SECTION XXV EVENTS IN NORTHERN, EASTERN, AND CENTRAL SPAIN CHAPTER I

KING JOSEPH AND HIS TROUBLES

While following the fortunes of Wellington and Masséna, during the first four months of 1811, we have been compelled to leave almost untouched the sequence of events in the rest of Spain; not only the doings of Suchet and Macdonald in the far east, which had no practical connexion with the campaign of Portugal, but also the minor affairs of the southern and central provinces. Only Soult’s expedition to Estremadura, which came into close touch with Wellington, has been dealt with. It is time to explain the general posture of the war in the Peninsula, during the time when its critical point lay between Lisbon and Abrantes, where Masséna and Wellington stood face to face, each waiting for the other to move.

What was going on in Portugal was, as we have already seen, practically a secret to the French in Spain. For the Portuguese Ordenan?a and the Spanish guerrilleros had done their work of blocking the roads so well, that no accurate information penetrated to Madrid, Valladolid, or Seville from Santarem. It was only at rare intervals, when Foy and other officers cut their way through this ‘fog of war’ that the condition of affairs on the Tagus became known for a moment. The fog descended again when they had passed through on their way to Paris, and given their information as to the fortunes of the Army of Portugal during the weeks that preceded their departure. The gaps in the narrative were very long—nothing got through between the departure of Masséna from Almeida on September 15, 1810, and Foy’s first arrival at Ciudad Rodrigo on November 8th.[p. 207] There was another lacuna in the knowledge of the situation between that date and the passage of Masséna’s second successful messenger, Casabianca, from Santarem to Rodrigo in the earliest days of February. And after Casabianca had passed by, the next news came out through Foy’s second mission, when he started to announce the oncoming retreat on March 5, and got to the borders of Leon on March 13. The only way in which King Joseph at Madrid, or the generals of the ‘military governments’ of Old Castile, or Soult in Andalusia, felt the course of the war on its most important theatre, was that they were for many months freed from any anxiety about the movements of Wellington. He was ‘contained’ by Masséna, and, however he might be faring, he had no power to interfere by armed force in the affairs of Spain. The French for all this time had to deal only with the armies of the Cortes, and with their old and irrepressible enemies the guerrilleros of the mountains.

While the fate of the Portuguese expedition was still uncertain, while it seemed possible to Napoleon that Masséna might cling to his position at Santarem till Soult came up to join him on the Tagus, a considerable change was made with regard to the French troops in northern Spain. Convinced at last there was little to be said in favour of that system of many small ‘military governments’, in Old Castile and the neighbouring provinces, which he had created in 1810, the Emperor resolved to put them all under a single commander. This would give him six less independent generals to communicate with, and would ensure for the future a much better co-operation between the divisions which occupied the valley of the Douro and the Pyrenean regions. The six military governors had been each playing his own game, and taking little notice of that of his neighbours. Their enemies were mostly the guerrillero bands of the Cantabrian hills and of Navarre. Each general did his best to hunt these elusive enemies out of his own department, but took little heed of their trespasses on his neighbours’ territory. Evasive and indomitable partisans like Mina in Navarre, Julian Sanchez in Old Castile, and Porlier and Longa in the Cantabrian sierras, found it comparatively easy to shift their positions when the pressure on one region was too great for them, and to move on into another—they were sure that the hunt would soon slacken, and that they[p. 208] could return at their leisure to their old haunts. The Emperor thought that it would be possible to make an end of them, if all his garrisons and movable columns in northern Spain were put under a single commander and moved in unison under a single will. Hence came the decree of January 8, 1811, creating the ‘Army of the North,’ and handing it over to Marshal Bessières, whose name was still remembered in those regions owing to his old victory of Medina de Rio Seco. His authority extended over the troops stationed in Navarre, Biscay, Burgos, Valladolid, Salamanca, the Asturias, and Santander, including not only the regular garrisons of those provinces but the two divisions of the Young Guard, which had replaced Drouet’s corps in Old Castile, and the division under Serras which watched Galicia from the direction of Benavente and Astorga. The total of the forces placed under his orders amounted to 70,000 men, of whom 59,000 were ‘présents sous les armes,’ the rest being in hospital, or detached outside the limits of the territory assigned to the Army of the North.

