SECTION XV: CHAPTER II

THE FRENCH ABANDON GALICIA

When, upon May 30, 1809, Ney arrived at Lugo, and met Soult in conference, it seemed that, now or never, the time had come when a serious endeavour might be made to subdue the Galician insurgents. The whole force of the 2nd and 6th Corps was concentrated in the narrow triangle between Ferrol, Corunna, and Lugo. The two marshals had still 33,000 men fit for service, after deducting the sick. If they set aside competent garrisons for the three towns that we have just named, they could still show some 25,000 men available for field operations, and with such a force Ney was of the opinion that the insurrection might be beaten down. It was true that the 2nd Corps was in a deplorable condition as regards equipment, but on the other hand Corunna and Ferrol were still full of the stores of arms and ammunition that had been captured when they surrendered. Clothing, no doubt, was lamentably deficient, and Ney could only supply hundreds where Soult asked for thousands of boots and capotes; but he refitted his colleague’s troops with muskets and ammunition, and furnished him with eight mountain-guns—field-pieces the Duke of Dalmatia would not take, though a certain number were offered him; for after his experience of the way that his artillery had delayed him in February and March he refused to accept them. Horses and mules were unattainable—nearly half Soult’s cavalry was dismounted, and he had lost most of his sumpter-beasts between Guimaraens and Montalegre. Nevertheless, the corps, after a week’s rest at Lugo, was once more capable of service. Its weakly men had been left in hospital at Oporto, or had fallen by the way in the dreadful defiles of Ruivaens and Salamonde. All that remained were war-hardened veterans, and Soult, out of his 19,000 men, had no more than 800 sick and wounded.[p. 391] He resolved to disembarrass himself of another hindrance, his dismounted cavalry, and in each regiment made the 3rd and 4th squadrons hand over their chargers to the 1st and 2nd. The 1,100 troopers thus left without mounts were armed with muskets, and formed into a column, to which were added the cadres of certain infantry battalions belonging to the regiments which had suffered most. In these the 3rd, or the 3rd and 4th, battalions turned over their effective rank and file to the others, while the officers and non-commissioned officers were to be sent home to their dép?ts to organize new units. The whole body was placed under General Quesnel, who was directed to cut his way to Astorga by the great high-road: it was hoped that he would come safely through, now that La Romana had withdrawn his army to Southern Galicia. The expedient was a hazardous one; but the column was fortunate: it was forced to fight with a large assembly of peasants at Doncos, half-way between Lugo and Villafranca, but reached its goal with no great loss, though for every mile of the march it was being ‘sniped’ and harassed by the guerrillas.

Soult’s available force, after he had sent his sick into the hospitals of Lugo, and had dismissed Quesnel’s detachment, was about 16,500 or 17,000 sabres and bayonets. Ney had about 15,000 men left. The two marshals were bound, both by the Emperor’s orders and by the mere necessities of the situation, to co-operate with each other. But there was a fundamental divergence between their aims and intentions. Ney had been given charge of Galicia, and he regarded it as his duty to conquer and hold down the province. He refused to look beyond his orders, or to take into consideration the progress of operations in other parts of the Peninsula. Soult, on the other hand, always loved to play his own game, and had no desire to stay in Galicia in order to lighten his colleague’s task. He was disgusted with the land, its mountains, and its insurgents, and was eager to find some excuse for quitting it. He had no difficulty in discovering many excellent reasons for retiring into the plains of Leon. The first was the dilapidated state of his troops: in spite of the resources which Ney had lent, the 2nd Corps still lacked clothing, pay, and transport. Soult had written to King Joseph on May 30 to ask that all these necessaries might be sent forward[p. 392] to Zamora, where he intended to pick them up. A still more plausible plea might be found in the general state of affairs in Northern Spain. The Emperor’s main object was the expulsion of the British army from the Peninsula. But if the 2nd Corps joined the 6th in a long, and probably fruitless, hunt after the evasive La Romana, Wellesley would be left free to march whithersoever he might please. He might base himself on Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo, and make a sudden inroad into Leon and Old Castile, where the small corps of Mortier would certainly prove inadequate to hold him back. Or he might go off to the south, and fall upon Victor in Estremadura, a move which might very probably lead to the loss of Madrid. Soult therefore was of opinion that his duty was to drop down into Leon, and there join with Mortier in making such a demonstration against Portugal as would compel the British army to stand upon the defensive, and to abandon any idea of invading Spain either by the valley of the Douro or that of the Tagus. ‘He could not keep his eye off Portugal,’ as Jourdan and King Joseph, no less than Ney, kept complaining[487]. There cannot be the least doubt that Soult was quite right in turning his main attention in this direction. It was the English army that was the most dangerous enemy; and it was the flanking position of Portugal that rendered the French movements toward the south of Spain hazardous or impracticable.

