SECTION XVI: CHAPTER II

WELLESLEY ENTERS SPAIN

The retreat of Victor beyond the Tagus forced Wellesley to concert yet another plan of operation with Cuesta, since the position of the French army, on which the whole of the recently adopted scheme depended, had just suffered a radical change. It was clear that every consideration now pointed to the necessity for adopting the combination which Wellesley had urged upon his colleague in his letter of June 8, viz. that the British army should move on Plasencia and Almaraz. It would now be striking at the flank instead of the rear of Victor’s corps, but it was clear that under the new conditions it would still be in a position to roll up his whole army, if he should endeavour to defend the passages of the Tagus against the Spaniards, who were now approaching them from the front. For Cuesta had descended from the mountains when he heard of Victor’s retreat, and was now approaching Almaraz.

It took some time, however, to induce the Captain-General to consent to this move. To the extreme vexation of his colleague he produced other plans, so gratuitously impracticable that Wellesley wrote to Castlereagh to say that he could conceive no explanation for the old man’s conduct save a desire to refuse any scheme urged on him by others, and a resolve to invent and advocate alternative plans of his own out of mere pride and wrongheadedness. ‘The best of the whole story,’ he added[562], was that Cuesta was now refusing to accept a plan which he himself had suggested in one of his earlier letters, merely because that plan had been taken up and advocated by his ally. ‘The obstinacy of this old gentleman,’ he concluded, ‘is[p. 450] throwing out of our hands the finest game that any armies ever had[563].’

The necessity for working out a new scheme for the combined operations of the British and Spanish armies, in view of Victor’s retreat to Almaraz, entailed the loss of a few days. It would have been impossible to start on the advance to Plasencia till Cuesta had promised to accept that movement as part of the joint campaign. There was also some time to be allowed for concluding an agreement with Venegas, the General of the La Carolina army, whose connexion with the campaign must become much more intimate, now that the fighting was to take place not in Estremadura, but further north, in the valley of the Tagus. For while Victor lay at Merida and Sebastiani at Manzanares and Ciudad Real, the Spanish forces which faced them were very far apart. But when Victor retired to Talavera, and Sebastiani to Madridejos, in the end of June, Cuesta and Venegas—each following the corps opposed to him—could draw closer together. It was evident that the Andalusian army ought to be made to play an important part in the combined operations of July.

It would be unfair to the Spanish generals to let it be supposed that the necessity for settling on a common scheme of operations with them was the sole cause which detained Wellesley at Abrantes from the eighth to the twenty-seventh of June. The leading brigades of the British troops from Oporto had begun to reach Abrantes on the eleventh, and the more belated columns came up on the fourteenth and fifteenth. But it would have been impossible to have moved forward without some further delay, even if Wellesley had been in possession of a complete and satisfactory plan of operations on the day upon which his whole force was concentrated on the line of the Zezere. At the least he would have required another week for preparations.

His hindrances at this moment were manifold. The first was the distressed condition of those of his brigades which had seen most service during the Oporto campaign. Many regiments had been constantly on the march from May 9 to June 14, without obtaining more than two days’ rest in the whole time. Their shoes were worn out, their jaded baggage-animals had dropped to the rear, and they were leaving so many stragglers[p. 451] on the way that it was absolutely necessary to give them a moderate rest at Abrantes, in order to allow the ranks to grow full and the belated baggage to come up. The regiments which had followed Beresford in the forced march from Amarante to Chaves were worst off—they had never completely recovered from the fatigues of those three days of constant rain and storm spent on the stony roads of the Tras-os-Montes[564]. In any case some delay must have occurred before all the troops were ready to march. But many circumstances conspired to detain the army at Abrantes for several days after the moment at which Wellesley had determined to start for Plasencia. The first was the non-arrival of convoys of shoes and clothing which he had ordered up from Lisbon. The transport of the army was not yet fully organized, its officers were lacking in experience, if not in zeal, and orders were slowly executed. Many corps had, in the end, to start for Spain without receiving the much-needed stores, which were still trailing up from Santarem to Abrantes when Wellesley gave the signal to advance. Another hindrance was the lack of money: the army was obliged to pay for its wants in coin, but hard cash was so difficult to procure both in London and in Lisbon that arrears were already beginning to grow up. At first they vexed the soul of Wellesley almost beyond endurance, but as the war dragged on they only grew worse, and the Commander-in-chief had to endure with resignation the fact that both the pay of the men and the wages of the Portuguese muleteers and followers were overdue for many months. In June 1809 he had not yet reached this state of comparative callousness, and was endeavouring to scrape together money by every possible device. He had borrowed ￡3,000 in Portuguese silver from the merchants of the impoverished city of Oporto: he was trying to exchange bills on England for dollars at Cadiz, where the arrival of the American contribution had produced a comparative plenty of the circulating medium. Yet after all[p. 452] he had to start from Abrantes with only a comparatively moderate sum in his military chest[565], the rest had not reached him on June 28, the treasure convoy having taken the unconscionable time of eleven days to crawl forward from Lisbon to Abrantes—a distance of no more than ninety miles[566].