Considerable as was this force, it did not accomplish all that the Emperor hoped, even when directed by a single commander of solid military talents. Bessières, though a capable officer, was not a genius, and the tasks assigned to him were so multifarious that after a short time he began to grow harassed and worried, and to cavil at every order that was sent him. He was directed to ‘suppress brigandage,’ i. e. to put down the guerrilleros, to support the Army of Portugal against Wellington whenever necessary, to keep an eye upon the Spanish regular forces in Galicia and the Asturias. This, he declared, was more than could be accomplished with the forces at his disposal. ‘If I concentrate 20,000 men all communications are lost, and the insurgents will make enormous progress. The coast would be lost as far as Bilbao. We are without resources, because it is only with the greatest pains that the troops can be fed from day to day. The spirit of the population is abominably bad: the retreat of the Army of Portugal has turned their heads. The bands of insurgents grow larger, and recruit themselves actively on every side.... The Emperor is deceived about Spain: the pacification of Spain does not depend on a battle with the English, who will accept it or refuse it as they please, and who have Portugal[p. 209] behind them for retreat. Every one knows the vicious system of our operations. Every one allows that we are too widely scattered. We occupy too much territory, we use up our resources without profit and without necessity: we are clinging on to dreams. Cadiz and Badajoz absorb all our means—Cadiz because we cannot take it, Badajoz because it requires a whole army to support it. We ought to blow up Badajoz, and to abandon the siege of Cadiz for the present. We ought to draw in, get solid bases for our magazines and hospitals, and regard two-thirds of Spain as a vast battlefield, which a battle may give us or cause us to lose, till the moment that we change our system and take in hand the real conquest and pacification of the country,’ &c.[264]

All this means that Bessières found it impossible to pacify the North, and concluded that it was useless to try to complete the conquest of Andalusia or Portugal, when that of Navarre and Santander was so far from being secure that no small party could go two miles from a garrison town, without a large probability of being cut off by the insurgents. He would have had his master abandon Andalusia and Estremadura, in order to concentrate such masses of troops in the north that the guerrilleros should be smothered by mere numbers, that every mountain village should have its garrison. There was small likelihood that his views would find favour at Paris; the Emperor knew well enough the effect on his prestige that would result from the abandonment of the siege of Cadiz, following upon the retreat of Masséna from Santarem. It would look like a confession of defeat, a renunciation of the great game of conquest; if the French armies retired beyond the Sierra Morena, the results of eighteen months of victorious campaigning in the south would be lost, and the Cortes at Cadiz would once more have a realm to administer. Hence all that Napoleon did for Bessières was to send him in June two new divisions for the strengthening of the garrisons of the North[265], and to bid him fortify every important station on the high-road to Madrid, and even the main bridges of the upper Ebro. A few months later he recalled him, partly[p. 210] because he considered him a pessimist, partly because Bessières quarrelled with King Joseph, who was continually soliciting his removal. But before the Duke of Istria departed he had many more troubles to go through, as will be seen.

The main difficulties of the Army of the North arose from geographical facts. While the plains of Leon and Old Castile could be scoured by cavalry, and easily traversed by flying columns, so that it was not impossible to keep some sort of order in them, this flat upland was bordered on the north by the long chain of the Cantabrian sierras and their foot-hills, broad, rugged, and nearly roadless. Behind these again lay the narrow and difficult coast-land of Asturias and Santander, cut up into countless petty valleys each drained by its own small river, and parted from its neighbours by spurs of the great sierras. How was this mountain region, seventy miles broad and two hundred long, to be dealt with? The French had no permanent garrisons on the coast between Gijon, the port of Oviedo, which was generally occupied by a detachment of Bonnet’s division, and Santander, not far from the borders of Biscay[266]. This last Bessières describes as ‘a bad post from every point of view, only to be defended by covering it with large bodies of troops,’ and only accessible by a series of difficult defiles. In the Cantabrian highlands dwelt Longa and Porlier, with bands which had assumed the proportions of small armies; they could communicate with the sea at any one of a dozen petty ports, and draw arms and supplies from the British cruisers of the Bay of Biscay. Even Mina would occasionally get in touch with the sea through this coast-land, though his main sphere of operations was in Navarre. There were dozens of smaller bands, each based on its own valley, but capable of joining its neighbours for a sudden stroke. Again and again French columns worked up into these sierras from the plain of the Douro, and went on a hunt after the patriots. Sometimes they caught them and inflicted severe loss; more often they were eluded by their enemies, who fled by paths that regular troops could not follow, into some distant corner of the mountains. It was impossible to garrison each upland valley with a force that could resist a general levy of the insur[p. 211]gents. Even little towns like Potes, in the Liebana, Longa’s usual head quarters, which were repeatedly taken, could not be kept. The ‘Army of the North’ would have required 150,000 men instead of the 70,000 whom Bessières actually commanded, if it was to master the whole of this difficult region. Indeed, Cantabria could only have been conquered by an enemy possessing a sea force to attack it in the rear, and occupy all its little ports, as well as an overwhelming land army operating from all sides. To the end of the war Longa and Porlier, often hunted but never destroyed, maintained themselves without any great difficulty in their fastnesses. Nothing but the general despair and demoralization that might have followed the extinction of the patriotic cause in the whole of the rest of Spain, could have brought the war in this region to an end. Nothing of the kind occurred: the Cantabrians kept a high spirit; they won many small successes, and they were perpetually helped by the British from the side of the sea. Bessières had a hopeless problem before him in this quarter, considering the size of his army.