Nevertheless all the Duke of Dalmatia’s arguments seemed to his colleague mere excuses destined to cover a selfish determination to abandon the 6th Corps, and to shirk the duty of co-operating in the conquest of Galicia. He insisted that Soult must aid him in crushing La Romana before taking any other task in hand. And he had a strong moral claim for pressing his request, because it was from the resources which he had furnished that the 2nd Corps had been re-equipped and rendered capable of renewed service in the field. The marshals wrangled, and their followers copied them, for a fierce feud, leading to a copious exchange of recrimination and many duels, sprang up during the few days that the staffs of the two corps lay together at Lugo[488]. At last Soult yielded, or feigned to yield, to Ney’s[p. 393] instances: he promised to lend his aid for the suppression of the Galician insurrection under certain conditions. A plan for combined action was accordingly drawn up.

According to this scheme Ney was to advance from Corunna to Santiago with the 6th Corps, and was to drive the main body of the insurgents southward in the direction of Vigo and Tuy, following the line of the great coast-road. Soult meanwhile was to operate in the inland, against the enemy’s exposed flank. He was to march from Lugo down the valley of the upper Minho, pushing before him all that stood in his way, with the object of thrusting the enemy on to Orense, and then towards the sea. If all went right, La Romana’s army as well as the insurgents of the coast, would finally be enclosed between the two marshals and the Atlantic cliffs, and, as it was hoped, would be exterminated or forced to surrender. The obviously weak point of the plan was that it did not allow sufficiently for the power which the enemy possessed of escaping, by dispersion, or by taking to the mountains. Even if the details of the two movements had been carried out with perfect accuracy, it is probable that the Galicians would have crept out of some gap,[p. 394] or slipped away between the converging corps, or saved themselves by a headlong retreat into Portugal. The Marshals might have captured Vigo and Orense: it is extremely unlikely that they could have done more, especially as they had to deal with a general like La Romana, who had made up his mind that his duty was to avoid pitched battles, and to preserve his army at all costs. If Cuesta or Blake had been in command the scheme would have been much more feasible; but La Romana was the only Spanish commander then in the field who had resolved never to fight if he could help it.

On June 1 Ney and Soult parted, starting the one upon the road to Corunna, the other upon that which makes for Orense by the valley of the upper Minho. It would seem that neither of them had any great confidence in the success of the plan adopted, and that each was possessed by the strongest doubts as to the loyalty with which his colleague would support him. Soult was on the watch for any good excuse for throwing up the scheme and retiring to Zamora. Ney was determined not to risk himself and his corps overmuch, lest he should find himself left in the lurch by Soult at the critical moment[489].

Meanwhile the Spaniards had been straining every nerve to reorganize the army of Galicia, employing the short time of respite that they had gained in drafting back into the old corps the numerous stragglers who began to return to their colours as the summer drew on, and in raising new battalions of volunteers. La Romana lay in person at Orense with the main body of the original army, which had now risen to a force of about 7,000 properly equipped men, and nearly 3,000 unarmed recruits: he had still only four guns[490]. The ‘Division of the Minho’ was no longer under Carrera and Morillo: they had been superseded by the arrival of the Conde de Noro?a to whom the Central Junta had given over the command. This officer found himself at the[p. 395] head of about 10,000 men, of whom only about 2,500 were regulars, the rest were peasantry new to the career of arms, but so much exhilarated by their late successes at Vigo and the Campo de Estrella, that it was hard to hold them back from taking the offensive[491]. Fortunately Noro?a was gifted not only with tact but with caution: he knew how to keep the horde together without allowing them to get out of hand, and utterly refused to risk them in the open field[492].

On June 5 Ney arrived before Santiago with the main body of the 6th Corps—eighteen battalions, three cavalry regiments and two batteries: he had again left Corunna, Ferrol, and Lugo in the charge of very small garrisons, and was by no means without misgivings as to their fate during his absence. But he thought that his first duty was to concentrate a field force sufficiently large to face and beat the whole army of Galicia, in case La Romana should join Noro?a for a combined attack on the 6th Corps.

