre cannonaded them for some time, without meeting with any reply, for Blake had hurried off his single battery to the rear when his first line gave way. Then the Marshal sent in the ten battalions of the division of Sebastiani, who completely cut through the Spanish centre, and left the two wings in isolated and dangerous positions. Without waiting for further developments, Blake gave way and ordered a retreat on Bilbao and Valmaceda. His intact wing-divisions covered the retreat, and though badly beaten he got away with very small loss, no more than 300 killed and wounded, and about the same number of prisoners. The French casualties were insignificant, not amounting in all to more than 200 men. The whole combat, indeed, though 40,000 men were on the field, was very short and not at all costly. The fact was that Blake had been surprised, and had given way at the first push, without making a serious attempt to defend himself. His sending away the guns, at the very commencement of the action, makes it sufficiently clear that he did not hope for ultimate success, and was already contemplating a retreat on Bilbao. His army, if properly handled, could have made a much more creditable fight; in fact it was tactically beaten rather than defeated by force of arms. It made its retreat in very fair order, and was irritated rather than cowed by the check which it had received. English eye-witnesses vouch for the steadiness and good spirit shown by the troops.
Immediately after giving orders for a general retreat behind the river Nervion, Blake had sent dispatches to the two divisions of Acevedo and Martinengo, which were covering his flank against a possible turning movement from the valley of the Ebro. They were told to save themselves, by falling back at once to Bilbao and joining the main army in its retreat. The part of the Asturian division which lay at Ordu?a succeeded in carrying out this order. But the remainder of Acevedo’s men and the whole of those of Martinengo—some 8,000 bayonets in all—were at Villaro, a point higher up in the mountains, on a much more difficult road, and closer to the French. They received Blake’s dispatch too late, and on pushing down the northern side of the pass which they had been holding, they learnt at Miravalles, only ten miles from Bilbao, that the latter town was in the hands of the French. Blake had evacuated it on the early morning of November 1, and Lefebvre had occupied it on the same night. Urging his pursuit some way beyond Bilbao in the hope of overtaking Blake, the duke pushed as far as Valmaceda: but even here the Galician army would make no stand, but fell back still further westward to Nava. Seeing that he could not reach his adversary, Lefebvre left the division of Villatte at Valmaceda to observe Blake, and returned with those of Sebastiani and Leval to Bilbao, to feed and rest his men in the town, after four days of marching in the mountains with very insufficient supplies. This was a very dangerous step, for Blake had been outman?uvred rather than beaten, and was still far too strong to be contained by a mere 7,000 men.
When therefore Acevedo and his column drew near to Bilbao, they learnt that 13,000 French troops blocked their road towards Blake . They drew back a little up the pass, keeping very quiet, and very fortunately failed to attract the attention of Lefebvre, who thought at the most that there were some bands of stragglers in the mountains on his left.
But their situation was still most uncomfortable, for their rearguard began to report that French troops were pushing up from Vittoria and entering the southern end of the defile in which they were blocked. King Joseph had been much vexed to hear of Lefebvre’s disobedience to his orders at Zornoza, but, wishing to draw what profit he could from the victory, sent Victor up the Murguia—Ordu?a road, with orders to cut in upon the line of Blake’s retreat. This the Duke of Belluno failed to accomplish, on account of the rapidity with which the Spanish army had retired. But reaching Amurrio, a few miles beyond Ordu?a, he came upon the flank of Acevedo’s column, whose head was blocked at Miravalles, ten miles further north, by the presence of Lefebvre at Bilbao. If either marshal had realized the situation, the 8,000 Spaniards, caught in a defile without lateral issues, must have surrendered en masse. But Victor had only one division with him, the other was far behind: and imagining that he had chanced upon the whole of Blake’s army he came to a dead stop, while Lefebvre, not yet aware of Victor’s approach, did not move at all. Acevedo wisely kept quiet, and tried to slip across Victor’s front towards Orantia and the river Salcedon: meanwhile the news of his situation reached Blake.
That general was never wanting in personal courage, and had been deeply distressed to hear that his flanking detachment had been cut off. Realizing Acevedo’s danger he resolved to make a sudden ‘offensive return’ against Lefebvre, and to endeavour to clear for a moment the road from Miravalles to Valmaceda, by which his subordinate could escape. On the night of November 4 he concentrated his whole army, which had now been raised to 24,000 men by the arrival of the main body of La Romana’s division from Santander. At dawn on the fifth he fell upon the enemy in his front, by the two roads on each side of the river Salcedon, sending one division and the ‘Vanguard Brigade’ to attack Valmaceda, and two and the ‘Reserve Brigade’ by Orantia along the southern bank of the stream. Villatte had been holding both these paths; but on seeing the heavy forces deployed against him, he withdrew from Orantia and concentrated at Valmaceda. This left the path clear for Acevedo, who escaped along the hillsides without being molested by Victor’s advanced guard, and got into communication with his chief. The inactivity of Victor is inexplicable: when he saw the Asturian division pushing hastily across his front, he should have attacked it at all costs; but though he heard plainly the cannonade of Villatte’s fight with Blake at Valmaceda, he held back, and finally retired on Ordu?a when Acevedo had got out of sight. His only excuse was that he had heard the distant roar of battle die down, and concluded therefore that Villatte (who as he supposed might be supported by the whole of Lefebvre’s corps) must have been victorious.
