SECTION XXII END OF THE YEAR 1810 CHAPTER I

OPERATIONS IN THE NORTH AND EAST OF SPAIN (JULY–DECEMBER 1810)

While tracing the all-important Campaign of Portugal, down to the deadlock in front of Santarem, which began about the 20th of November, 1810, and was to endure till the 1st of March in the succeeding year, we have been obliged to leave untouched events, civil and military, in many other parts of the Peninsula during the autumn. Only the Andalusian campaigns have been carried down to November: in Northern Spain we have traced the course of affairs no further than September[574]: in Eastern Spain no further than August[575]. Moreover, little has been said of the general effect on the French occupation caused by the division of supreme authority which Napoleon sanctioned in the spring[576], or of the importance of the long-deferred meeting of the Spanish Cortes, which assembled at Cadiz in the autumn. With these points we must deal before proceeding to narrate the campaigns of 1811.

The survey of the military operations, none of which were particularly important, must precede the summary of the political situation, with regard to King Joseph on the one side and the Cortes on the other. For the acts of the King and the Cortes had an influence extending far beyond the months in which they began, and were, indeed, main factors in the Peninsular struggle for years to come. But the doings of the armies in Galicia and Asturias on the one flank, in Catalonia and Valencia on the other, can easily be dismissed in a few pages: they were but preliminaries to the greater operations in the spring of 1811.

We may first turn to the north-west. When Masséna[p. 483] plunged into Portugal in September 1810, and was lost to the sight of his colleagues and subordinates for nearly three months, the situation left behind him was as follows:—Leon and Old Castile, as far as the Galician foot-hills and the Cantabrian sierras, were held down by Serras and Kellermann with some 12,000 men—a force none too great for the task that lay before them. The latter general had charge of the provinces of Valladolid, Toro, and Palencia, as one of the ‘military governors’ recently appointed by the Emperor. He gave himself absurd airs of independent authority, and took little more heed of the orders of Masséna than of those of King Joseph, for whom he showed a supreme contempt. General Serras’s troops were more definitely part of the Army of Portugal. They were in charge of the provinces of Zamora, Leon, and Salamanca, thus covering Kellermann’s government on the outer flank, and taking care of the borders both of Galicia on the Spanish and of Tras-os-Montes on the Portuguese side. To cover this long front Serras had only eleven battalions[577], and two provisional regiments of dragoons—some 9,000 men. Out of this force he had to find garrisons for Astorga, Leon, Benavente, Zamora, and several smaller places. Kellermann, who was intended to serve as a reserve for Serras, as well as to guard the central dép?ts at Valladolid, had only two regiments of dragoons (part of his original division) and three infantry battalions, making 3,000 men in all[578]. Both of them were directed to keep in close touch with Bonnet, who, at the head of his old troops, the four regiments which never came south of the Cantabrian hills till the Salamanca campaign[579], kept a precarious hold on Central and Eastern Asturias with 9,000 men.

There were also present in the circumscription of Serras’s and Kellermann’s command the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo (two battalions) and Gardanne’s five squadrons of dragoons, which[p. 484] Masséna had left behind, in the vain hope that they would keep the line clear between Almeida and Salamanca. This force added 2,500 men to the total of the French troops in Leon.

If the French were left rather weak in this direction, the same was not the case in the region further east. From Burgos to the Bidassoa the country-side was full of troops in the latter half of September, when the Army of Portugal had gone westward. In the Government of Burgos were the two infantry divisions of the Young Guard, under Roguet and Dumoustier, with their two cavalry regiments, making 11,464 sabres and bayonets. Navarre was occupied by 8,733 men, Biscay by 8,085. The little province of Santander was held by three provisional battalions 3,500 strong. But this permanent garrison, making over 31,000 men, was at the moment supplemented by Drouet’s 9th Corps, for whose arrival at the front Masséna had waited so long and so vainly. On September 15 its commander, its head quarters, and Claparéde’s division, were at Vittoria: Couroux’s division and the cavalry brigade of Fournier were echelloned between Vittoria and Bayonne. The whole corps mustered over 18,000 sabres and bayonets. Fifty thousand men, therefore, adding the permanent garrisons to the advancing corps of Drouet, were between Burgos and Bayonne, and there were yet a few more troops to come forward from the interior of France, for Caffarelli was bringing up another division, which had the official title of the ‘Division of Reserve of the Army of Spain,’ and consisted of four provisional regiments of infantry and two cavalry regiments, with a strength of 8,000 men[580]. It was ordered to be at Bayonne by October 20, and formed the nucleus of the force which in the next year was styled the ‘Army of the North’.