On the news of the Marshal’s approach the Spanish general drew back all his forces behind the estuary known as the Octavem (or Oitaben), a broad tidal stretch of water where several small mountain torrents meet at the head of a long bay. Noro?a might have disputed the lines of the Ulla and the Vedra, but neither of these rivers affords such a good defensive position as the Oitaben. Here the hills of the interior come down much nearer to the sea than they do at the mouths of the Ulla and the Vedra, so that there is a much shorter line to defend, between low-water mark and the foot of the inaccessible Sierra de Suido. There was no road inland by which the position could be turned, so that the Galicians had only to guard the six miles of river-bank between the sea and the mountain. There were two bridges to be watched: the more important was that of Sampayo, where the main chaussée to Vigo passes the Oitaben just where it narrows down and ceases to be tidal. The second was that of Caldelas, four miles further inland, where a side-road to the village of Sotomayor crosses the Verdugo, the most northern of the three torrents which unite to form the Oitaben. Noro?a had broken down four arches of the great Sampayo bridge.[p. 396] That of Caldelas he had not destroyed, but had barricaded: he had drawn a double line of trenches on the hillside that dominates it, and placed there a battery containing some of his small provision of artillery—he had but nine field-guns and two mortars taken from the walls of Vigo. Morillo was given charge of this part of the position, Noro?a took post himself at Sampayo. He had neglected no minor precaution that was possible—some gunboats, one of which was manned by English sailors drawn from the two frigates in the bay, patrolled the tidal part of the Oitaben, and flanked the broken bridge. Winter, the senior naval officer present, put his marines on shore: along with sixty stragglers from Moore’s army, who had been liberated by the peasants from French captivity, they garrisoned Vigo, which lies a few miles beyond the Oitaben.

On June 7 Ney reached the front of the position and ascertained that the bridge of Sampayo was broken. His artillery exchanged some objectless salvos with that of Noro?a, while his cavalry rode inland to look for possible points of passage. They could find none save the fortified bridge of Caldelas, and a very difficult ford just above it, commanded, like the bridge, by the Spanish trenches on the hillside. The Marshal was also informed that at the Sampayo itself there was another ford, passable only at low tide for three hours at a time.

These reports were by no means encouraging: the Spanish position was almost impregnable, and there was no way of turning it. Indeed the only road by which the enemy could be taken in flank or rear was that from Orense to Vigo, along the Minho. This Ney could not reach: but supposing that Soult had carried out the plan of operations to which he had assented on June 1, it was just possible that he might appear, sooner or later, on that line, and so dislodge the enemy. However it was equally possible that he might be still far distant, and so Ney resolved to make an attempt to force the passage of the Oitaben. On the morning of June 8 therefore, after a long but fruitless cannonade, one body of infantry endeavoured to pass at the ford opposite the village of Sampayo[493], while another, with some cavalry,[p. 397] attempted to cross the other ford at Caldelas, and to storm its bridge. At both places the Galicians stood their ground, and the heads of the column were exposed to such a furious fire that they suffered heavily and failed to reach the further bank. The Marshal therefore drew them back, and refused to persist in an attack which would only have had a chance of success if the enemy had misbehaved and given way to panic. The French lost several hundred men[494], the Galicians, safe in their trenches, suffered far less.

That evening Ney received news which convinced him that Soult had left him in the lurch, and had no intention of prosecuting his march on Orense, to turn the enemy’s flank. It was reported that the 2nd Corps, after making only two days’ march from Lugo, had stopped short at Monforte de Lemos, and showed no signs of moving forward. Indeed the Duke of Dalmatia had put the regiments into cantonments and was evidently about to make a lengthy halt.