A third cause of delay was the time spent in waiting for reinforcements from Lisbon. Eight or nine regiments had landed, or were expected to arrive within the next few days. It was in every way desirable to unite them to the army before the campaign should begin. This was all the more necessary because several corps had to be deducted from the force which had been used in the Oporto campaign. Under stringent orders from home, Wellesley had sent back two infantry battalions and part of two cavalry regiments to Lisbon, to be embarked for Gibraltar and Sicily[567]. In return he was to receive a much larger body of troops. But while the deduction was immediate, the addition took time. Of all the troops which were expected to reinforce the army, only one battalion caught him up at Abrantes, while a second and one regiment of Light Dragoons[568] joined later, but yet in time for Talavera. Thus at the commencement of the actual campaign the force in the field was, if anything, slightly less in numbers than that which had been available in May. It was particularly vexatious that the brigade of veteran light infantry, for which Wellesley had made a special demand on Castlereagh as early as April, did not reach Abrantes till long after the army had moved forward. These three battalions, the nucleus of the famous Light Division[569],[p. 453] had all gone through the experiences of Moore’s campaign, and were once more under their old leader Robert Craufurd. Detained by baffling winds in the Downs, the transports that bore them only reached Lisbon at various dates between June 28 and July 2, though they had sailed on May 25. Their indefatigable brigadier hurried them forward with all speed to the front, but in spite of his exertions, they only came up with the main army after the day of battle was over. The same was the fate of two batteries of horse artillery[570]—an arm in which Wellesley was wholly deficient when he marched into Spain. They arrived late, and were still far to the rear when the march from Abrantes began.

It thus resulted that although there were over 33,000 British troops in the Peninsula at the commencement of July 1809, less than 21,000 could be collected for the advance on Plasencia which was now about to begin. More than 8,000 men lay at Lisbon, or were just starting from that city, while 4,500 were in hospital[571]. The sick seemed more numerous than might have been expected at the season of the year: though the fatigues of the Oporto campaign accounted for the majority of the invalids, yet Wellesley was of opinion that a contributory cause might be found in the slack discipline of certain regiments, where inefficient commanding officers had neglected sanitary precautions, and allowed their men to neglect personal cleanliness, or to indulge to excess in wine and unripe fruit and vegetables. It was his opinion that the number of men in hospital should never exceed ten per cent. of the total force. But all through the war he found that this proportion was exceeded.

[p. 454]

With the internal condition of many of his regiments Wellesley was far from satisfied. His tendency to use the plainest, indeed the harshest, terms concerning the rank and file, is so well known that we are not surprised to find him writing that ‘the army behave terribly ill: they are a rabble who cannot bear success any more than Sir John Moore’s army could bear failure[572].’ He complained most of all of the recruits sent him from the Irish militia, who were, he said, capable of every sin, moral or military. Though he was ‘endeavouring to tame the troops,’ yet there were several regiments in such bad order that he would gladly have sent them home in disgrace if he could have spared a man. The main offence, of course, was robbery of food from the Portuguese peasantry, often accompanied by violence, and now and then by murder. The number of assistant-provost-marshals was multiplied, some offenders were caught and hanged, but marauding could not be suppressed, even while the troops were receiving full rations in their cantonments at Abrantes. When they were enduring real privation, in the wilds of Estremadura, matters grew much worse. Though many regiments were distinguished for their good behaviour, yet there were always some whose excesses were a disgrace to the British army. Their Commander never shrank from telling them so in the most incisive language; he was always complaining that he could not get a sufficient number of the criminals flogged or hanged, and that regimental court-martials were far too lenient in their dealings with offenders[573].