Without counting this last unit, which was only in process of formation in September, Napoleon had between the Galician frontier and Bayonne no less than 72,000 men[581]. What had[p. 485] his enemies to oppose to this formidable host, whose strength was considerably greater than that of the force with which Masséna invaded Portugal? Of regularly organized troops the number of Spaniards and Portuguese opposed to them was absolutely insignificant. Silveira in the Tras-os-Montes had six regiments of militia and one of the line—this last being the 24th, the absconding garrison of Almeida. The whole made under 7,000 men, including an incomplete cavalry regiment. Mahy in Galicia had recruited up the depleted divisions which La Romana had left with him in the spring to a strength of 12,000 men, mostly raw and untrustworthy; for the best regiments had been destroyed at the siege of Astorga. The remains of the army of Asturias, which had suffered so many defeats at the hands of Bonnet during the spring and summer, consisted of about 6,000 men, of whom half, under Barcena and Losada, were holding the western end of the province, behind the Navia river, with head quarters at Castropol, while the rest lurked in the higher valleys of the Cantabrian Sierra, rendering Bonnet’s communication with Serras in Leon insecure, and sometimes descending to the coast, to make a sudden attack on one of the small garrisons which linked the French garrison in Oviedo with that at Santander. Of these roving bands the chief leader was the adventurous Porlier, the Marquesito[582], as the Asturians called him, who won a well-deserved reputation for his perseverance and never-failing courage. The 25,000 men of Silveira, Mahy, and the Asturian army were the only regular troops opposed to the 75,000 French in Northern Spain. How came it, then, that the enemy was held in check, and never succeeded in pushing on to the support of Masséna any force save the two divisions of Drouet? The answer is simple: the French garrisons were fixed down to their positions partly because of Napoleon’s entire lack of naval power, partly because of the unceasing activity of the guerrilleros, who were far more busy in 1810 than at any preceding time. As to the first-named cause, it may be said that the 20,000 French in Asturias, Santander, and Biscay were paralysed by the existence of a small Anglo-Spanish squadron based on Corunna and Ferrol. As long as this existed, every small port along the whole[p. 486] northern coast of Spain had to be garrisoned, under penalty of a possible descent from the sea, which might cut the road from Oviedo to San Sebastian at any one of a hundred points, and provide arms and stores for the guerrilla bands of the mountains. Many such expeditions were carried out with more or less success in 1810. The first and most prosperous of them took place in July, when Porlier, putting his free corps of some 1,000 men on transports, and convoyed by the British commodore Mends, with a couple of frigates, came ashore near the important harbour of Santona, drove out the small garrison, and then coasted along in the direction of Biscay, destroying shore-batteries and capturing as many as 200 men at one point and another. Of the peasantry of the coast, some enlisted in Porlier’s band, others took to the hills on their own account, when they had been furnished with muskets from the ships. The Marquesito repeated his raid in August, but this time stopped on shore, and put himself at the head of the local insurgents, who made so strong a head in the country about Potes and the upper Pisuerga, that Serras marched against him with almost the whole of his division[583], and spent September in hunting him along the sides of the sierras. But though aided by troops lent by Bonnet, and by detachments from Burgos, the French general could never catch the adroit partisan, who, when too hard pressed, returned to the central mountains of the Asturias.

Pleased with the exploits of Porlier, the Cadiz Regency resolved to keep up the game, and sent up to Corunna Colonel Renovales, the officer who had for so long made head against Suchet in the mountains of Aragon[584]. He was authorized to requisition a brigade from Mahy’s army, and the more seaworthy ships from the arsenal of Ferrol. Applications for naval assistance had also been made to the British Admiralty, and Sir Home Popham came, with four frigates and a battalion of marines, to assist in a systematic raid along the coasts of Asturias and Biscay. The joint expedition started from Corunna on October 14, with a landing force of 1,200 Spanish and 800 British bayonets on board. On the 16th it drew in to[p. 487] land near the important harbour of Gijon, where Bonnet kept a force of 700 men, who depended for their succour on the main body of his division at Oviedo. But the French general chanced to be hunting Porlier further to the east, and had left the Asturian capital almost ungarrisoned. Hence, when Porlier unexpectedly appeared before Gijon on the inland side, having eluded his pursuer, and the ships threw the landing force ashore, the French battalion had to fly. Several ships, both privateers and merchantmen, with a considerable amount of military stores, fell into the hands of Porlier and Renovales. This exploit drew down on them the whole French force in the Asturias, for Bonnet concentrated every man and musket on Gijon. But the Anglo-Spanish squadron, having thus drawn him westward, sailed in the opposite direction, and, after threatening Santona, was about to touch at Vivero, when it was scattered by a hurricane from the Bay of Biscay. A Spanish frigate and brig, an English brig, and several gunboats and transports were dashed on the rocky coast, and lost with all hands. This disaster, which cost 800 lives, compelled Renovales to return to Corunna (November 2). But the raid had not been useless; it had compelled Bonnet to evacuate many posts, distracted the garrisons of Santander and Biscay, and even induced Caffarelli to march down to the coast with his newly-arrived division, the ‘Reserve of the Army of Spain.’ Serras, too, had drawn up the greater part of his scattered division to the north-west, thus leaving the borders of Galicia and the Tras-os-Montes hardly watched. This enabled Mahy to send down troops into the plain of Leon, and to establish something like a blockade around Astorga. But all the operations of the Captain-General of Galicia were feeble and tentative. He passed among his countrymen as an easy-going man, destitute of energy or initiative[585]. Silveira, in the Tras-os-Montes, a more active but a more dangerous man to entrust with troops, took advantage of Serras’s absence to cross the Douro, invest Almeida, and cut the communication between that place and Ciudad Rodrigo[586].