Since the Duke of Elchingen was now convinced that the enemy could not be dislodged from behind the Oitaben without his colleague’s aid, and since that colleague showed no signs of appearing within any reasonable time, the game was up. On the morning of the ninth Ney gave orders for his troops to draw off, and to retire by the road to Santiago and Corunna. He made no secret of his belief that Soult had deliberately betrayed him, and had never intended to keep his promise[495]. Without the aid of the 2nd Corps he had no hopes of being able to suppress the Galician insurrection. But till he should learn precisely what his colleague was doing, he could not make up his mind to abandon the province. He therefore sent off on June 10 an aide-de-camp with a large escort, by the circuitous route via Lugo. This officer bore a dispatch, which explained the situation, reported the check at Sampayo, and demanded[p. 398] that the 2nd Corps should not move any further away, but should return to lend aid to the 6th in its time of need. It was more than ten days before an answer was received. But on the twenty-first Soult’s reply came to hand: he had been found marching, not towards Orense, but eastward, in the direction of the frontiers of Leon. He refused to turn back, alleging that this was not in the bond signed at Lugo, and that his troops were in such a state of exhaustion that he was forced to lead them into the plains, to rest them and refit them. Such a reply seemed to justify Ney’s worst suspicions; abandoned by his colleague, and with the care of the whole of Galicia thrown upon his hands, he refused to risk the safety of the 6th Corps in the unequal struggle. He evacuated Corunna and Ferrol on the twenty-second and concentrated his whole force at Lugo. There he picked up the sick and wounded of Soult’s corps as well as his own, and in six forced marches retired along the high-road by Villafranca to Astorga, which place he reached on June 30. Every day he had been worried and molested by the local guerrillas, but neither Noro?a nor La Romana had dared to meddle with him. In his anger at the constant attacks of the insurgents, he sacked every place that he passed, from Villafranca and Ponferrada down to the smallest hamlets. Twenty-seven Galician towns and villages are said to have been burned by the 6th Corps during its retreat. Such conduct was unworthy of a soldier of Ney’s calibre: it can only be explained by the fact that he was almost beside himself with wrath at being foiled by Soult’s breach of his plighted word, and vented his fury on the only victims that he could reach.

We must now turn back to trace the steps of the 2nd Corps in its devious march from Lugo to the plains of Leon. Soult had sent out Loison with one division by the road down the left bank of the Minho on June 1. He himself followed with the rest of the army on the next day. On the third the Marshal reached the little town of Monforte de Lemos, between the Minho and the Sil, which he found deserted by its inhabitants. In obedience to La Romana’s orders they had all gone up into the mountains.

If Soult had been honestly desirous of carrying out his compact with Ney, his next step would have been to make[p. 399] a rapid march on Orense. He must have been able to calculate that his colleague would now be in touch with Noro?a’s forces somewhere to the south of Corunna, and it was his duty to co-operate by descending the Minho in the enemy’s rear. The mere fact that he remained for the unconscionable space of eight days at Monforte, is a sufficient proof that he never intended to carry out his part of the compact. During this time [June 3-11], while Ney was fighting out to an unsuccessful end his campaign against Noro?a, Soult was absolutely quiescent, at a place only thirty miles from his starting-point at Lugo. He was unmolested save by small bands of local guerrillas, who fled to the hills whenever they were faced. His official chronicler Le Noble pleads that there were no fords to be found either over the Minho or over the Sil[496]. But in eight days, unopposed by any serious enemy, the engineers of the 2nd Corps could certainly have built bridges if the Marshal had ordered them to do so. Meanwhile the troops rested, and rejoiced in the abundant supplies of food and wine which they gathered in from the neighbourhood, for Monforte lies in the centre of a fertile upland and its neighbourhood had never before suffered from the ills of war[497].

On the eleventh Soult at last moved on. But it was not in the direction of Orense. He had no news of Ney, and professed to be concerned that the 6th Corps had not yet been heard of on the Orense road. Finally he announced that he was compelled to believe that the Duke of Elchingen had not executed his part of the joint campaign[498], and that there was no longer any reason that the 2nd Corps should carry out its share of the plan. Accordingly he marched, not toward Ney, but in the opposite direction, up the valley of the Sil, with his face set towards the east. He pretended that he hoped to catch and disperse the corps of La Romana, to whom he attributed a design of marching on Puebla de Senabria—the same movement that the Marquis had executed once before in the first days of March. But as a matter of fact La Romana was at Orense, and far from[p. 400] having any intention of retreating eastward, if he were attacked by the 2nd Corps, he was looking on Portugal as his line of retreat[499].