As a matter of fact the isolated French division had almost suffered the fate that should have befallen the Asturians. Driven out of Valmaceda by Blake, it was falling back on Guenes when it came across Acevedo’s men marching on the opposite side of the Salcedon to join their comrades. Thereupon the Asturian general threw some of his men across the stream to intercept the retiring column. Villatte formed his troops in a solid mass and broke through, but left behind him one gun (an eight-pounder), many of his baggage-wagons, and 300 prisoners. That he escaped at all is a fine testimony to his resolution and his capable handling of his troops, for he had been most wantonly exposed to destruction by Victor’s timidity and Lefebvre’s carelessness .
On hearing of Villatte’s desperate situation, the Duke of Dantzig had realized the consequences of his unjustifiable retreat to Bilbao, and marched up in hot haste with the divisions of Sebastiani and Leval. He was relieved to find that Villatte had extricated himself, and resolved to punish Blake for his unexpected offensive move. But he was unable to do his adversary much harm: the Galician general had only advanced in order to save Acevedo, and did not intend to engage in any serious fighting. When Lefebvre moved forward he found that the Spaniards would not stand. Blake had pushed out two flanking divisions to turn the position at Guenes, on to which Villatte had fallen back, and had his main body placed in front of it. But when Lefebvre advanced, the whole Galician army fell back, only fighting two rearguard actions on November 7, in which they suffered small loss. On the next day there was a more serious engagement of the same sort at Valmaceda, to which the Galicians had withdrawn on the previous night. The troops with which Blake covered his retreat were hustled out of the town with the loss of 150 killed and wounded, and 600 missing. In his dispatches the Spanish general explains that he retreated not because he could not have made a better resistance, but because he had used up all his provisions, and was prevented by the bad weather and the state of the roads from drawing further supplies from Santander and Reynosa, the two nearest points at which they could be procured. For Western Biscay had been eaten bare by the large forces that had been crossing and re-crossing it during the last two months, and was absolutely incapable of feeding the army for a single day. The men too were in a wretched condition, not only from hunger but from bad equipment: hardly any of them had received great-coats, their shoes were worn out, and sickness was very prevalent. An appreciable number of the raw Galician and Asturian levies deserted during the miserable retreat from Guenes and Valmaceda to Espinosa de los Monteros, the next point on the Bilbao-Reynosa road at which Blake stood at bay. When he reached that place he was short of some 6,000 men, less from losses in battle than from wholesale straggling. Moreover he was for the moment deprived of the aid of the greater part of one of his divisions. This was the 4th Galician division, that of General Carbajal: it had formed the extreme left of the army, and had lain nearest to the sea during the fighting about Guenes and Valmaceda. Cut off from the main body, a large portion of it had retreated by the coast-road towards Santander, and only a fraction of it had rejoined the commander-in-chief. The total of Blake’s forces would have been nearly 40,000, if his army had been still at the strength with which each corps started on the campaign. But for its decisive battle he had no more than 23,000 in hand.
Beyond Valmaceda he had been pursued no longer by Lefebvre, but by Victor. The latter, soundly rebuked by the Emperor for his inactivity on November 5, had advanced again from Ordu?a, had picked up the division of Villatte—which properly belonged to his corps—and had then taken the lead in pressing Blake. Lefebvre, reduced to his original force—the 13,000 men of Sebastiani and Leval, followed as far as the end of the defile of El Berron, and then turned off by a flanking road which reaches the upper valley of the Ebro at Medina de Pomar. He intended to strike at Villarcayo and Reynosa, and to intercept Blake’s retreat at one of these two points. If he arrived there before the Galicians, who would be delayed by the necessity of fighting continual rearguard actions with Victor, he hoped that the whole of the Spanish army might be surrounded and captured.
Map of battle of Espinosa
Enlarge Battle of Espinosa. November 11th, 1808.