Such was the effect of the sea-power, even when it was used sparingly and by unskilful hands. The raids along the northern[p. 488] coast had kept Bonnet and the troops in Santander and Biscay fully employed; they had distracted Serras, Caffarelli, and even the garrisons of the province of Burgos. They had saved Mahy and Silveira from attack, and had lighted up a blaze of insurrection in the western hills of Cantabria which, thanks to the energy of Porlier and his colleague Louga, was never extinguished.

Meanwhile the mass of French troops between Burgos and Pampeluna—the 9th Corps, the Young Guard Divisions, and the garrison in Navarre—had been ‘contained’ by an enemy of a different sort. Here the influence of the British naval supremacy was little felt: it was due to the energy of Spaniards alone that the 38,000 men under Drouet, Roguet and Dumoustier, and Reille were prevented during the months of September, October, and November from doing anything to help Masséna. Old Castile, Navarre, and the lands of the Upper Ebro, were kept in a constant turmoil by a score of guerrillero chiefs, of whom the elder Mina was the leading figure. We have already had occasion to speak of the exploits of his relative, ‘the Student’ as he was called, to distinguish him from his uncle, and have noted his final capture by Suchet[587]. Francisco Espoz y Mina had rallied the relics of his nephew’s band, and began his long career of raids and counter-marches in April 1810. His central place of refuge was the rough country on the borders of Navarre and Aragon, where he kept his main dép?t at the head of the valley of Roncal; but he often ranged as far afield as Biscay and the provinces of Soria and Burgos. Almost from his first appearance he obtained a mastery over the other chiefs who operated on both sides of the Upper Ebro, having won his place by the summary process of seizing and shooting one Echeverria, ‘who,’ as he writes, ‘was the terror of the villages of Navarre, which he oppressed and plundered in a thousand ways, till they complained to me concerning him. I arrested him at Estella on June 13, 1810, caused him to be shot with three of his principal accomplices, and incorporated his band (600 foot and 200 horse) with my own men[588].’ Mina was the special enemy of Reille,[p. 489] then commanding in Navarre, but he also attracted the attention of Drouet, one of whose divisions was entirely absorbed in hunting him during the autumn of 1810. This was the main cause of the non-appearance of the 9th Corps at Rodrigo and Salamanca, when Masséna was so anxiously awaiting its arrival. Mina’s lot during this period was no enviable one: he was beset on all sides by flying columns, and was often forced to bid his band disperse and lurk in small parties in the mountains, till the enemy should have passed on. Sometimes he was lurking, with seven companions only, in a cave or a gorge: at another he would be found with 3,000 men, attacking large convoys, or even surprising one of the blockhouses with which the French tried to cover his whole sphere of activity. The Regency, admiring his perseverance, gave him, in September, the title of ‘Colonel and Commandant-General of all the Guerrilleros of Navarre.’ He asserts with pride, in his memoir, that he was at one and the same time being hunted by Dorsenne, commanding at Burgos, Reille from Navarre, Caffarelli and his ‘division of Reserve of the Army of Spain,’ by D’Agoult, Governor of Pampeluna, Roguet, commanding the Young Guard, and Paris, one of Suchet’s brigadiers from the Army of Aragon. Yet none of the six generals, though they had 18,000 men marching through his special district, succeeded in catching him, or destroying any appreciable fraction of his band.

There is no exaggeration in this; his services were invaluable during the campaign of Portugal, since he was wearing out a French force of five times his own strength in fruitless marches, under winter rains, and over roads that had become all but impassable. The archives of the French War Office show lists of officers by the dozen killed or wounded ‘dans une reconnaissance en Navarre,’ or ‘dans une rencontre avec les bandes de Mina,’ or ‘en combat près de Pampelune,’ during the later months of 1810. Wellington owed him no small gratitude, and expressed it to him in 1813, when he entrusted him with much responsible work during the Campaign of the Pyrenees. The suffering inflicted on the provinces of the Upper Ebro by Mina’s activity was of course terrible: the French destroyed every village that sheltered him or furnished him with recruits, and were wont to shoot every prisoner from his band that they[p. 490] caught, till he began to retaliate by corresponding or greater numbers of executions from the considerable number of prisoners in his hands. In 1811 this barbarous system was in full swing on both sides, but it was put to an end by mutual agreement in 1812. In addition to the woes that Navarre and its neighbours suffered under the French martial law, and by the monstrous requisitions imposed upon them to feed the mass of troops forming the flying columns, they had also to maintain the patriotic bands. Mina declares that he always took rations for his men, but avoided levying money contributions on the peasantry, depending on his booty, the rents of national and ecclesiastical property, on which he laid hands, on fines inflicted on ‘bad Spaniards,’ i. e. those who had done anything to help his pursuers, and on ‘the custom-houses which I established upon the very frontier of France; for I laid under contribution even the French custom-house at Irun, on the Bidassoa, which engaged to deliver, and actually paid to my delegates, 100 gold ounces (about ￡320) per month.’ By this strange secret agreement private goods passing Irun and the other frontier posts were guaranteed against capture in the district which Mina’s bands infested[589].

