SECTION XIX: CHAPTER III

THE FRENCH PREPARATIONS: MASSéNA’S ARMY OF PORTUGAL

During the summer campaign of 1809 the French Army of Spain had received hardly any reinforcements from beyond the Pyrenees. Every man that the Emperor could arm was being directed against Austria in May and June. But when Wagram had been won, and the armistice of Znaym signed, and when moreover it had been discovered that the British expedition to the Isle of Walcheren need not draw off any part of the Army of Germany, the Emperor began to turn his attention to the Peninsula. The armistice with Austria had been signed on July 12: only six days later, on the 18th of the same month, Napoleon was already selecting troops to send to Spain, and expressing his intention of going there himself to ‘finish the business’ in person[203]. But he had made up his mind that it was too late in the year for him to transport any great mass of men to the Peninsula in time for operations in the autumn, and had settled that the expulsion of the English and the conquest of Cadiz, Seville, and Valencia must be delayed to the spring of 1810. On September 7 he wrote[204] to approve King Joseph’s decision that Soult should not be allowed to make any attempt on Portugal in the autumn, and a month later he advised his brother to defend the line of the Tagus, and drive back Spanish incursions, but to defer all offensive movements till the reinforcements should have begun to arrive[205].

The composition of the new army that was to enter Spain was dictated in a minute to the Minister of War on October 7, in[p. 198] which the Emperor stated that the total force was to be about 100,000 men, including the Guard, that it was all to be on the roads between Orleans and Bayonne by December, and that he should take command in person[206]. It may be noted that the troops designated in this memorandum were actually those which took part in the campaign of 1810, with the exception of the Old Guard, which was held back when Napoleon determined to remain behind, and to send a substitute as commander-in-chief in Spain. Since the bulk of the immense column was only directed to reach Bayonne at the end of the year, it was clear that it would not be within striking distance of the enemy till March 1810.

Down to the month of December 1809, Napoleon’s correspondence teems with allusions to his approaching departure for Spain. They were not merely intended to deceive the public, for they occur in letters to his most trusted ministers and generals. We might be inclined to suspect an intention to cajole the English Ministry in the magnificent phrases of the address to the Corps Législatif on December 3, when the Emperor declares that ‘the moment he displays himself beyond the Pyrenees the Leopard in terror will seek the Ocean to avoid shame, defeat, and death.’ But business was certainly meant when Berthier was advised to send forward his carriages and horses to Madrid, and when the Old Guard’s departure for the frontier was ordered[207]. Suddenly, in the third week of December, the allusions to the Emperor’s impending departure cease. It would appear that his change of purpose must be attributed not to the news of Oca?a, where the last great Spanish army had perished, but to a purely domestic cause: this was the moment at which the question of the Imperial Divorce came into prominence. It would seem that when Napoleon had conceived the idea of the Austrian marriage, and had learnt that his offers were likely to be accepted, he gave up all intention of invading Spain in the early spring in person. The divorce was first officially mooted when the ‘protest’ was laid before a Privy Council on December 15[208],[p. 199] and after that day there is no more mention of a departure for the South. All through January, February, and March the negotiations were in progress, and on April 1-2[209] the Emperor married his new wife. The festivities which followed lasted many days, and when they were over the Emperor conducted his spouse on a long tour through the Northern Departments in May, and did not return to the vicinity of Paris till June, when the army of invasion, which had long since reached the Peninsula, had been already handed over to a new chief.

In the months during which the marriage negotiations were in progress, and the columns of reinforcements were pouring into Navarre and Old Castile, it is not quite certain what were the Emperor’s real intentions as to the allocation of the command. Nothing clear can be deduced from an order given to Junot in the middle of February ‘to spread everywhere the news of the arrival of the Emperor with 80,000 men, in order to disquiet the English and prevent them from undertaking operations in the South[210].’ This is but a ruse de guerre; the marriage project was so far advanced that the ratifications of the contract were signed only four days later than the date of the dispatch[211], and Napoleon must have known that he could not get away from Paris for another two months at the least. But it was only on April 17 that an Imperial Decree, dated at Compiègne, was published, announcing that not the whole French force in Spain, but three army corps (the 2nd, 6th, and 8th), with certain other troops, were to form the Army of Portugal and to be placed under the command of Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. After this it was certain that the Emperor would not cross the Pyrenees. Five days later this was made still more clear by an order to the Commandant of the Guard to recall the old Chasseur and Grenadier regiments of that corps from the various points that they had reached on the way to Bayonne, and to send on to Spain only the Tirailleur and Voltigeur regiments recently raised in 1809, and generally known as the[p. 200] ‘Young Guard’[212]. Napoleon never took the field in person without the veteran portion of his body-guard.