On the thirteenth Soult reached Montefurado, where the Sil is bridged by masses of rocks which have fallen into its bed: the river forces its way beneath them by a tunnel sixty feet broad, which is supposed to have been cut by the Romans. Crossing on this natural bridge, he turned southward to follow the valley of the Bibey, which leads to Puebla de Senabria and the plains of Leon. He met no resistance save from the local insurgents, headed by the Abbot of Casoyo and a partisan called El Salamanquino, who received little or no aid from the regular army. Indeed the only Spanish troops in this remote corner of Galicia were 200 men under an officer called Echevarria, a dép?t left behind at Puebla de Senabria by La Carrera, when he had marched to Vigo in May. This handful of men joined the local guerrillas, and the appearance of their uniforms among the enemy’s ranks served Soult as an excuse for stating that he was contending with the army of La Romana. Any reader of his dispatches would conclude that during the last days of June he was opposed by a considerable body of that force. As a matter of fact he was never anywhere near the Galician army, which lay first at Orense, then at Celanova, finally at Monterey on the Portuguese frontier, always moving to the right, parallel with the Marshal’s advance, so as to avoid being outflanked on its southern wing. It was with the peasants of the valley of the Bibey alone that Soult had to do. Thrusting them to right and left, and cruelly ravaging the country-side on both banks of the river, he reached Viana on June 16. From thence Franceschi sent a flying expedition over the hills to La Gudina, on the road from Monterey to Puebla de Senabria. It brought back news that La Romana had come down to Monterey when the 2nd Corps moved to Viana, but that he was evidently not marching eastward. It had met and[p. 401] routed a party of Spanish cavalry sent out from Monterey[500]; the prisoners taken from them said that the Marquis was returning to Orense now that he had seen the 2nd Corps committing itself to an advance up the valley of the Bibey, and passing away in the direction of the plains of Leon.

It was while halting at Larouco, during this march, that Soult received the dispatch which Ney had written to him from Santiago on June 10. His reply, as we have already seen, was a peremptory refusal to turn back to the aid of the 6th Corps. He asserted that he had fulfilled his part of the bargain made at Lugo (which he assuredly had not), and refused to undertake any further offensive operations with troops in a state of utter destitution and fatigue. He declared to his staff, and wrote to King Joseph, that he believed that Ney had deliberately mismanaged his expedition against Vigo, and had suffered himself to be checked, in order to have an excuse for detaining the 2nd Corps in Galicia[501]. Why, he asked, had not the Duke of Elchingen sent a turning column against Orense, instead of making a frontal attack against the line of the Oitaben? The plain answer to this query—viz. that Ney with a field-force of only 10,000 men, and having three weak garrisons behind him, could not afford either to divide his army or to go too far from Corunna and Lugo—he naturally did not give.

Accordingly, on June 23, Soult abandoned the valley of the Bibey, and crossed the watershed of the Sierra Segundera in two columns, one descending on to La Gudina, the other on to[p. 402] Lobian. On the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth the whole army was united at Puebla de Senabria. The town was taken without a shot being fired; and the French found there several cannon which La Carrera had not carried off when he marched to Vigo, and which Echevarria had spiked but neglected to destroy. The corps rested for five days in Puebla de Senabria, where it obtained abundance of food and comfortable lodging. But Franceschi and his light-horse, now reduced to not more than 700 sabres, were pushed on at once to Zamora, to bear news to King Joseph of the approach of the 2nd Corps, and to beg that the stores, money, artillery, and clothing, which Soult had demanded in his letter from Lugo, might be forwarded to him as soon as possible[502]. Although the authorities at Madrid had heard nothing of the doings of the Marshal since June 1, they had already prepared much of the material required, and sent it to Salamanca. From thence it was now transferred to Zamora and Benavente, where it was handed over to the war-worn 2nd Corps. Other stores were procured from Valladolid and even from Bayonne. But the artillery, the most important of all the necessaries, was long in coming.

Soult’s main body had broken up from Puebla de Senabria on June 29: from thence Mermet’s, Delaborde’s, and Lorges’ troops marched to Benavente, and those of Merle and Heudelet to Zamora. In these places they enjoyed a few days of rest and began to refit themselves. But it was not long before they were called upon to take part in another great campaign, and once more to face their old enemies the English.

[p. 403]

The first care of the Duke of Dalmatia, after he had emerged from the Galician Sierras, had been to write long justificatory dispatches to the Emperor and King Joseph. They are most interesting documents, and explain with perfect clearness his reasons for abandoning Ney and returning to the valley of the Douro. His main thesis is that it was his duty to keep the English in check, since they were the one really dangerous enemy in the Peninsula. Since it was notorious that Wellesley had quitted Northern Portugal, it was practically certain that he must be intending to march southward, to fall upon Victor, and strike a blow at Madrid. It was necessary, therefore, that the 2nd Corps should follow him, and be ready to aid in the defence of the capital. The safety of Madrid was far more important than the subjection of Galicia, and the Marshal had no hesitation in sacrificing the lesser object in order to secure the greater. Ney, he thought, would be strong enough to make head against Noro?a and La Romana united: but he could not hope to hold down the whole of Galicia, and he would have either to be reinforced, or to be permitted to evacuate the province.