Eastward of Mina’s sphere of activity the guerrilleros were more numerous but less powerful. Among the chief of them was Julian Sanchez, who, with a mounted band of 300 to 500 lancers—infantry would have been easily caught in the plain of Leon—busied himself in cutting the communication between Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Zamora, and Valladolid, and was Kellermann’s chief tormentor. He was in regular communication with Wellington, and sent him many captured dispatches and useful pieces of information. In Old Castile the priest Geronimo Merino, generally known as ‘El Cura,’ was the most famous and most active among many leaders. It was his band, aided by that of Tapia, also a cleric, which on July 10, 1810, fought a most daring and desperate action at Almazan, near Soria, with two French battalions of marines, who were marching, the one to join Masséna the other to join Soult. It cost the enemy no less than 13 officers hors de combat, as the Paris[p. 491] archives show[590], and over 200 men, though the guerrilleros were finally beaten off. In October he surprised and captured an enormous convoy of corn and munitions of war, whose loss put the French garrison of Burgos in considerable straits for some weeks. He waged with Dorsenne the same horrible contest of retaliation in the shooting of prisoners which Mina was at the same time carrying on with the generals in Navarre. There were many other bands in Old Castile, those of Abril, Tenderin, Saornil, Principe, and others, of whom some are accused by their own colleagues of being more harmful to the country-side than to the French, from their reckless and miscellaneous plundering, and their refusal to combine for any systematic action[591]. Yet even the worst of them contributed to distract the activity of the French garrisons, and to retard the communication of dispatches and the march of isolated detachments. Under the easy excuse that it was dangerous to move any small body of men along the high-roads, the French commanders of every small town or blockhouse detained for weeks, and even months, drafts on their way to the south or the west, with the result that the number of recruits received at Madrid, Seville, or Salamanca never bore any proper proportion to the total that had crossed the Bidassoa.

Northward from Old Castile, on the skirts of the mountains of Santander and Biscay, the dominating personality among the guerrilleros was Louga, who afterwards rose to some distinction as a commander of regular troops. His special task was the cutting of the communications between Burgos and Bilbao, and Bilbao and Santander; but he often co-operated with Porlier, when that restless partisan made one of his descents from the Asturian mountains, either on to the coast region or on the southern skirts of the Cantabrian sierras.

On the whole, there were probably never more than 20,000 guerrilleros in arms at once, in the whole region between the Sierra de Guadarrama and the shore of the Bay of Biscay. They never succeeded in beating any French force more than two or[p. 492] three battalions strong, and were being continually hunted from corner to corner. Yet, despite their weakness in the open field, their intestine quarrels, their frequent oppression of the country-side, and their ferocity, they rendered good service to Spain, and incidentally to Great Britain and to all Europe, by pinning down to the soil twice their own numbers of good French troops. Any one who has read the dispatches of the commandants of Napoleon’s ‘military governments,’ or the diaries of the officers who served in Reille’s or Dorsenne’s or Caffarelli’s flying columns, will recognize a remarkable likeness between the situation of affairs in Northern Spain during 1810 and 1811 and that in South Africa during 1900 and 1901. Lightly moving guerrilla bands, unhampered by a base to defend or a train to weigh them down, and well served as to intelligence by the residents of the country-side, can paralyse the action of an infinitely larger number of regular troops.

In the north-east of Spain, where the French were engaged not with mere scattered bands of guerrilleros, but with two regular armies, O’Donnell’s Catalans and Caro’s Valencians, the fortune of war took no decisive turn during the autumn of 1810, though one dreadful blow to the Spanish cause—the loss of Tortosa—was to fall in the winter which followed.

We left Suchet in August 1810, established in his newly-conquered positions at Lerida and Mequinenza, master of all the plain-land of Aragon, as well as of a strip of Western Catalonia, and only waiting for the co-operation of Macdonald and the 7th Corps to recommence his operations[592]. That co-operation, however, was long denied him. The Emperor’s last general orders, which had reached Suchet in June, briefly prescribed to him that the conquest of the city and kingdom of Valencia was his final object, but that he must first break the Spanish line by capturing Tortosa, the great fortress of the Lower Ebro, and Tarragona, the main stronghold of Southern Catalonia[593]. For both these latter operations he was to count on the aid of Macdonald and the Army of Catalonia[594]. Relying on this support, Suchet, after less than a month had elapsed since the capture of Mequinenza, had pushed his advanced guard down the Ebro,[p. 493] till it was at the very gates of Tortosa. One detachment even passed the town, and seized the ferry of Amposta, the only passage of the Ebro near its mouth, actually cutting the great road from Tarragona to Valencia, and only leaving the bridge of Tortosa itself open, for the linking of the operations of Caro and O’Donnell. Meanwhile Suchet was preparing his siege-train at Mequinenza, and waiting for a rise in the Ebro, which would commence to become navigable with the arrival of the autumn rains, in order to ship his guns down-stream to their destined goal. He was at the same time making the land route to Tortosa passable, by repairing the old military road from Caspe to Mora and Tivisa, which had been constructed during the wars of the Spanish Succession, but had long ago fallen into ruin.