The non-appearance of the Emperor had one most important result. If he had taken the field, every marshal and general in Spain would have been subject to a single directing will, and would have been forced to combine his operations with those of his neighbours, whether he wished or no. On determining to devote the spring and summer of 1810 to nuptial feasts and state progresses, instead of to a campaign on the Tagus, he did not nominate any single commander-in-chief to take his place. Masséna, from his seniority and his splendid military record, might have seemed worthy of such promotion. He was not given it, but only placed in charge of three army corps, and of certain parts of Old Castile and Leon and the garrison troops there residing. This was a vast charge, embracing in all the command of 138,000 men. But it gave Masséna no control over the rest of the armies of Spain, and no power to secure their co-operation, save by the tedious method of appeals to Paris. Indeed, the Emperor had chosen the precise moment of King Joseph’s conquest of Andalusia to break up such hierarchical organization of command as existed in the Peninsula. By a decree of February 8 he took the provinces of Aragon and Catalonia, with the army corps there employed, completely out of the sphere of the authority of King Joseph: Augereau and Suchet were forbidden to hold any communication with Madrid, and were directed to make every report and request to Paris. This would not have been fatal to the success of the main operations of the French army, for Aragon and Catalonia were a side-issue, whose military history, all through the war, had little connexion with that of Castile and Portugal. But their severance from the military hierarchy dependent on the King was followed by that of Navarre, the Basque provinces, Burgos, Valladolid, Palencia, and Toro, which were formed into four ‘Military Governments’ under Generals Dufour, Thouvenot, Dorsenne, and Kellermann. These governors were given complete civil and military autonomy, with power to raise taxes, administer justice, to name and displace Spanish functionaries, and to move their troops at[p. 201] their own pleasure, under responsibility to the Emperor alone. The ‘6th Government’ (Valladolid, Palencia, Toro) was afterwards placed under the authority of Masséna; the others remained independent Viceroyalties. Thus military authority in the Peninsula was divided up for the future between (1) the Commander of the Army of Portugal, who controlled not only his army but all the regions which it occupied—Leon, the greater part of Old Castile, and part of Estremadura; (2) the military governors of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Biscay, Burgos; (3) the King, who practically controlled his Army of the Centre and the kingdom of New Castile alone, since Soult, in Andalusia, though not formally created a ‘military governor,’ practically acted on his own responsibility, without any reference to the King’s wishes. All the viceroys reported directly to Paris, and kept the Emperor fully employed with their perpetual bickerings. How Napoleon came to create and continue such a vicious system it is hard to conceive. Apparently the explanation must be sought in the fact that he feared servants with too great power, and acted on the principle of divide et impera, despite of the fact that he knew, as a soldier, that the want of a commander-in-chief is ruinous in practical war. At the bottom was the idea that he himself could manage everything, even when his armies were a thousand miles away, and when it took three weeks or a month to transmit orders to them. He sometimes acknowledged in a moment of self-realization that this was a bad arrangement, and that it was impossible for him to conduct or criticize the details of strategy at such a distance, or under such conditions. But after a lucid moment he would fall back into his usual ways of thought, and proceed to give orders and directions which were obsolete before the dispatches that conveyed them could be delivered to the hands of his marshals.

To proceed to details—the old Army of Spain had come to a standstill after it had overrun Andalusia in February 1810. Three corps under Soult were absorbed by that new conquest, some 73,000 men in all[213]. Suchet with his 3rd Corps, 26,000 men,[p. 202] held Aragon; Augereau with the vast 7th Corps, 56,900 in all, did not hold down, but was executing military promenades in, the turbulent Catalonia. The 2nd and 6th Corps lay observing Portugal, the former with head quarters at Talavera, the latter with head quarters at Salamanca. Ney had now returned to take charge of the 6th Corps, and Reynier (an old enemy of the English, who had beaten him at Alexandria and Maida) was named chief of the 2nd Corps. This last had now been shorn of its third division,—that which had been composed of so many fractional units in 1809; these had been made over to the 6th Corps, which in 1810 possessed three divisions[214] and no longer two. Reynier had about 18,000 men, Ney no less than 38,000 after this rearrangement; he had been assigned Lorges’ dragoon-division as well as the troops transferred from the 2nd Corps. The King had 14,000 men in Madrid and New Castile: the old garrisons of the Northern Provinces, excluding the newly arrived reinforcements, made up nearly 20,000 men more. This 237,000 sabres and bayonets represents the old army of 1809[215]; the troops sent down by the Emperor after the termination of the Austrian War had not, for the most part, been absorbed into the old units, though they had crossed the Pyrenees in December and January.