In this expectation he was disappointed, for matters came to a head before he was near enough to exercise any influence on the approaching battle. On November 10 Blake turned to bay: his rearguard, composed of the troops from the Baltic, had been so much harassed and detained by the incessant attacks of Victor’s leading division, that its commander, the Conde de San Roman, sent to the general to ask for aid. Unless supported by more troops he would be surrounded and cut off. Tempted by the strong defensive position in front of the picturesque old town of Espinosa de los Monteros, Blake directed the rearguard to take post there, and brought up the whole of the rest of his army into line with them. At this point the high-road along the river Trueba, after passing through a small plain (the Campo de Pedralva), reaches a defile almost blocked by the little town of Espinosa, for steep hills descending from each flank narrow the breadth of the passage to half a mile. Here Blake occupied a semicircular position of considerable strength. The troops of San Roman took post at its southern end, on a hill above the high-road, and close to the river’s edge. The line was prolonged to the north of them, across the narrow space of level ground, by the Vanguard Brigade (Mendizabal) and the 3rd Division (Riquelme). Where the ground begins to rise again lay the 1st Division (Figueroa), and on the extreme left, far to the north, the Asturians of Acevedo occupied a lofty ridge called Las Pe?ucas. Here they were so strongly placed that it seemed unlikely that they could either be turned or dislodged by a frontal attack. The rest of the army formed a second line: the Reserve Brigade (Mahy) was in the rear of the centre, in the suburb of Espinosa. The 2nd Division (Martinengo) and the small remains of the 4th Division lay behind San Roman, near the Trueba, to support the right wing, along the line of the high-road. The whole amounted to something between 22,000 and 23,000 men, but there were only six guns with the army—the same light battery which had fought at Zornoza. They were posted on the right-centre, with Mendizabal’s brigade, in a position from which they could sweep the level ground in front of Espinosa. Blake also called up to his aid the one outlying force that was within reach, a brigade under General Malaspina, which lay at Villarcayo, guarding the dép?t which had been there established. But these 2,500 men and the six guns which they had with them were prevented, as we shall see, from reaching the field.
The position of Espinosa was most defensible: its projecting wings were each strong, and its centre, drawn far back, could not prudently be attacked as long as the flanking heights were in the hands of the Spaniards. But the pursuing French were under the impression that the Galician army was so thoroughly demoralized, and worn out by hunger and cold, that it would not stand. Victor had with him the infantry of his own corps, some 21,000 strong: Villatte’s division, which led the pursuit, dashed at the enemy as soon as it came upon the field. Six battalions drew up opposite the Spanish centre, to contain any sally that it might make, while the other six swerved to the left and made a desperate attack on the division from the Baltic, which held the heights immediately above the banks of the Trueba. San Roman’s troops, the pick of the Spanish army, made a fine defence, and after two hours of hard fighting retained their position.
At this moment—it was about three o’clock in the short winter afternoon—Victor himself came on the scene, bringing with him his other two divisions, the twenty-two battalions of Ruffin and Lapisse. The Marshal was anxious to vindicate himself from the charge of slackness which his master had made against him for his conduct on November 5, and pushed his men hastily to the front. Nine fresh battalions—a brigade of Ruffin’s and a regiment of Lapisse’s division—attacked again the heights from which Villatte had been repulsed. There followed a very fierce fight, and Blake only succeeded in holding his ground by bringing up to the aid of the regiments from the Baltic the whole of his 3rd Division and part of his 2nd. At dusk the heights were still in Spanish hands, and Victor’s corps was obliged to draw back into the woods at the foot of the position.
This engagement was most creditable to Blake’s army: the lie of the ground was in their favour, but considering their fatigue and semi-starvation they did very well in repulsing equal numbers of the best French troops. They were aided by the reckless manner in which Villatte and Victor attacked: it was not consonant with true military principles that the van should commit itself to a desperate fight before the main body came up, or that a strong position should be assailed without the least attempt at a preliminary reconnaissance.
Next day the Marshal, taught caution by his repulse, resumed the action in a more scientific fashion. He came to the conclusion that Blake would have been induced by the battle of the previous day, to strengthen his right, and in this he was perfectly correct. The Spaniard had shifted all his reserves towards the high-road and the banks of the Trueba, expecting to be attacked on the same ground as on the previous day. But Victor, making no more than a demonstration on this point, sent the greater part of Lapisse’s division to attack the extreme left of Blake’s line—the Asturian troops who held the high ridge to the north of Espinosa. Here the position was very strong, but the troops were not equal in quality to the veteran battalions from the Baltic. When the French pressed up the hill covered by a thick cloud of skirmishers, the Asturians fell into disorder. Their general, Acevedo, and his brigadiers, Quiros and Valdes, were all struck down while trying to lead forward their wavering troops. Finally the whole division gave way and fled down the back of the hill towards Espinosa. Their rout left the enemy in possession of the high ground, which completely commanded the Spanish centre, and General Maison, who had led the attack, fully used his advantage. He fell upon the Galician 1st Division from the flank, while at the same moment Victor ordered his entire line to advance, and assailed the whole of Blake’s front. Such an assault could not fail, and the Spaniards gave way in all directions, and escaped by fording the Trueba and flying over the hillsides towards Reynosa. They had to abandon their six guns and the whole of their baggage, which lay parked behind Espinosa. The losses in killed and wounded were not very heavy—indeed many more were hurt in the hard fighting of November 10 than in the rout of November 11: it is probable that the whole of the Spanish casualties did not exceed 3,000 men: nor were many prisoners captured, for formed troops cannot pursue fugitives who have broken their ranks and taken to the hills. The main loss to Blake’s army came from straggling and desertion after the battle, for the routed battalions, when once scattered over the face of the country, did not easily rally to their colours. When Blake reassembled his force at Reynosa he could only show some 12,000 half-starved men out of the 23,000 who had stood in line at Espinosa. The loss in battle had fallen most heavily on the division from the Baltic—their commander, San Roman, with about 1,000 of his men had fallen in their very creditable struggle on the first day of the fight. Victor’s triumph had not been bloodless: in the repulse of the tenth the fifteen battalions which had tried to storm the heights had all suffered appreciable losses: the total of French casualties on the two days cannot have fallen below 1,000 killed and wounded.