Suchet was quite aware that by thrusting a comparatively small force—he had only brought up 12,000 men—into the near neighbourhood of Tortosa, he was risking the danger of being attacked at once by the Army of Valencia from the south and O’Donnell’s Catalans from the north. But he trusted that Macdonald and the 7th Corps would keep the latter—the more formidable enemy—employed, while he had a well-founded contempt for the generalship of Caro, who had always proved himself the most incompetent and timid of commanders. But Macdonald arrived late, having been forced to spend the whole summer, as has been already related[595], in his triple revictualling of Barcelona, and meanwhile the Valencian army came to the front. Its leading division, under Bassecourt, threatened Morella, on Suchet’s flank, early in August, hoping to draw him away to defend this outpost. But a single brigade under Montmarie sufficed to turn back the Valencian detachment, and Suchet kept his positions. O’Donnell meanwhile, vainly hoping for solid help from Caro, had joined the division of his army which was kept at Falcet[596], and after threatening Suchet’s head quarters at Mora on July 30, so as to distract his attention, suddenly turned aside and entered Tortosa with 2,500 men. Calling out all the troops available for a sortie, he issued from the town on August 3, and beat up the outposts of the division under Laval, which was in observation before his gates. But though the Catalans fought fiercely, and drove in the first[p. 494] French line, they were not strong enough to push the enemy away from Tortosa. O’Donnell should have brought a heavier force if he intended to accomplish his end. Shortly after he returned to Tarragona, whither he was called by the movements of Macdonald.

Some days later than he had covenanted, Caro came up to Vinaros, on the coast-road from Valencia, and to San Mateo on the parallel inland road, with his whole army, including the force which Bassecourt had been commanding. It consisted of no more than 10,000 ill-organized troops of the Line, who had been joined by nearly as many unregimented peasants in loose guerrilla bands. The whole mass was far from being formidable, as Suchet knew. Wherefore the French general, cutting down to the smallest possible figure the containing troops left before Tortosa, and at his head quarters at Mora, marched with eleven battalions and a cavalry regiment—only 6,000 men in all—to meet the Valencians. He drove their advanced cavalry from Vinaros, and advanced against their positions at Calig and Cervera del Maestre. Caro at once ordered a precipitate retreat, and did not stop till he had placed thirty miles between himself and the enemy. His obvious terror and dismay at the approach of the French roused such anger that he was summoned to give up the command by his own officers, and obeyed without hesitation[597]. He fled by sea to Majorca, knowing, it is said, that he would have been torn to pieces if he had shown his face before the populace at Valencia, over which he had exercised a sort of dictatorship for more than a year. Suchet, unable to catch such an evasive enemy, and regarding the routed army as a negligible quantity, returned to Mora, where he received the news that the long-expected Macdonald was at last about to appear (August 20).

The Duke of Tarentum had thrown the third and last of his great convoys into Barcelona on the 18th of August, having brought with him as its escort the French division of his army, which was now commanded by Frère[598], and the Italian divisions[p. 495] of Severoli and Pignatelli. He had left behind him General Baraguay d’Hilliers, in the position which Reille had been wont to hold, as the defender of the Ampurdam and Northern Catalonia as far as Hostalrich. Eighteen thousand men were told off for this task, including all the German brigades; but after garrisoning Gerona, Rosas, Figueras, and Hostalrich, d’Hilliers had no great field-force left, and found full employment in warding off the raids of Manso, Rovira, and the other miquelete leaders upon the communication between Gerona and Perpignan. Nearly 10,000 men had also been left in Barcelona, including many sick, and the three divisions with which Macdonald marched to join Suchet did not exceed 16,000 sabres and bayonets, though the whole force of the 7th Corps was reckoned at over 50,000 men.

On August 13 Macdonald forced the Pass of Ordal, after some skirmishing with the somatenes, and entered the plain of Tarragona. It was the news of his approach to the Catalan capital which brought O’Donnell back in haste from Tortosa. He concentrated the greater part of his troops, on the hypothesis that the 7th Corps might be intending to lay siege to the place. He brought down Campoverde’s division from the north to join those of Ibarrola, Sarsfield, and the Baron de Eroles, which were already on the spot. It soon became known, however, to the Spaniards that Macdonald could not be bent on siege operations, for he was bringing with him neither the heavy artillery nor the enormous train of provisions that would be required in such a case. He marched past Reus and Valls to Momblanch, skirmishing all the way with O’Donnell’s detachments, and thence to Lerida, which he reached on August 29. There he found Suchet awaiting him for a conference. The orders from Paris, on which both were acting, seemed to prescribe that Tortosa and Tarragona should both be attacked[599]. But the General and the Marshal agreed that their joint strength was not more than enough for one siege at a time. They agreed that the 3rd Corps should undertake the leaguer of Tortosa, and ‘the containing’ of the Valencian army, while the 7th should cover these operations by keeping O’Donnell and[p. 496] the Catalans fully employed. Suchet therefore drew his detachments southward from Lerida and the plains of the Segre, handing over all that tract to Macdonald. From this fertile region alone could the Marshal have fed his corps, Central Catalonia being barren, and so overrun by O’Donnell’s detachments that it was impossible to forage freely within its bounds. Suchet undertook to provide for his own corps during the siege of Tortosa by bringing up stores from Saragossa and the valley of the Ebro, via Mequinenza. Macdonald lent him, meanwhile, the weakest of his three divisions, 2,500 Neapolitans under Pignatelli, who were to escort the siege-train for Tortosa along the Ebro, when the autumn rains made the river navigable from Mequinenza to the sea.
Coins current in 1808-14

Enlarge  COINS CURRENT IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL IN 1808–14