It is now time to see what troops constituted these succours, the 100,000 men with whom the Emperor had originally intended to march in person to the conquest of the Peninsula. On looking through their muster roll the first thing that strikes the eye is that very little—almost nothing indeed—had been taken from the Army of Germany. The Emperor, though Austria was tamed and Prussia was under his feet, did not think it safe to cut down to any great extent the garrisons of Central Europe and Eastern France:

(1) Of all the corps that had taken part in the Wagram campaign only one had been directed on Spain, and this was a force of the second line, a unit originally called[p. 203] the ‘Corps de Réserve de l’Armée d’Allemagne’ and afterwards the 8th Corps. It had played only a small part in the late war, and was mostly composed of the newly raised 4th battalions of regiments serving elsewhere. Recruited up to a strength of 30,000 men by the addition of some stray battalions from Northern Germany, it was the first of all the new reinforcements to reach Spain[216]. Indeed, the head of its column reached Burgos by the 1st of January, 1810. It was assigned to the Army of Portugal. By the drafting away of some of its 4th battalions to join the regiments to which they appertained it ultimately came down to about 20,000 men.

(2) Next in point of importance were the two divisions of the Young Guard under Generals Roguet and Dumoustier, nineteen battalions, with three provisional regiments of the Guard Cavalry, nearly 15,000 men in all. These units had been formed in 1809, just in time for some of them to take their share in the bloody days of Essling and Wagram. The Emperor did not make them over to the Army of Portugal, but retained them in Biscay and Navarre, close under the Pyrenees. Apparently he disliked sending any of his Guards so far afield as to render it difficult to draw them back to France, in the event (unlikely as it was at this moment) of further troubles breaking out in Central Europe. The Guard divisions stayed in Spain two years, but were never allowed to go far forward into the interior.

(3) Deeply impressed with the danger and difficulty of keeping up the lines of communication between Bayonne and Madrid, since Mina and his coadjutors had set the guerrilla war on foot in Navarre and Old Castile, Napoleon had formed a corps whose special duty was to be the keeping open of the roads, and the policing of the country-side between the frontier and the Spanish capital. This was composed of twenty squadrons of Gendarmes, all veterans and picked men, each with a total strength of seven officers and 200 troopers. The decree ordering their selection[p. 204] from among the gendarmerie of Southern and Central France was published on November 24, 1809: but the first squadrons only began to pass the Pyrenees in February 1810, and many did not appear till April and May. Yet 4,000 men were in line by the summer[217].

(4) A few new regiments which had not hitherto been represented in the Peninsula were moved down thither. Among these were the Neuchatel troops from Berthier’s principality, a German division from the minor states of the Confederation of the Rhine under General Rouyer[218], which went to Catalonia, the 7th, 13th, and 25th Chasseurs à Cheval, with two battalions of Marines. The total did not amount to more than some 10,000 men.

(5) By far the largest item in the reinforcements was composed of the 4th battalions of wellnigh every regiment which was already serving in Spain. The army which had marched across the Pyrenees in 1808 had been organized on the basis of three field-battalions to the regiment, the 4th battalion being the dép?t battalion. But Napoleon had now raised the standard to four (or in a few cases more) field-battalions, over and above the dép?t. All the fourth battalions were now existing and available; a few had served in the Austrian War, many of the others had been lying in the camps which the Emperor had formed at Boulogne, Pontivy, and elsewhere, to protect his coasts against possible English descents. Those belonging to 40 regiments already in Spain, with the full complement of 840 men each, were first ordered to cross the Pyrenees: they numbered 33,600 men: these were all at the front by May 1810. The Emperor somewhat later dispatched the fourth battalions of twenty-six regiments more to the Peninsula, giving to the temporary organization the name of the 9th Corps. This should have given another 21,840 men, and nearly did so; their gross total, when all had reached Vittoria in September 1810, was 20,231. But the 9th Corps should not be reckoned in the first 100,000 men which the[p. 205] Emperor set aside for the spring campaign of 1810, it was a supplementary addition[219].

(6) The Emperor dealt in a similar way with the cavalry; the regiments already in Spain had been reduced to a strength of two or three squadrons by the wear and tear of eighteen months of war. The dép?ts had now got ready two squadrons fit for field service. Those belonging to sixteen regiments of dragoons, organized into eight provisional regiments, were sent early to the front, and were all in Spain by January 1810.