To complete the story of Blake’s retreat, it is only necessary to mention that the detached brigade under Malaspina, which he had called up from Villarcayo to Espinosa, was never able to rejoin. On its way it fell in with Marshal Lefebvre’s corps, marching to outflank the retreat of the Galician army. Attacked by Sebastiani’s division, Malaspina had to turn off and make a hasty and isolated retreat, sacrificing his six guns. The driving away of his small force was the only practical work done in this part of the campaign by the 4th Corps: its long turning movement was rendered useless by Blake’s rapid retreat across its front to Reynosa.
NAPOLEON CROSSES THE EBRO: THE ROUT OF GAMONAL: SOULT’S PURSUIT OF BLAKE
After resting for only thirty-six hours at Bayonne the Emperor, as we have already seen, pushed on to Vittoria, where he arrived on November 6. He found in and about that ancient city the bulk of the Imperial Guard, his brother Joseph’s reserves, the light cavalry of Beaumont and Franceschi, and the heavy cavalry of Latour-Maubourg and Milhaud. The divisions of Marchand and Bisson, which were to complete the corps of Ney, were close behind him, so that he had under his hand a mass of at least 40,000 men. The 2nd Corps, which Bessières had so long commanded, was in front of him at Pancorbo, just beyond the Ebro. Victor and Lefebvre, very busy with Blake, lay on his right hand with some 35,000 men. The troops which had hitherto been under Ney, with Moncey’s 3rd Corps, were on his right—the former at Logro?o, the latter at Caparrosa and Lodosa. They were in close touch with the armies of Casta?os and Palafox.
All was ready for the great stroke, and on the day of his arrival the Emperor gave orders for the general advance, bidding Bessières (whose corps formed his vanguard) to march at once on Burgos and sweep out of it whatever troops he might find in his front. Napoleon imagined that the force in this section of the Spanish line would turn out to be Pignatelli’s ‘Army of Castile,’ but that very untrustworthy body had ceased to exist, and had been drafted into the ranks of the army of Andalusia. It was really with the newly arrived army of Estremadura that the 2nd Corps had to deal.
Everything seemed to promise a successful issue to the Emperor’s plan: the enemy had only a trifling force in front of him at Burgos. Palafox and Casta?os were still holding their dangerous advanced positions at Sanguesa and Calahorra. Blake was being pursued by Victor, while Lefebvre was marching to intercept him. The only contretemps that had occurred was the temporary check to Villatte’s division on November 5, which had been caused by the carelessness of the Duke of Dantzig and the unaccountable timidity of the Duke of Belluno. But by the seventh their mistakes had been repaired, and Blake was once more on the run, with both marshals in full cry behind him. The Emperor found time to send to each of them a letter of bitter rebuke, but told them to push on and catch up the army of Galicia at all hazards. Upon Moncey, on the other hand, he imposed the duty of keeping absolutely quiet in his present position: his share in the game would only begin when Casta?os and Palafox should have been turned and enveloped by troops detached from the central mass of the army.
The total stay of the Emperor in Vittoria covered parts of four days. All this time he was anxiously expecting decisive news from Victor and Lefebvre, but it had not yet arrived when he set forth. He waited, also in vain, for the news that Bessières had occupied Burgos: but that marshal did not show the decision and dash which Napoleon expected from him: finding that there was infantry in the place, he would not risk an action without his master’s presence, and merely contented himself with pushing back the Spanish outposts, and extending his cavalry on both flanks. It is possible that his slackness was due to chagrin on receiving the intelligence that he was about to be superseded in command of the 2nd Corps by Soult, whom the Emperor had summoned out of Germany, and who was due at the front on the ninth. Bessières was to be compensated by being given the command of the reserve-cavalry of the army, five splendid divisions of dragoons, of which four were already on the Ebro. But this post, which would always keep him at the Emperor’s heels, was probably less attractive to him than the more independent position of chief of a corps complete in all arms. He was probably loth to leave the divisions with which he had won the victory of Medina de Rio Seco. Be this as it may, he was told to attack Burgos on the sixth, and on the ninth he had not yet done so. On the morning of that day Soult arrived, alone and on a jaded post-horse, having outridden even his aides-de-camp, who did not join him till twenty-four hours later. He at once took over command of the 2nd Corps, and proceeded next day to carry out the Emperor’s orders by attacking the enemy.