But this was not his only trouble; Bonnet in Asturias was holding Oviedo and the district immediately round it with a strong division, which varied at one time and another from 6,000 to 8,000 men. He was very useful in his present position, because he cut the Spanish line of defence along the north coast in two, and because he seemed to threaten Galicia from the north-east. The threat was not a very real one, for he had not enough men to deliver an attack on eastern Galicia and at the same time to hold Oviedo and its neighbourhood. But he was a source of trouble as well as of strength to his superiors, for it was very difficult to keep in touch with him through the pass of Pajares, and if he were to be attacked at once by the Galicians and by a British landing-force, his position would be a very dangerous one. He had been put to great trouble by Renovales’s naval expedition in October 1810[267], though this was but a small force and had not received any real help from Galicia along the land side. Bessières, after he had been a few months in authority, was inclined to withdraw Bonnet to the south side of the sierras, and to abandon Oviedo, but was warned against such a move by his master, who said that this would be ‘a detestable opera[p. 212]tion,’ as it would relieve Galicia from the threat of invasion, allow of the re-formation of a Junta and an army in Asturias, and necessitate a heavy concentration at Santander[268]. Nevertheless the Marshal did at one crisis withdraw the division from Oviedo.

Between Bonnet in the Asturias and Ciudad Rodrigo, the long front against Galicia was occupied by a single weak French division, that of Serras, whose head quarters were at Benavente, his advanced post at Astorga, and his flank-guards at Leon and Zamora[269]. If the army of Galicia had been in good order this force would have been in great danger, for it was not strong enough to hold the ground allotted to it. But when Del Parque in 1809 drew off to Estremadura the old Army of the North, he had left behind him only a few skeleton corps, and the best of these had been destroyed in defending Astorga in the following year. The formation of a new Galician army of 20,000 men had been decreed, and the cadres left behind in the country had been filled up in 1810, but the results were not satisfactory. The Captain-General, Mahy, was a man of little energy, and spent most of it in quarrels with the local Junta, whom he accused of conspiracy against him, and charged with secret correspondence with La Romana and his party. He seized their letters in the post and imprisoned two members, whereupon riots broke out, and complaints were sent to the Regency at Cadiz. This led to Mahy’s recall, and the captain-generalship was given to the Duke of Albuquerque, then on his mission to London. He died without having returned to Spain, so that the appointment was nugatory, and the Regency then gave it to Casta?os, who was at the same time made Captain-General of Estremadura, after the death of La Romana and the disaster at the Gebora. Casta?os went to the Tagus, to rally the poor remnants of the Estremaduran army, and while retaining the nominal command in Galicia never visited that province, but deputed the command in it to Santocildes, the young general who had so bravely defended Astorga in the preceding spring. He had been sent prisoner to France, but was adroit enough to escape[p. 213] from his captivity, and to make his way back to Corunna. His appointment was popular, but he got no great service out of the Galician army, which was in a deplorable condition, and hopelessly scattered. The Junta kept many battalions to garrison the harbour-fortresses of Corunna, Vigo, and Ferrol, and the main body, whose head quarters lay at Villafranca in the Vierzo, did not amount to more than 7,000 men, destitute of cavalry (which Galicia could never produce) and very poorly provided with artillery. There was another division, under General Cabrera, some 4,000 strong, at Puebla de Senabria, and a third under Barcena and Losada on the borders of the Asturias, opposite Bonnet. The whole did not amount to 16,000 raw troops—yet this was sufficient to hold Serras in observation and to watch Bonnet, who was too much distracted by the Cantabrian bands to be really dangerous. But in the spring of 1811 the Galicians could do no more, and Wellington was much chagrined to find that he could get no effective assistance from them, after he had driven Masséna behind the Agueda, and so shaken the hold of the French on the whole kingdom of Leon. It was not till June that Santocildes found it possible to descend from the hills and threaten Serras. This led to a petty campaign about Astorga and on the Orbigo river, which will be narrated in its due place.