It was at Abrantes that Wellesley first arranged his army in divisions, and gave it the organization which, with certain modifications, it was to maintain during the rest of the war. His six regiments of cavalry were to form a single division consisting of one heavy and two light brigades, commanded respectively by Fane, Cotton, and Anson. The twenty-five[p. 455] battalions of infantry were distributed into four divisions of unequal strength under Generals Sherbrooke, Hill, Mackenzie, and A. Campbell. Of these the first was by far the largest, counting four brigades of two battalions each: the first (Henry Campbell’s) was formed of the two battalions of Guards, the second (Cameron’s) of two line regiments, the third and fourth, under Low and Langwerth, comprised the infantry of the King’s German Legion. The second and third divisions each consisted of two brigades of three battalions each[574]. The fourth, and weakest, showed only five battalions in line. Of artillery there were only thirty guns, eighteen English and twelve German: all were field-batteries, as none of the much-desired horse artillery had yet reached the front[575]. They were all of very light calibre, the heaviest being a brigade of heavy six-pounders belonging to the German Legion.

On June 28 the army at last moved forward: that day the head quarters were at Corti?ada, on the Sobreira Formosa. On the thirtieth Castello Branco, the last Portuguese town, was reached. On July 3 the leading brigades passed the Elga, the frontier river, and bivouacked on the same night around Zarza la Mayor, the first place in Spanish Estremadura. At the same time Sir Robert Wilson’s small column of 1,500 Portuguese crossed the border a little further north, and advanced in a direction parallel to that of the main army, so as to serve as a flank guard for it in the direction of the mountains.

King Joseph meanwhile was in a state of the most profound ignorance concerning the impending storm. As late as July 9 he wrote to his brother that the British had not as yet made any pronounced movement, and that it was quite uncertain whether they would invade Galicia, or strike at Castile, or remain in the neighbourhood of Lisbon[576]! On that day the head of the British army had entered Plasencia, and was only 125 miles from Madrid. It is impossible to give any better testimonial than this simple fact to the way in which the insurgents and the guerrillas served the cause of the allies. Wellesley[p. 456] had been able to march from Oporto to Abrantes, and from Abrantes to Plasencia, without even a rumour of his advance reaching Madrid. All that Joseph had learnt was that there was now an allied force of some sort behind Alcantara, in the direction of Castello Branco. He took it for granted that they were Portuguese, but in one dispatch he broaches the theory that there might be a few English with them—perhaps from having heard a vague report of the composition of Mackenzie’s division on the Zezere in May. He therefore wrote in a cheerful tone to the Emperor that ‘if we have only got to deal with Cuesta and the Portuguese they will be beaten by the 1st Corps. If they have some English with them, they can be beaten equally well by the 1st Corps, aided by troops which I can send across the Tagus via Toledo’ (i.e. the 5,000 or 6,000 men of the Central Reserve which could be spared from Madrid). ‘I am not in the least disquieted,’ he continued, ‘concerning the present condition of military affairs in this part of Spain[577].’ In another epistle to his brother he added that ‘if the English should be at the back of Cuesta, it would be the happiest chance in the world for the concluding of the whole war[578].’

It was lucky for the King that he was not induced to try the experiment of falling upon Wellesley and Cuesta with the 28,000 men of Victor and the Central Reserve. If he had done so, he would have suffered a frightful disaster and have lost Madrid.

In the end of June and the first days of July Joseph’s main attention had been drawn off to that part of his front where there was least danger, so that he was paying comparatively little heed to the movements of the allies on the lower Tagus. He had been distracted by a rash and inexplicable movement of the Spanish army of La Mancha. When General Venegas had heard of the retreat of Victor from Estremadura, and had been informed that Cuesta was about to move forward in pursuit of the 1st Corps, he had concluded that his own troops might also advance. He argued that Sebastiani and the 4th Corps must[p. 457] beat a retreat, when their right flank was uncovered by Victor’s evacuation of the valley of the Guadiana. He was partly justified in his idea, for Joseph had drawn back Sebastiani’s main body to Madridejos when Victor abandoned Merida. It was safe therefore to advance from the Despe?a Perros into the southern skirts of La Mancha, as far as Manzanares and the line of the Guadiana. But to go further forward was dangerous, unless Venegas was prepared to risk a collision with Sebastiani. This he was certainly not in a condition to do: his troops had not yet recovered from the moral effects of the rout of Ciudad Real, and his brigades were full of new battalions of untried Andalusian reserves. He should have been cautious, and have refused to move without concerting his operations with Cuesta: to have had his corps put hors de combat at the very beginning of the joint campaign of the allied armies would have been most disastrous.