(7) In addition to units like 4th battalions and 3rd and 4th squadrons added to the strength of each dragoon or infantry regiment, the Emperor did not neglect to send drafts to fill up the depleted 1st, 2nd, and 3rd battalions and 1st and 2nd squadrons. In the early months of 1810, 27,000 men, in small drafts not amounting to the strength of a battalion or squadron were forwarded to recruit the old units. They went forward in ‘régiments de marche,’ which were broken up on reaching the head quarters of the corps to which each party belonged.

Adding together all the units, with an extra allowance of 3,500 artillery for the new batteries that came in with Junot’s Corps, the Guard divisions, and the 9th Corps, we get as a total of the reinforcements poured into Spain between December 1809, and September 1810, the following figures:—
Junot’s corps, at its final strength in June, infantry only     20,000
Young Guard divisions     15,000
Gendarmerie     4,000
New regiments     10,000
4th battalions, the first arrivals     33,600
4th battalions forming the 9th Corps     20,000
Cavalry in organized squadrons     5,000
Artillery in complete batteries     3,500
Drafts, not in permanent units, for Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery     27,000
      138,100

[p. 206]This total far exceeds the original 100,000 of which Napoleon had spoken in the autumn of 1809, but is certainly rather below the actual number of men received into the Peninsula; the figure for drafts, in especial, is hard to verify. But as the total strength of the Army of Spain in the autumn of 1809 was 237,000 men, and in September 1810, 353,000 men, while at least 25,000 had been lost in the interval[220], the figures cannot be far out.

Of this total, as we have already said, the 2nd, 6th, and 8th Corps and the troops under Kellermann and Bonnet occupying the provinces of Toro, Palencia, Valladolid, and Santander formed the ‘Army of Portugal’ assigned to Masséna; he was also given an extra unattached division under Serras[221], and promised the use of the 9th Corps when it should have crossed the Pyrenees. The gross total of this force was in May, when the new Commander-in-Chief had taken up his post, about 130,000 men, of whom some 86,000 were effective and available for active operations at the moment. Serras, Kellermann, and Bonnet were tied down to their local duties—the first had to look after the Spanish army of Galicia, the second to keep the plains of Valladolid quiet, the third to hold Santander and (when it was fully subdued) to enter and overrun the Asturias. The 20,000 men of the 9th Corps were not yet arrived in Spain[222]. The troops in the provinces of Burgos, Biscay, and Navarre, though not placed under the Marshal’s actual command, were yet in existence to cover his rear and his communications with France. If they are added to the total of the force which, directly or indirectly, was employed for the conquest of Portugal, some 30,000 more must be taken into consideration. But, though they were useful, indeed[p. 207] indispensable, for the conquest of Portugal, it is fairer to leave them out of consideration.

But the exact total of an army is, after all, less important than the character and capacity of its generals. The individuality of Masséna was the most important factor in the problem of the invasion of Portugal. He was fifty-two years of age—very nearly the eldest of all the Marshals—and he was the only one of those on active service, save Jourdan, who had achieved greatness in the days before Napoleon arrived at supreme power. He had led an army of 60,000 men when, of the three corps-commanders now under him, Ney was but a lieutenant-colonel, Junot a young captain, and Reynier a brigadier-general. Like nearly all the men of the Revolution he had risen from below; he sprang from a poor family in Genoa: according to his enemies they were Jews, and his name was but Manasseh disguised. His personal character was detestable; many of the marshals had an evil reputation for financial probity, but Masséna’s was the worst of all. ‘He plundered like a condottiere of the Middle Ages,’ wrote one of his lieutenants. He had been in trouble, both with the Republican government and with the Emperor, for his shameless malversations in Italy, and had piled up a large private fortune by surreptitious methods[223]. Avarice is not usually associated with licentiousness, but he shocked even the easy-going public opinion of the French army by the way in which he paraded his mistress at unsuitable moments and in unsuitable company. He took this person, the sister of one of his aides-de-camp, with him all through the dangers of the Portuguese campaign, where her presence often caused friction and delays, and occasionally exposed him to insults[224]. Masséna was hard, suspicious, and revengeful; an intriguer to the finger-tips, he was always prone to suppose[p. 208] that others were intriguing against himself[225]. Though an old Republican, who had risen from the ranks early in the revolutionary war, he had done his best to make himself agreeable to Napoleon by the arts of the courtier. Altogether, he was a detestable character—but he was a great general. Of all the marshals of the Empire he was undoubtedly the most capable; Davoust and Soult, with all their abilities, were not up to his level. As a proof of his boldness and rapid skill in seizing an opportunity the battle of Zurich is sufficient to quote; for his splendid obstinacy the defence of Genoa at the commencement of his career has its parallel in the long endurance before the lines of Torres Vedras at its end. His best testimonial is that Wellington, when asked, long years after, which of his old opponents was the best soldier, replied without hesitation that Masséna was the man, and that he had never permitted himself to take in his presence the risks that he habitually accepted when confronted with any of the other marshals[226].
Portrait of Masséna

Enlarge  ANDRé MASSéNA,
DUC DE RIVOLI PRINCE D’ESSLING,
Né à Nice, en 1755,
Mort à sa Terre près Paris, en Avril 1817.