While affairs stood thus in the north, King Joseph and his ‘Army of the Centre’ were profiting for many months from the absence of any danger upon the side of Portugal. Indeed, the period between September 1810 and April 1811 were the least disturbed of any in the short and troublous reign of the Rey Intruso, so far as regular military affairs went. There was no enemy to face save the guerrilleros, yet these bold partisans, of whom the best known were the Empecinado and El Medico (Dr. Juan Palarea) on the side of the eastern mountains, and Julian Sanchez more to the west, on the borders of Leon, sufficed to keep the 20,000 men of whom King Joseph could dispose[270][p. 214] in constant employment. Such a force was not too much when every small town, almost every village, of New Castile had to be provided with a garrison. Roughly speaking, each province absorbed a division: the Germans of the Rheinbund occupied La Mancha, Lahoussaye’s dragoons and the incomplete division of Dessolles[271] held Toledo and its district, the King’s Spaniards the Guadalajara country, leaving only the Royal Guards and some drafts and detachments to garrison the capital. It was with considerable difficulty that Joseph collected in January 1811 a small expeditionary force of not over 3,500 men[272], with which Lahoussaye went out, partly to open up communications with Soult in Estremadura, but more especially to search for any traces of the vanished army of Masséna in the direction of the Portuguese frontier. Lahoussaye started from Talavera on February 1, communicated by means of his cavalry with Soult’s outposts between Truxillo and Merida, and then went northward across the Tagus to Plasencia, from which his cavalry searched in vain, as far as Coria and Alcantara, for any news of the Army of Portugal. From Plasencia he was soon driven back to Toledo by want of supplies. Joseph had directed him to seize Alcantara, re-establish its broken bridge, and place a garrison there; but this turned out to be absolutely impossible, for it would have been useless to leave a small force in this remote spot, when it was certain that it must ere long retire for lack of food, and might well be cut off by the guerrilleros before it could reach Talavera, the nearest occupied point[273].

The Army of the Centre just sufficed to occupy the kingdom of New Castile, and was unable to do more. At least, however, it could maintain its position, and was in no danger. The King was even able to make state visits to places in the close neighbourhood of Madrid, such as Alcala and Guadalajara[274], and[p. 215] seems to have regarded the possibility of such a modest tour as a sign of the approaching pacification of this region.

But just at the moment when Joseph Bonaparte’s military situation was safe, if not satisfactory, he was passing through a diplomatic crisis which absorbed all his attention and reduced him to the verge of despair. We have already alluded, in an earlier chapter, to Napoleon’s insane resolve to annex all Spain beyond the Ebro to the French Empire[275], in return for which he was proposing to hand over Portugal, when it should be conquered, to his brother. The proclamation announcing this strange resolve, which was to make Frenchmen of Mina and all the guerrilleros of Navarre, no less than of the Catalan armies which were still striving so hard against Macdonald, was delayed in publication. For the Emperor wished to wait till Lisbon was in the hands of Masséna, before he made known his purpose. But Joseph was aware that the proclamation had been drawn up, and had been sent out to the governors of the northern provinces, who were only waiting for orders to issue it. The news that the English had evacuated Portugal might any day arrive, and would be the signal for the dismemberment of Spain. He had sent in succession to Paris his two most trusted Spanish adherents, the Duke of Santa-Fé and the Marquis of Almenara, to beg the Emperor to forgo his purpose; all was to no effect. Santa-Fé came back in December absolutely crushed by the reception that he had been given; the Emperor had delivered to him an angry diatribe, in which he complained that his brother forgot that he was a French prince, and remarked that ‘many other European sovereigns, who had received much harder measure, did not make nearly so much noise about it as the King of Spain[276].’ Almenara reached Madrid about a week later to report an equally characteristic interview with Napoleon. He had been directed to inform his master that he should be given one more chance. Let him open negotiations with the Cortes at Cadiz, making them the offer that if they would recognize him as King of Spain, he would recognize them as lawful representatives of the nation, and rule them according to the[p. 216] constitution drawn up at Bayonne. Cadiz and the other fortresses held by the troops of the Regency must open their gates, and Napoleon would then promise to make no annexations of Spanish soil; he would even guarantee the integrity of the kingdom. If the Cortes refused to treat, the Emperor would regard himself as free from any previous engagements made with his brother or the Spanish nation. The provinces beyond the Ebro would become part of France. He added that if affairs in Portugal went badly, it would not be wise to open negotiations with Cadiz at all, for fear that the Spaniards might take the mere fact that proposals had been made to them as a token of growing fear and depression on the part of Joseph.