As to the conquest of Galicia, it would take many men and many months. At present it would be impossible to find the forces necessary for its complete subjection. This could only be done by fortifying not merely Corunna, Ferrol, and Lugo, but also Tuy, Monterey, Viana, and Puebla de Senabria. Each of these places should be given a garrison of 5,000 or 6,000 men, and furnished with stores calculated to last for four months. In addition there would have to be blockhouses built along the high-road from Lugo to Villafranca, and on several other lines. Columns operating from each of the seven great garrisons should be continually moving about, keeping open the communication between stronghold and stronghold, and chastising the insurgents.

Thus Soult calculated that the subjection of Galicia would require from 35,000 to 42,000 men, continually on the move, and never liable to be called upon for any service outside the province. It was absurd, therefore, for him to suggest in a later paragraph that Ney might be left to hold his own. What was the use of setting 15,000 men to work on a task that would strain the energies of 35,000? And where was King Joseph[p. 404] to find the additional 20,000 men, if the 2nd Corps were withdrawn into Leon to watch the British army? No such force could be drawn from any other part of Spain, and it would be useless to ask for reinforcements from France while the Austrian War was calling every available man to the Danube. Soult’s view, clearly, was that Galicia would have to be abandoned for the present, though he did not choose to say so. Till the English had been destroyed, or driven into the sea, King Joseph would never be able to find 35,000 men to lock up in the remote and mountainous north-western corner of the Peninsula[503].

There is not the slightest doubt that Soult’s views were perfectly correct. Looking at the war in the Peninsula as a whole, it was a strategical blunder to endeavour to hold Galicia before Portugal had been conquered. And while the force of the French armies in Spain remained at its present figure, it was impossible to spare two whole army corps for this secondary theatre of operations. The attempt to subdue the province had only been made because Moore had drawn after him to Corunna the armies of Soult and Ney: and, since they were on the spot, the temptation to use them there was too great to be withstood. This is but one more instance of the way in which the famous march to Sahagun had disarranged all the Emperor’s original plans for the conquest of the Peninsula.

It has often been debated whether it would be truer to say that Galicia was delivered by Wellesley’s operations or by the valour and obstinacy of its own inhabitants. After giving all due credit to the gallant peasantry who checked Ney and harassed Soult, to the prudence of the untiring La Romana, and to Noro?a’s cautious courage, it is yet necessary to decide that the real cause of the evacuation of the province by the invaders was the presence of the victorious British army in Portugal. The two Marshals might have maintained themselves there for an indefinite time, if they could have shut their eyes to[p. 405] what was going on elsewhere. But Soult was quite right in believing that it would be mad to persist in the attempt to subdue Galicia, while Wellesley was in the field, and nothing lay between him and Madrid but the 22,000 men of the 1st Corps. If he and Ney had lingered on in the north, engaged in fruitless hunting after La Romana, while July and August wore on, Madrid would have fallen into the hands of Wellesley and Cuesta, and King Joseph would once more have been forced to go upon his travels, to Burgos or elsewhere. The Talavera campaign only failed of success because the 2nd and the 6th Corps were withdrawn from the Galician hills just in time to concentrate at Salamanca and fall upon the rear of the victors. If they had been wandering around Monterey or Mondonedo at the end of July, instead of being cantoned in the plains of Leon, the capital of Spain would undoubtedly have been recovered by Wellesley and Cuesta—though whether those ill-assorted colleagues could have held it for long is another question. Into such possibilities it is useless to make inquiry.

N.B.—My best authority for this campaign is the set of dispatches by Carrol in the Record Office. He was at Vigo from June 3 to June 14; with La Romana from June 16 to July 11. Thus he was on the spot for the fight on the Oitaben, and also for the operations against Soult. Napier’s narrative is more than usually faulty in dealing with the end of the Galician campaign. He writes as a partisan of Soult, and his whole tale is drawn from the Marshal’s dispatches and from the book of the panegyrist, Le Noble. His whole picture of the desperate condition of La Romana is untrue: the Marquis had always open to him a safe retreat into Portugal, and his army was never engaged with Soult at all. Carrol’s dispatches make this quite clear. The map (facing p. 125 of vol. ii.) is so hopelessly inaccurate both as to distances, and as to the relative positions of places to each other, that I can only compare it to those ingenious diagrams which a railway produces, in order to show that it possesses the shortest route from London to Edinburgh, or from Brussels to Berlin.