The supersession of Bessières was not the only change which was made during the few days while the Emperor lay at Vittoria. He rearranged the internal organization of several of the corps, altered the brigading of that of Moncey, and turned over to other corps most of the troops which had hitherto served under Ney, leaving to that marshal little more than the two newly arrived divisions from Germany (those of Lagrange and Marchand).
The troops destined for the march on Burgos counted some 70,000 men, but only the 2nd Corps and the cavalry of Milhaud and Franceschi were in the front line. These 18,000 bayonets and 6,500 sabres were amply sufficient for the task. Behind followed fourteen battalions of the Imperial Guard and the cavalry of that corps, the two divisions of Ney’s 6th Corps, the division of Dessolles from King Joseph’s reserve, and two and a half divisions of reserve cavalry—an enormous mass of troops, of which nearly 20,000 were veteran cavalry from Germany, a force invaluable for the sweeping of the great plains of Old Castile.
When we turn to enumerate the forces opposed to the Emperor at Burgos, the disproportion between the two armies appears ludicrous. Down to November 6 the only Spanish troops in that ancient city consisted of two battalions, one from the reserves of the army of Galicia, the other from the army of Castile. They numbered 1,600 men, and had four guns with them. If Bessières had attacked on the sixth, he would have found no more than this miserable detachment to oppose him. But on November 7 there arrived from Madrid the 1st Division of the army of Estremadura under the Conde de Belvedere, 4,000 foot and 400 horse with twelve guns. On the next day there came up the greater part of the 2nd Division of the same army, about 3,000 infantry and two regiments of hussars. On the tenth, therefore, when Soult attacked, Belvedere—who took the command as the senior general present—had about 8,600 bayonets, 1,100 sabres, and sixteen guns under his orders.
Down to November 2 the army of Estremadura had been commanded by Don Joseph Galluzzo, Captain-General of that province—the officer who had given so much trouble to Dalrymple by his refusal to desist from the futile siege of Elvas. He had been repeatedly ordered to bring his army up to Madrid, but did not arrive till the end of October. On the twenty-ninth of that month he marched for Burgos, his three divisions, 13,000 men in all, following each other at intervals of a day. But on November 2 he received orders to lay down his command and return to Aranjuez, to answer some charges brought against him by the Supreme Junta. No successor was nominated to replace him, and hence the conduct of the army fell into the hands of the Conde de Belvedere, the chief of the 1st Division, a rash and headstrong young aristocrat with no military experience whatever. His family influence had made him a general at an age when he might reasonably have expected to lead a company, and he found himself by chance the interim commander of an army: hence came the astonishing series of blunders that led to the combat of Gamonal.
Belvedere’s army was still incomplete, for his 3rd Division had only reached Lerma, thirty miles back on the Madrid road, when the French cavalry came forward and began to press in his outposts. Clearly a crisis was at hand, and the Count had to consider how he would face it. Isolated with 10,000 men on the edge of the great plain of Old Castile, and with an enemy of unknown strength in front of him, he should have been cautious. If he attempted a stand, he should at least have taken advantage of the ancient fortifications of Burgos and the broken ground near the city. But with the most cheerful disregard of common military precautions, the Count marched out of Burgos, advanced a few miles, and drew up his army across the high-road in front of the village of Gamonal. He was in an open plain, his right flank ill covered by the river Arlanzon, which was fordable in many places, his left completely ‘in the air,’ near the village of Vellimar. In front of the line was a large wood, which the road bisects: it gave the enemy every facility for masking his movements till the last moment. Belvedere had ranged his two Estremaduran batteries on the centre: he had six battalions in his first line, including two of the Royal Guards—both very weak—with a cavalry regiment on each flank. His second line was formed of four battalions—two of them Galician: two more battalions, the four Galician guns, and his third cavalry regiment were coming up from the rear, and had not yet taken their post in the second line when the short and sudden battle was fought and lost.
Soult came on the scene during the hours of the morning, with the light-cavalry division of Lasalle deployed in his front. Then followed the dragoons of Milhaud, and three infantry divisions of the 2nd Corps—Mouton in front, then Merle, then Bonnet bringing up the rear. When he came upon the Spaniards, arrayed on either side of the road, the Marshal was able with a single glance to recognize the weakness of their numbers and their position. He did not hesitate for a moment, and rapidly formed his line of battle, under cover of the wood which lay between the two armies. Milhaud’s division of dragoons rode southward and formed up on the banks of the Arlanzon, facing the Spanish right: Lasalle’s four regiments of light cavalry composed the French centre: the twelve battalions of Mouton’s division deployed on the left, and advanced through the wood preceded by a crowd of tirailleurs. There was no need to wait for Merle and Bonnet, who were still some way to the rear.