While Suchet was moving southward and making ready for the siege, the Duke of Tarentum established himself with head quarters at Cervera on the Barcelona-Lerida road, and brigades at Lerida, Agramunt, and Tarrega, all in the plain; he was ready to fall upon O’Donnell’s flank if the Catalans should make any attempt to succour Tortosa, by marching from Tarragona along the roads parallel to the sea coast. Meanwhile he had completely lost touch both with the garrison of Barcelona and with Baraguay d’Hilliers in the Ampurdam. This was the regular state of things during the Catalan war; for if the French left detachments to guard a line of communication, they were invariably cut off by the enemy; while, if they did not, the roads were blocked and no information came through. So vigorous were the somatenes at this moment, that small parties moving from Tarrega to Cervera,—places only twelve miles apart, and in the middle of the cantonments of the 7th Corps,—were not unfrequently waylaid and destroyed. Macdonald, despite his well-known humanity, was forced to burn villages, and shoot road-side assassins caught red-handed. He lay in the position which he had taken up on September 4-6 for the greater part of that month and the succeeding October, concentrating at intervals a part of his forces for an expedition into the hills, when the Catalans pressed him too closely. At the commencement of his sojourn in the plains, he sent Severoli with an Italian brigade to collect provisions in the valley of the Noguera Palleresa. This raid led to dreadful[p. 497] ravaging of the country-side, but Severoli returned with no spoil and many wounded. He had pushed his advance as far as Talarn, skirmishing the whole way, and driving the somatenes before him, but could accomplish nothing save the burning of poor villages evacuated by their inhabitants. A week later other expeditions scoured the mountain sides eastward, with little more success[600].

Meanwhile, though Macdonald imagined that he was not only protecting Suchet’s northern flank, but also attracting the attention of O’Donnell to himself, the enterprising Spanish general had contrived an unwelcome surprise for him. He knew that he was not strong enough to fight the 7th Corps in the open field, nor even to face Suchet by making another attempt to relieve Tortosa—which place, for the moment, was in no immediate danger. He therefore resolved to draw Macdonald from his present position, by a blow at the corner of Catalonia where the French were weakest.

The Marshal considered that Baraguay d’Hilliers was perfectly safe in the northern region which he garrisoned, since no regular Spanish force was now in arms in that direction. O’Donnell resolved to undeceive him. Leaving the two divisions of Obispo and Eroles to block the road from Macdonald’s post at Cervera to Barcelona, with orders to retire into Tarragona if hard pressed, he ordered a third division, that of Campoverde, to prepare for a forced march to the north. At the same time a force, consisting of the British frigate Cambrian and the Spanish frigate Diana, convoying a few transports with 500 men on board for disembarkation, sailed from Tarragona, for a destination which was kept secret to the last moment. The troops were under Doyle, the British commissioner in Catalonia; Captain Fane of the Cambrian was senior naval officer.

O’Donnell’s march was perilous: he had to pass close to the front of the garrisons of Barcelona, Hostalrich, and Gerona, through a most difficult and mountainous country, without giving any signs of his presence; for, if his movement were discovered, Baraguay d’Hilliers might concentrate his scattered brigades, and crush him by force of numbers. The march, how[p. 498]ever, was carried out with complete success, and on September 13 O’Donnell lay with 6,000 infantry and 400 horse at Vidreras, south of Gerona, while the naval force was hovering off Palamos, the nearest point on the coast. The rough region between Gerona and the sea was at this moment occupied by half Rouyer’s division of troops of the Confederation of the Rhine, under Schwartz—the ever-unlucky general whose name was connected with the disasters of Bruch[601] and Manresa[602]. He had with him four weak battalions of the 5th (Anhalt-Lippe) and 6th (Schwartzburg-Waldeck-Reuss) regiments, and a squadron of cuirassiers: a force which, owing to the sickliness of the autumn season, did not amount to much more than 1,500 men in all. But he was so close to Gerona[603], where lay Rouyer’s other two regiments, and some French troops, that he was not considered in any danger by his superiors. Schwartz’s main duty was to prevent any communication between the somatenes of the inland and the cruisers which were always passing up and down the coast. Provoked by a recent raid at Bagur, on September 10, where an English landing-party had stormed one of his coast batteries, and captured the garrison of 50 men, Schwartz had just strengthened all his posts along the shore. He had only 700 men at his head quarters at La Bispal; the rest were dispersed between Bagur, San Feliu, Palamos, and the connecting post at Calonje. On the morning of the fourteenth he was stricken with horror when his outposts informed him that they had been driven in by Spanish infantry and cavalry in overwhelming force. He sent orders, too late, for his troops on the coast to concentrate, and prepared to fall back on Gerona with his whole force. But his messenger had hardly gone when he was attacked by O’Donnell, who drove him into the indefensible castle of La Bispal, which was commanded by a neighbouring hill and the church tower of the village. After losing some men shot down from these points of vantage, Schwartz surrendered at nightfall, when the Spaniards were preparing to storm his refuge. His defence cannot have been very desperate, as he had lost only one officer and four men killed, and three officers and sixteen men wounded.[p. 499] But this was only part of the disaster which befell the German brigade that day: by a careful timing of the attacks Doyle and Fane stormed Palamos with the landing-force at the same moment that La Bispal was being attacked, while Colonel Fleires, with a detachment of O’Donnell’s land troops, surprised San Feliu, and Colonel Aldea with another cut off the companies at Calonje. In all the Spaniards captured on that day one general, two colonels, fifty-six officers, and 1,183 rank and file, with seventeen guns. Schwartz’s brigade was absolutely destroyed; only a few stragglers reached Gerona, from which no help had been sent, because O’Donnell had turned loose all the somatenes of the region to demonstrate against the place[604].