The King and his ministers knew well the impracticability of making any offer to the government of Cadiz, which (with all its faults and internal dissensions) was determined to fight to the death, and had never shown the least intention of recognizing Napoleon’s nominee as King of Spain. They looked upon the scheme as merely a preliminary to the publication of the edict for the annexation of the provinces beyond the Ebro. King Joseph was to be made to demonstrate his own futility, since he would receive an angry and contemptuous reply, or no reply at all, and it would then be open to his brother to declare that the attempt to govern a united Spain by a king had failed, and that it was necessary to dismember it—perhaps to cut it up into a number of French military governments. This seems to have been Joseph’s own impression; in the council at which the Emperor’s proposal was discussed, he broke out into violent reproaches and bitter complaints against his brother, and explained with tears to his ministers that he and they were betrayed. He was now for abdicating, and this would have been the most dignified course to take. He talked of buying an estate in France, and settling down, far from Paris, as a private person. He had indeed charged his wife’s nephew, Marius Clary, to cross the Pyrenees, and purchase a castle and lands for him in Touraine or the South, where he might hide his disgrace and disappointment.

This move provoked Napoleon’s wrath. He signified his displeasure. ‘The members of the Imperial family could not legally make any acquisition of land in France without the[p. 217] formal consent of the Emperor. In addition, it was impossible for the King of Spain, or the commander of the Army of the Centre, to quit his post without having received the Imperial authorization. Painful as the declaration must be, if the King took such a hazardous step, he should be arrested at Bayonne on crossing the frontier. There must be no more talk about the constitution of Bayonne: the Emperor could dispose of Spain at his good pleasure, and in the interests of the French Empire alone.’ If Joseph persisted in the idea of abdication, he must first make a formal statement to that effect to the French ambassador at Madrid, and, provided that it was considered that the step would cause no dangerous results, nor give rise to any slanderous reports, he might come to his estate of Morfontaine near Paris and ‘finish the matter en règle[277].’

Joseph at first seemed inclined to accept any terms by which he might emerge from his present ignominious position, and actually had several interviews with Laforest, in which they discussed the drafting of a deed of abdication. But it seemed that Napoleon would prefer the prolongation of the present state of affairs, and for his own purposes intended that a puppet king should continue at Madrid. By the ambassador’s advice the document ultimately took the shape of a letter in which Joseph, instead of abdicating in definitive form, merely stated his wish to do so, and referred it to his brother. His confidant, Miot de Melito, with whom he talked over the whole matter, expresses his opinion that at the last moment the fascination of the crown overpowered his master’s full sense of resentment. ‘The King’s note was a good piece of writing, but I consider that it did not state clearly enough that the course to which he inclined, and which he preferred to all others, was abdication. I wished that he had made a stronger affirmation of this, and told him so, but to no effect. It was easy to see that the name of King had still a powerful attraction, from which Joseph could[p. 218] not escape, and I wondered at the glamour and intoxication which (as it seems) hangs about supreme power, since the mere shadow of that power could overweigh with him so many rebuffs and so much resentment[278].’

Napoleon made no reply to his brother’s declaration; he had no intention of taking over the formal responsibility for the government of Spain, and preferred to leave another to answer for all its obvious injustices and oppressions. Affairs were at a standstill for some months, till in April Joseph, taking the opportunity of a formal invitation to become one of the godfathers of the newly-born King of Rome, the heir of the Empire, made a sudden and unauthorized sally to Paris. He started from Madrid on April 23, accompanied by nine of his courtiers and ministers, and crossed the Bidassoa into France on May 10. He made no halt at Bayonne, lest he should be stopped there by orders from his brother, and when, at Dax in Gascony, he received an Imperial dispatch forbidding him to quit Spain, he was able to plead that it was too late to act upon it. Pursuing his journey night and day, he presented himself at Paris on May 15th, and announced to Napoleon that he was come to discharge in person the honourable duties of god-parent at the approaching baptism of his nephew.