The engagement opened by a discharge of the two Spanish batteries, directed at those of Mouton’s men who were advancing across the comparatively open ground on each side of the high-road. But they had hardly time to fire three or four salvos before the enemy was upon them. The seven regiments of cavalry which formed the left and centre of the French army had delivered a smashing charge at the infantry opposed to them in the plain. The regiment of Spanish hussars which covered their flank was swept away like chaff before the wind, and the unfortunate Estremaduran and Galician battalions had not even time to throw themselves into squares before this torrent of nearly 5,000 horsemen swept over them. They received the attack in line, with a wavering ill-directed fire which did not stop the enemy for a moment. Five battalions were ridden down in the twinkling of an eye, their colours were all taken, and half the men were hewn down or made prisoners. The remnant fled in disorder towards Burgos. Then Milhaud’s dragoons continued the pursuit, while Lasalle’s chasseurs swerved inwards and fell upon the flank of the surviving half of Belvedere’s army. At the same moment the infantry of Mouton attacked them vigorously from the front. The inevitable result was the complete rout and dispersion of the whole: only the battalion of Walloon Guards succeeded in forming square and going off the field in some order. The rest broke their ranks and poured into Burgos, in a stream of fugitives similar to that which was already rushing through the streets from the other wing. The sixteen Spanish guns were all captured on the spot, those of the second line before they had been unlimbered or fired a single shot.
Belvedere, who was rash and incompetent but no coward, made two desperate attempts to rally his troops, one at the bridge of the Arlanzon, the other outside the city; but his men would not halt for a moment: their only concern was to get clear of the baggage-train which was blocking the road in the transpontine suburb. A little further on the fugitives met the belated battalions of Valencia and Zafra, which had been four or five miles from the field when the battle was lost. The Commander-in-chief tried to form them across the road, and to rally the broken troops upon them: but they cried ‘Treason,’ pretended that their cartridge-boxes were empty, broke their ranks, and headed the flight. Ere night they had reached Lerma, thirty miles to the rear, where the 3rd Division of Estremadura had just arrived.
Napoleon was probably using less than his customary exaggeration when he declared in his Bulletin that he had won the combat of Gamonal at the cost of fifteen killed and fifty wounded. It is at any rate unlikely that his total of casualties exceeded the figure of 200. The army of Estremadura on the other hand had suffered terribly: considering that its whole right wing had been ridden down by cavalry, and that the pursuit had been urged across an open plain for nine miles, it may well have lost the 2,500 killed and wounded and the 900 prisoners spoken of by the more moderate French narrators of the fight. It is certain that it left behind twelve of the twenty-four regimental standards which it carried to the field, and every one of its guns.
The French army celebrated its not very glorious victory in the usual fashion by sacking Burgos with every attendant circumstances of misconduct. They were so much out of hand that the house next to that in which the Emperor had taken up his quarters for the night was pillaged and set on fire, so that he had to shift hastily into another street.
The night of the tenth was devoted to plunder, but on the following morning Bonaparte resumed without delay the execution of his great plan, and hurried out to the south the heavy masses of cavalry which were to sweep the plains of Old Castile. Lasalle’s division pushed on to Lerma, from which the shattered remnants of the army of Belvedere hastily retired. Milhaud’s dragoons were directed on Palencia, Franceschi’s light cavalry more to the west, along the banks of the Urbel and the Odra. Nowhere, save at Lerma, was a single Spanish soldier seen, but it is said that some of Milhaud’s flying parties obtained vague information of the advance of Sir John Moore’s English army beyond the frontier of Portugal. His vanguard was reported to be at Toro, an utter mistake, for the expeditionary force had not really passed Salamanca on the day when the rumour was transmitted to the Emperor. There is no sign in his dispatches of any serious expectation of a possible British diversion.