Without waiting for Rouyer and Baraguay d’Hilliers to assemble their forces, O’Donnell departed from the scene of his exploits without delay. He himself, having received a severe wound in the foot, embarked with the prisoners on board Fane’s ships and returned to Tarragona. Campoverde, with the land-force, retired hastily past Gerona to the mountains of the north, retook Puycerda, beat up the outposts of the French garrison of Montlouis on the frontier of Cerdagne, and raised some contributions on the other side of the Pyrenees. From thence he descended the Segre, and established himself at Cardona and Calaf, facing Macdonald’s northern flank.

So thoroughly had the main body of the 7th Corps lost touch with the troops left behind at Gerona and in the Ampurdam, that the news of the disaster of La Bispal only reached Macdonald, via France and Saragossa, more than a fortnight after it had happened. It alarmed him for the safety of the north, but did not suffice to draw him away from Suchet, as O’Donnell had hoped. The news that the Spanish raiding division had disappeared from the neighbourhood of Gerona encouraged him to remain in his present position, which alone made the siege of Tortosa possible. Presently he was informed that a considerable force had appeared in his own sphere of operations—this being the same division of Campoverde which had done all the mischief in the north. He therefore marched[p. 500] on October 18, with two French and two Italian brigades, to attack this new enemy. On the next day he occupied Solsona, where the Junta of Upper Catalonia had hitherto been sitting. The place was found deserted by its inhabitants, and was plundered; its great cathedral was burnt—either by accident or design. On the twenty-first, however, when the Marshal came in front of Cardona, he found the town, the inaccessible castle above it, and the neighbouring heights, manned by Campoverde’s division, strengthened by several thousand somatenes of the district. The Italian general Eugenio marched straight at the position, with Salme’s French brigade in support, despising his enemy, and not waiting for the Commander-in-Chief and the reserves. He met with a sharp repulse, for the Spaniards charged his columns just as they drew near the crest, and hurled them down with loss. Macdonald refused to throw in all his troops, and contented himself with bringing off the routed brigade. He then returned to Solsona and Cervera, much harassed in his retreat by the somatenes. It is curious that he did not press the combat further, as he had a large superiority of numbers over the Catalan division, and had not lost much more than 100 men in the first clash[605]. But the position was formidable, and the Marshal more than once in this campaign showed himself averse to taking risks. Perhaps, also, he may have already made up his mind to return to the east and abandon Suchet, since it was at about this time that more disquieting information from Baraguay d’Hilliers reached him by way of France.

This new budget of troubles contained two main items. The first was that the August supplies thrown into Barcelona were nearly exhausted, and that the town urgently required revictualling. The second was that it was impossible to send on the necessary convoys, because of the extreme activity of the somatenes, and the inadequate number of troops left in Northern Catalonia. One considerable train of waggons had been captured and destroyed near La Junquera, on the very frontier of France, by the Baron de Eroles, who had now taken up the[p. 501] command of the northern insurgents. Another was standing fast at Gerona for want of sufficient escort, a third had been collected at Perpignan, but dared not start. So pressing was the need for the relief of Barcelona, that Macdonald made up his mind that he must break up from his present cantonments—even at the risk of making the siege of Tortosa impossible—and transfer himself to the north-east.

Accordingly, on November 4, he commenced a toilsome march by way of Calaf, Manresa, and Hostalrich to Gerona, where he arrived in safety on the 10th. Campoverde followed him, for some way, by parallel paths along the mountains, but never dared to strike, the strength of the 7th Corps when it marched in a mass being too great for him. It is probable that the Marshal would have had more trouble if O’Donnell had been in the field, but that enterprising general was not yet healed of the wound which he had received at La Bispal. It had gangrened, and he had been sent to Majorca by his physicians, who declared that a complete cessation from military work was the only chance of saving his life. The interim command was turned over in November to the senior Lieutenant-General in Catalonia, Miguel Iranzo, a very poor substitute for the hard-fighting Spanish-Irish general.

Macdonald, having joined Baraguay d’Hilliers, had now an imposing mass of troops under his hand. Moreover, he got back the services of his old divisional generals Souham and Pino, who arrived from sick leave, and took over charge of the divisions lately in the charge of Frère and Severoli. A great draft from France and Italy had rejoined in their company. The Marshal was therefore able to collect the fractions of the great convoy destined for Barcelona, and to conduct it to that city after a slow and cautious march on November 25. He then changed the battalions in the garrison of Barcelona, where he left both Pino and Souham, sent back to the Ampurdam the troops he had borrowed from Baraguay d’Hilliers, as escort for the returning convoy, and marched for the second time to join Suchet; moving by way of Momblanch, he got once more into touch with the Army of Aragon at Falcet, near Mora, on December 12.