Nevertheless Venegas came down from the passes of the Sierra Morena with 18,000 infantry, 3,000 horse, and twenty-six guns, and proceeded to thrust back Sebastiani’s cavalry screen and to push in his outposts in front of Madridejos. The French general had in hand at this moment only two infantry divisions and Milhaud’s dragoons; his third division and his light cavalry were still absent with Victor, to whom they had been lent in March for the campaign of Medellin. But with 13,000 foot and 2,000 horse[579] he ought not to have feared Venegas, and could have given a good account of him had he chosen to attack. But having received exaggerated reports of the strength of the Spanish army, he wrote to the King that he was beset by nearly 40,000 men and must be reinforced at once, or he would have to fall back on Madrid[580]. Joseph, fully believing the news, sent orders to Victor to restore to the 4th Corps the divisions of Leval and Merlin, and then, doubting whether these troops could arrive in time, sallied out[p. 458] of Madrid on June 22 with his Guards and half the division of Dessolles—about 5,500 men.

It was lucky for Venegas that Sebastiani had refused to fight him, but still more lucky that the news of the King’s approach reached him promptly. On hearing that Joseph had joined the 4th Corps on June 25 he was wise enough to turn on his heel and retreat in all haste towards his lair in the passes of the Sierra Morena. If he had lingered any longer in the plains he would have been destroyed, for the King, on the arrival of Leval’s and Merlin’s divisions, would have fallen upon him at the head of 27,000 men. As it was, Venegas retired with such promptitude to Santa Cruz de Mudela, at the foot of the passes, that the French could never catch him. Joseph pursued him as far as Almagro and El Moral, on the southern edge of La Mancha, and there stopped short. He had received, on July 2, a dispatch from Victor to the effect that Cuesta had repaired the bridge of Almaraz and begun to cross the Tagus, while a body of 10,000 allied troops, presumably Portuguese, had been heard of in the direction of Plasencia[581]. (This was in reality the whole army of Wellesley!) Rightly concluding that he had pushed the pursuit of Venegas too far, the King turned back in haste, left Sebastiani and the 4th Corps behind the Guadiana, and returned with his reserve to Toledo, in order to be in a position to support Victor. His excursion to Almagro had been almost as reckless and wrongheaded as Venegas’s advance to Madridejos, for he had separated himself from Victor by a gap of 200 miles, at the moment when the British army was just appearing on the Marshal’s flank, while Cuesta was in his front. If the allied generals had concentrated their forces ten days earlier—a thing that might well have happened but for the vexatious delays at Abrantes caused by Cuesta’s impracticability—the 1st Corps might have been attacked at the moment when Joseph lay at the foot of the Sierra Morena, in a position too remote from Talavera to allow him to come up in time to succour Victor.

While the King was absent on his expedition in pursuit of Venegas the most important change in the situation of affairs[p. 459] on the Tagus was that the Duke of Belluno had drawn back his troops from the line of the Tagus, where they had been lying since June 19, and had retired behind the Alberche. His retreat was not caused by any apprehension as to the appearance of Wellesley on his flank—a fact which was completely concealed from him—but by sheer want of provisions. On June 25 he sent to the King to say that his army was again starved out of its cantonments, and that he had eaten up in a week the small remnant of food that could be squeezed out of the country-side between the Tagus and the Tietar, and was forced to transfer himself to another region. ‘The position,’ he wrote, ‘is desperate. The 1st Corps is on the eve of dissolution: the men are dropping down from mere starvation. I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to give them. They are in a state of despair.... I am forced to fall back on Talavera, where there are no more resources than here. We must have prompt succour, but where can it be found? If your Majesty abandons me in my present wretched situation, I lose my honour, my military record—everything. I shall not be to blame for the disaster which menaces my troops, but I shall have to bear the blame. Tomorrow I shall be at Talavera, waiting your Majesty’s orders. The enemy [Cuesta] has a pontoon-train: if he wishes to cross the Tagus he can do so, for the 1st Corps can no longer remain opposite him. Never was there a more distressing situation than ours[582].’

On June 26, therefore, Victor transferred himself to Talavera, and adopted a position behind the Alberche, after burning the materials of the late pontoon bridge at Almaraz, which he had taken up and stored in case they might again be needed. His movement was a lucky one for himself, as it took him further away from Wellesley’s army, which was just about to start from Abrantes with the object of turning his flank. It puzzled Cuesta, who sought for some other explanation of his departure than mere starvation, and was very cautious in taking advantage of it. However, on the day after the French had withdrawn, he pushed troops across the Tagus, and prepared to construct[p. 460] another bridge at Almaraz to replace that which the French had destroyed. His cavalry pushed out to Navalmoral and Oropesa, and further to the east he passed some detachments of infantry across the bridge of Arzobispo, which Victor—most unaccountably—had left intact. Fortunately he did no more, and refrained from advancing against Talavera, a step which from his earlier record we should judge that he might well have taken into consideration.