On the same day on which the cavalry poured down into the plains of Castile, the Emperor began also to execute the great flanking movements which were to circumvent the armies of Blake and Casta?os and to drive the one into the Bay of Biscay and the other against the Pyrenees. On the afternoon of the eleventh Soult, with the three divisions of Mouton, Merle, and Bonnet, and Debelle’s cavalry brigade, was directed to make forced marches upon Reynosa, by the hilly road that passes by Urbel and Olleros. It was hoped that he might reach Reynosa before Blake, whose retreat towards the west was being closely pressed by Victor and Lefebvre. If he failed to catch the army of Galicia, the Marshal was to push on across the mountains, and occupy the important harbour-town of Santander, where it was known that British stores had been landed in great quantities. Milhaud was to co-operate in this movement by sending from Palencia one of his brigades of dragoons, to cut the road from Reynosa to Salda?a, by which the Emperor considered it likely that Blake would send off his heavy baggage and guns when he heard of Soult’s approach. Two days after dispatching Soult to the north-west, the Emperor gave orders for the other great turning movement, which was destined to cut off the army of Casta?os. On the thirteenth Marshal Ney, with one division of his own corps (that of Marchand) and with the four regiments of Dessolles from the central reserve, together with the light cavalry of Beaumont, had marched from Burgos, in the wake of Lasalle’s advance. On the sixteenth he reached Aranda de Duero, and, having halted there for two days, was then directed to turn off from the high-road to Madrid, and march by Osma and Soria so as to fall upon the rear of Casta?os, who was still reported to be in the neighbourhood of Tudela. If he could succeed in placing himself at Tarazona before the enemy moved, the Emperor considered that the fate of the Spanish ‘Army of the Centre’ was sealed.
While the movements of Soult and Ney were developing, Napoleon remained at Burgos. He stayed there in all for ten days, while his army passed by, each corps that arrived pressing forward along the high-road to Madrid by Lerma as far as Aranda. His advance on the Spanish capital was not to begin till he was certain how Blake and Casta?os had fared, and whether there was any considerable body of the enemy interposed between him and the point at which he was about to strike. Meanwhile his correspondence shows a feverish activity devoted to subjects of the most varied kind. A good many hours were devoted to drawing up a scheme for the restoration of the citadel of Burgos: it was the Emperor’s own brain which planned the fortifications that proved such an obstacle to Wellington four years later in September, 1812. It was in these days also that Napoleon dictated the last reply sent to Canning with regard to the peace negotiations that had been started at Erfurt. At the same moment he was commenting on the Code Napoléon, organizing the grand-duchy of Berg, ordering the assembly of Neapolitan troops for a descent on Sicily, regulating the university of Pisa, and drawing up notes on the internal government of Spain for the benefit of his brother Joseph. But the most characteristic of all his actions was a huge piece of ‘commandeering’ of private property. Burgos was the great distributing centre for the wool-trade of Spain: here lay the warehouses of the flock-masters, who owned the great herds of merino sheep that feed upon the central plateaux of Castile. There were 20,000 bales of wool in the city, not government stores but purely private accumulations. The Emperor seized it all and sold it in France, gloating over the fact that it was worth more than 15,000,000 francs.
Neither of the flanking expeditions which the Emperor sent out quite fulfilled his expectations, but that of Soult was worked far more successfully than that of Ney. The Duke of Dalmatia’s corps marched sixty miles over bad Spanish roads in three days—a great feat for infantry—and reached Canduelas close to Reynosa on November 13. If Blake had not already been flying for his life before Victor, he must have been intercepted. But he had made such headlong speed that he had already reached Reynosa only twenty-four hours after his defeat at Espinosa. He had hoped to refit and reorganize his army by means of the vast accumulation of stores collected there, for he had left both Victor and Lefebvre far behind, and calculated on getting several days’ rest. His first act was to begin to evacuate his artillery, baggage, and wounded on to Leon by the road of Aguilar del Campo and Salda?a. He intended to follow with the infantry, but on the morning of November 14 Soult’s advanced cavalry came upon the flank of the great slow-moving convoy, and captured a considerable part of it. The Asturian general, Acevedo, lying wounded in his carriage, was slain, it is said, by Debelle’s dragoons, along with many other unfortunates. Much of the artillery and all the baggage was taken. The news of this disaster showed Blake that his only road into the plain was cut: no retreat on Leon was any longer possible. At the same moment the approach of Victor along the Espinosa road and of Lefebvre along the Villarcayo road was reported to him. It seemed as if he was doomed to destruction or capture, for all the practicable roads were cut, and the army, though a little heartened up by two days of regular rations at Reynosa, was in the most disorganized condition. But making a desperate appeal to the patriotism of his men, Blake abandoned all his stores, all his wheeled vehicles, even his horses, and struck up by a wild mountain track into the heart of the Asturian hills. He went by the gorge of Cabuerniga, along the rocky edge of the Saja torrent, and finally reached the sea near Santillana. This forced march was accomplished in two days of drenching rain, and without food of any kind save a few chestnuts and heads of maize obtained in the villages of this remote upland. If anything was needed to make Blake’s misery complete it was to be met, at Renedo , by the news that he was superseded by La Romana, who came with a commission from the Junta to take command of the army of