Thus the campaign came back, at mid-winter, to the same[p. 502] aspect that it had shown in the first days of September. It has been the wont of military critics to throw the blame for the lost three months on Macdonald[606]. But this seems unfair: it is true that he was absent from the post which he had promised to hold, for the protection of Suchet’s rear, from November 4 to December 13. But why had so little been done to forward the siege of Tortosa during the time from September 4 to November 4—two whole months—while the Marshal was in the covenanted position, and actually carrying out his promise to contain the Catalans, and leave Suchet’s hands free for the actual prosecution of the projected siege? The commander of the Army of Aragon had been given two of the best campaigning months of the year—September and October—and had no enemy about him save the ever-unlucky Valencian army, the local somatenes of the Lower Ebro, and the scattered bands of Villacampa in the hills of Upper Aragon. It was only sixty miles from his base at Mequinenza, where his siege-train had been collected months before, to the walls of Tortosa, and he had brought up his field army before that place as early as August. No doubt the country between Mequinenza and Tortosa is rough, and its roads execrable, while water-transport along the Ebro was rendered more difficult than usual by a rather dry autumn, which kept the river low. But twenty-six heavy siege-guns were got down to Xerta, only ten miles from Tortosa, as early as September 5, during a lucky flood, while a considerable number more were pushed to the front during the same month, by the land route, formed by Suchet’s new military road from Caspe to Mora. It seems, therefore, that Suchet’s inactivity in September and October can be explained neither by laying blame on Macdonald, nor by exaggerating the difficulties of transport. If, as he wrote himself, ‘Notre corps d’armée se trouvait encha?né sur le bas Ebre, sans pouvoir agir, et son chef n’avait d’espoir que dans une crue d’eau et dans le secours des circonstances[607],’ he was himself responsible for his failure, either from over-caution or because he had undertaken a task beyond his means. The real cause of his two months’ delay was the vigorous action of the[p. 503] enemy. There was no danger from the disorganized Valencian army, which only made a feeble attempt on November 26-27 to beat up the small force under General Musnier, which lay at Uldecona to cover the blockade of Tortosa from the south; the attack, led by Bassecourt, was driven off with ease. The real opponents of Suchet were the irregular forces of the Catalans, and the Aragonese insurgents in his rear. The former, though few in numbers, since Macdonald was attracting their main attention, attacked every convoy that tried to float down the gorge of the Ebro, and sometimes with success. On the 15th of September they captured a whole battalion of Pignatelli’s Neapolitans, which was acting as guard to some boats. On other occasions they took or destroyed smaller or greater portions of flotillas carrying guns or stores to Xerta, where the siege park was being collected. But Villacampa’s Aragonese gave even greater trouble; from his lair in the Sierra de Albaracin that enterprising partisan made countless descents upon Suchet’s rear, and so molested the garrisons of Upper Aragon, that the French general had repeatedly to send back troops from his main body to clear the roads behind him. Villacampa was beaten whenever he tried to fight large bodies, even though he was aided by a General Carbajal, whom the Regency had sent from Cadiz with money and arms, to stir up a general revolt in the Teruel-Montalban region. The Polish General Chlopiski, detached in haste from the blockade of Tortosa, broke the forces of Carbajal and Villacampa in two successive engagements at Alventosa, on the borders of Valencia (October 31), and Fuensanta, near Teruel (November 11). The insurrection died down, Villacampa retired into his mountains, and Chlopiski returned to the main army. But only a few days later Suchet had to cope with a new danger: Macdonald having taken himself off to Gerona, the Catalans were at last able to detach regular troops to reinforce the somatenes of the Lower Ebro. A brigade under General Garcia Navarro came up to Falcet, opposite Mora, and formed the nucleus of a raiding force, which beset the whole left bank of the Ebro, and made its navigation almost impossible. Suchet had to detach against it seven battalions under Abbé and Habert, who attacked Navarro’s entrenched camp at Falcet on[p. 504] November 12, and stormed it. The Spanish general, who showed distinguished personal courage, and charged valiantly at the head of his reserves, was taken prisoner with some 300 men. The somatenes fled to the hills again, and the regulars retired to Reus, near Tarragona, where they were out of Suchet’s sphere of operations. It was just after this combat that the unfortunate Army of Valencia made the useless diversion of which we have already spoken[608]. It, at least, kept Suchet busy for a few days. By the time that it was over, the greater part of the remaining siege-material was ready at Xerta, the water-carriage down the Ebro having become easy since Garcia Navarro’s defeat. When, therefore, Macdonald’s arrival at Momblanch was reported at Suchet’s head quarters, and an adequate covering-force was once more placed between him and the Catalan army in the direction of Tarragona, the actual leaguer of Tortosa could at length begin. It lasted, short though it was, till the New Year of 1811 had come, and must, therefore, be described not here but in the fourth volume of this work.

Thus six months had elapsed between the fall of Lerida and the commencement of the next stage of the French advance in Eastern Spain. If it is asked why the delay was so long, the answer is easy: it was due not, as some have maintained, to Suchet’s slowness or to Macdonald’s caution, but solely to the splendid activity displayed by Henry O’Donnell, a general often beaten but never dismayed, and to the tenacity of the Catalans, who never gave up hope, and were still to hold their own, after a hundred disasters, till the tide of success in the Peninsula at last turned back in 1812-13.