The fatigues of the late Austrian war, in which he had borne such an honourable part, had tried Masséna’s health; it was not without difficulty that the Emperor had persuaded him to undertake the Portuguese campaign. When he first assembled round him at Salamanca the staff which was to serve him in the invasion, he astonished and somewhat disheartened his officers by beginning his greetings to them with the remark, ‘Gentlemen, I am here contrary to my own wish; I begin to feel myself too old and too weary to go on active service. The Emperor says that I must, and replied to the reasons for declining this post which I gave him, by saying that my reputation would suffice to end the war. It was very flattering no doubt, but no man has two lives to live on this earth—the soldier least of all[227].’ Those who had served under the Marshal a few years back, and now saw him after an interval, felt that there was truth in what he said. Foy wrote in his diary, ‘He is no longer the Masséna of the flashing eyes, the mobile face,[p. 209] and the alert figure whom I knew in 1799, and whose head then recalled to me the bust of Marius. He is only fifty-two, but looks more than sixty; he has got thin, he is beginning to stoop; his look, since the accident when he lost his eye by the Emperor’s hand[228], has lost its vivacity. The tone of his voice alone remains unchanged.’ But if the Marshal’s bodily vigour was somewhat abated, his will was as strong as ever. He needed it at this juncture, for he had to command subordinates who were anything but easy to deal with. Ney, though an honest man and an admirable soldier, had the fault of insubordination in the highest degree. He never obeyed any one save the Emperor in the true military fashion. He quarrelled with every colleague that he met—notably with Soult—and had an old and very justifiable personal dislike for Masséna. Even before the latter appeared at the front, he had been heard to use threatening language concerning him. Junot was almost as bad; having held the chief command in the last Portuguese expedition he had a strong, if a mistaken, belief that it was becoming that he should be placed in charge of the second. His record rendered the idea absurd, but this he was the last to understand, being of an overweening and self-confident disposition. He was stupid enough to regard Masséna as his supplanter, and to show sullen resentment. Of the three chiefs of the army corps about to invade Portugal, Reynier was the only one on decent terms with his Commander-in-Chief, but even he was not reckoned his friend[229].

Masséna’s chief of the staff was Fririon, a scientific soldier and a man well liked by his colleagues; but it is said that he was not so much in the Marshal’s confidence as Lieut.-Colonel[p. 210] Pelet, the senior aide de camp of his staff. Complaints are found, in some of the letters and memoirs of the time, that Masséna would talk matters over with Pelet, and issue orders without letting even his chief of the staff know of his change of plan or new inspiration. Pelet’s own indiscreet statements on this point seem to justify the complaints made by others against him[230]. There was friction, therefore, even within the staff itself, and all that the Marshal did, or said, was criticized by some of those who should have been his loyal subordinates, under the notion that it had been inspired by others, who were accorded a more perfect confidence by their common chief. Exact knowledge of the disputes in the état Major is hard to obtain, because, when the campaign was over, every man tried to make out that its failure had been due to the advice given to Masséna by those of whom he was jealous. At the bottom, however, all this controversy is not very important—there is no doubt that the Marshal himself was responsible for all that had happened—he was not the man to be led by the nose or over-persuaded by ambitious or intriguing underlings.

Failure or success is not the sole criterion of merit. Masséna’s campaign was a disastrous business; yet on investigating the disabilities under which he laboured, we shall be inclined in the end to marvel that he did so much, not that he did no more. The fundamental error was the Emperor’s, who gave him too few men for the enterprise with which he was entrusted. Napoleon refused to take the Portuguese troops into considera[p. 211]tion, when he weighed the needs of the expedition. He repeatedly wrote that ‘it was absurd that his armies should be held in check by 25,000 or 30,000 British troops,’ as if nothing else required to be taken into consideration. He did not realize that Wellington had turned the Portuguese regular army into a decent fighting machine, capable of holding back French divisions in line of battle—as was shown at Bussaco. He had not foreseen that the despised militia required to be ‘contained’ by adequate numbers of troops on the line of communications. Still less had he dreamed of the great scheme for the devastation of Portugal, which was to be not the least effective of the weapons of its defender. But of this more will be said in the proper place.