Galicia. After the receipt of the intelligence of Zornoza, the Government had disgraced the Irish general, and given his place to the worthy Marquis. But the latter did not assume the command for some days, and it was left to Blake to get his army out of the terrible straits in which it now lay. On nearing the coast he obtained a little more food for his men from the English vessels that had escaped from Santander, waited for his stragglers to come up, and, when he had 7,000 men collected, resumed his march. He sent the wrecks of the Asturian division back to their own province, but resolved to return with the rest of his army to the southern side of the Cantabrian Mountains, so as to cover the direct road from Burgos to Galicia. He had quite shaken off his pursuers, and had nothing to fear save physical difficulties in his retreat. But these were severe enough to try the best troops, and Blake’s men, under-fed, destitute of great-coats and shoes, and harassed by endless marching, were in a piteous state: although they had not thrown away their muskets, very few had a dry cartridge left in their boxes. An English officer who accompanied them described them as ‘a half-starved and straggling mob, without officers, and all mixed in utter confusion.’ The snow was now lying deep on the mountains, and the road back to the plains of Leon by Potes and Pedrosa was almost as bare and rough as that by which the troops had saved themselves from the snare at Reynosa. Nevertheless Blake’s miserable army straggled over the defile across the Pe?as de Europa, reached the upper valley of the Esla, and at last got a few days of rest in cantonments around Leon. Here La Romana took up the command, and by December 4 was at the head of 15,000 men. This total was only reached by the junction of outlying troops, for there had come into Leon a few detachments from the rear, and that part of the artillery and its escort which had escaped Soult’s cavalry at Aguilar del Campo. Of Blake’s original force, even after stragglers had come up, there were not 10,000 left: that so many survived is astonishing when we consider the awful march that they had accomplished. Between November 1 and 23 they had trudged for three hundred miles over some of the roughest country in Europe, had crossed the watershed of the Cantabrian Mountains thrice (twice by mere mule-tracks), wading through rain and snow for the greater part of the time, for the weather had been abominable. For mere physical difficulty this retreat far exceeded Moore’s celebrated march to Corunna, but it is fair to remember that Blake had shaken off his pursuers at Reynosa, while the English general was chased by an active enemy from first to last.
While the unhappy army of Galicia was working out its salvation over these rough paths, Soult’s corps had fared comparatively well. On reaching Reynosa on November 14 the Duke of Dalmatia had come into possession of an enormous mass of plunder, the whole of the stores and munitions of Blake’s army. Among the trophies were no less than 15,000 new English muskets and thirty-five unhorsed field-guns. The food secured maintained the 2nd Corps for many days: it included, as an appreciative French consumer informs us, an enormous consignment of excellent Cheshire cheese, newly landed at Santander. At Reynosa Soult’s arrival was followed by that of Victor and Lefebvre, who rode in at the head of their corps the day after the place had been occupied . There was no longer any chance of catching Blake, and the assembly of 50,000 men in this quarter was clearly unnecessary. The Emperor sent orders to Victor to march on Burgos and join the main army, and to Lefebvre to drop down into the plains as far as Carrion, from whence he could threaten Benavente and Leon. Soult, whose men were much less exhausted than those of the other two corps, was charged with the occupation of Santander and the pursuit of Blake. He marched by the high-road to the sea, just in time to see seventeen British ships laden with munitions of war sailing out of the harbour. But he captured, nevertheless, a large quantity of valuable stores, which were too heavy to be removed in a hurry .
The Marshal left Bonnet’s division at Santander, with orders to clear the surrounding district and to keep open the road to Burgos. With the rest of his troops he marched eastward along the coast, trying to get information about Blake’s movements. At San Vincente de la Barquera he came upon the wrecks of the Asturian division which Blake had left behind him when he turned south again into the mountains. They fled in disorder the moment that they were attacked, and the principality seemed exposed without any defence to the Marshal’s advance. But Soult did not intend to lose touch with his master, or to embark on any unauthorized expedition. When he learnt that the Galician army had returned to the plains he followed their example, and crossed the Cantabrian Mountains by a track over the Sierras Albas from Potes to Cervera, almost as impracticable as the parallel defile over which Blake had escaped. Coming down on to the upper valley of the Pisuerga he reached Salda?a, where he was again in close communication with Lefebvre.
Blake and his army might now be considered as being out of the game; they were so dispersed and demoralized that they required no more attention. But there was as yet no news of Ney, who had been sent to execute the turning movement against Casta?os, which corresponded to the one that Soult had carried out against the Galicians. Meanwhile more troops continued to come up to Burgos, ready for the Emperor’s great central march on Madrid. King Joseph and his Guards had arrived there as early as the twelfth; Victor came down from Reynosa on the twenty-first, and on the same day appeared the division of dragoons commanded by Lahoussaye. The belated corps of Mortier and Junot were reported to be nearing Bayonne: both generals received orders to march on Burgos, after equipping their men for a serious winter campaign. Independent of the large bodies of men which were still kept out on the two flanks under Soult and Lefebvre, Moncey and Ney, there would soon be 100,000 bayonets and sabres ready for the decisive blow at the Spanish capital.