On the part of the allies things were now in a state of suspense from which they were not to stir for a fortnight. Cuesta was waiting for Wellesley, Wellesley was pushing forward from Zarza la Mayor to join Cuesta. Venegas was recovering at Santa Cruz de Mudela from the fatigues of his fruitless expedition into La Mancha.

But on the French side matters suffered a sudden change in the last days of July—the hand of the Emperor was stretched out from the banks of the Danube to alter the general dispositions of the army of Spain. On June 12 he had dictated at Sch?nbrunn a new plan of campaign, based on information which was already many weeks old when it reached him. At this date the Emperor was barely aware that Soult was being pressed by Wellesley in Northern Portugal. He had no detailed knowledge of what was taking place in Galicia or the Asturias, and was profoundly ignorant of the intrigues at Oporto which afterwards roused his indignation. But he was convinced that the English army was the one hostile force in Spain which ought to engage the attention of his lieutenants. Acting on this belief he issued an order that the 2nd, 5th, and 6th Corps—those of Soult, Mortier, and Ney—were to be united into a single army, and to be told off to the task of evicting Wellesley from Portugal. They were to put aside for the present all such subsidiary enterprises as the subjection of Galicia and the Asturias, and to devote themselves solely to ‘beating, hunting down, and casting into the sea the British army. If the three Corps join in good time the enemy ought to be crushed, and then the Spanish war will come to an end. But the troops must be moved in masses and not march in small detachments.... Putting aside all personal considerations, I give the command of the united army to the Duke of Dalmatia, as the senior marshal. His three[p. 461] Corps ought to amount to something between 50,000 and 60,000 men[583].’

This dispatch reached King Joseph at El Moral in La Mancha on July 1, and Soult at Zamora on July 2. It had been drawn up in view of events that were taking place about May 15. It presupposed that the British army was still in Northern Portugal, in close touch with Soult, and that Victor was in Estremadura[584]. As a matter of fact Soult was on this day leading his dilapidated corps down the Esla, at the end of his retreat from Galicia. Ney, furious at the way in which his colleague had deserted him, had descended to Astorga three days before. Mortier was at Valladolid, just about to march for Villacastin and Madrid, for the King had determined to draw him down to aid in the defence of the capital. Finally, Cuesta, instead of lying in the Sierra Morena, as he was when Napoleon drew up his orders, was now on the Tagus, while Wellesley was no longer in touch with Soult on the Douro, but preparing to fall upon Victor in New Castile. The whole situation was so changed that the commentary which the Emperor appended to his orders was hopelessly out of date—as was always bound to be the case so long as he persisted in endeavouring to direct the course of affairs in Spain from the suburbs of Vienna.

Soult was overjoyed at receiving the splendid charge which the Emperor’s decree put into his hands, though he must have felt secret qualms at the idea that ere long some account of his doings at Oporto must reach the imperial head quarters and provoke his master’s wrath. There was a bad quarter of an hour to come[585]. But meanwhile he was given a formidable army, and might hope to retrieve the laurels that he had lost in Portugal, being now in a position to attack the British with an overwhelming superiority of numbers. It must have been specially[p. 462] delightful to him to find that Ney had been put under his orders, so that he would be able to meet his angry colleague in the character of a superior officer dealing with an insubordinate lieutenant.

Soult’s first action, on finding himself placed in command of the whole of the French forces in North-western Spain, was to issue orders to Mortier to march on Salamanca, and to Ney to bring the 6th Corps down to Benavente. These dispositions clearly indicate an intention of falling upon Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, and assailing Northern Portugal—the plan which the Duke of Dalmatia had broached to the King in his letter from Puebla de Senabria on June 25, before he had received the news that the 5th and 6th Corps had been added to his command.

It is clear that on July 2 Soult had no knowledge of Wellesley’s movements, and thought that the British army was quite as likely to be aiming at Salamanca as at Madrid. It is also evident that he was aware that he would be unable to move for some weeks. Till the 2nd Corps should have received the clothing, munitions, and artillery which had been promised it, it could not possibly take the field for the invasion of Portugal.

Soult, therefore, was obliged to wait till his stores should be replenished, and till the two corps from Astorga and Valladolid should concentrate on his flanks. It was while he was remaining perforce in this posture of expectation that the news of the real condition of affairs in New Castile was at last brought to him.