Though annoyed at the King’s arrival, for refusals and evasions of a brother’s petitions are transacted more easily by letter than face to face, the Emperor thought it well to make no open show of displeasure, and accepted all the explanations given to him. There followed a series of interviews at Rambouillet, in which Joseph allowed himself to be talked out of his project of abdication: for the Emperor declared that he found him useful in his present position, and informed him that it was his duty, as a brother and a French prince, to obey the directions of the head of his house. In return Napoleon promised to make many arrangements which would render the King’s position less intolerable than it had been for the last year. He would provide him with a monthly subsidy of a million francs from the French treasury, of which half would be for the sustenance of his court and ministers, and the other half for the pay of the Army of the[p. 219] Centre. Orders were issued to Soult, commanding the Army of Andalusia, Bessières, commanding the newly-formed Army of the North, and Suchet, so far as the Army of Aragon was concerned (but not for Catalonia), by which they were directed to pay over to a commissary appointed by Joseph one quarter of the gross revenues which they were raising in the districts which they occupied. They were also directed to leave the law courts in the King’s hands, and not to allow judgements to be given in the name of the Emperor. It was this last practice, frequently adopted by Kellermann in Castile, which had irritated Joseph more than any other misdemeanour of the local commandants.

What Joseph most desired, a real directing power over the movements of all the French troops in Spain, was not given him. But he was granted a sort of illusory superintending authority: if he was at the head quarters of any of the armies, he was to be given the honours of supreme command; all the marshals and generals commanding armies were to send him frequent reports, and not to undertake any operations without informing him of them. ‘The King must have reports of everything that happens; he must know everything, and be able to act in his central position as a sort of agency for transmitting information to the generals. This communication of intelligence, observations, and advice may even take place through his Spanish Minister of War[279],’ wrote the Emperor. The King flattered himself that this meagre concession gave him something like a directing authority over the armies. He told his courtiers that he was given the position of General-in-Chief[280], and used his brother’s permission to send advice in reams to each of the local commanders. Unfortunately there was no way of making them take this advice; they answered more or less politely, showing reasons why they could not follow it, and went on their own ways as before. It was to no effect that Joseph got leave to have his old friend Marshal Jourdan sent back to him, first as governor of Madrid, and later as chief of the staff. He flattered himself[p. 220] that his dispatches would be taken more seriously by Soult or Suchet when they came countersigned by a marshal of France. But he erred, for the younger commanders looked upon Jourdan as effete and past his prime—nor were they altogether wrong.

Nothing can be more curious than the Emperor’s memorandum to Berthier, which directs him to lay these conditions before Joseph. ‘I am thus,’ he writes, ‘satisfying the desires which the King expressed to me, save on the single point of the supreme command over my troops. I cannot give away that supreme command, because I do not see any man capable of managing the troops, and yet the command ought to be one and indivisible. In the note which the King gave me, all the arrangements were complex and confused. It is in the nature of things that if one marshal were placed at Madrid, and directed all operations, he would want to have all the glory along with all the responsibility. The commanders of the Armies of the South and of Portugal would think themselves under the orders not so much of the King as of that marshal, and in consequence would not give him obedience.... My intention is to make no change whatever in the military command, neither with the Army of the North, nor the Army of Aragon, nor the Army of the South, nor the Army of Portugal, save so much as is necessary to secure for the King reports from them all.... I want to do all that I can to give the King a new prestige on his return to Spain, but nothing that may in any way disorganize the Army of Andalusia, or any of the other armies[281].’

It is clear that we have in these few sentences the key to all Napoleon’s difficulties in conducting the Spanish war. He did not wish to ‘have a marshal at Madrid who would want to have all the glory along with all the responsibility,’ i. e. he refused to make one of his servants dangerously great. Soult’s intrigues for kingship at Oporto in 1809 were not forgotten, and Soult would have been the obvious candidate for supreme command, now that Masséna had been tried and found wanting. The Emperor preferred to go on with the hopeless system that was already working, by which he himself directed operations from[p. 221] Paris, basing his orders on facts that were often a month old when he learnt of them, and sending out those orders to reach their destination another month later. He was aware of the evils of this arrangement, but anything was better than to hand over supreme power over 300,000 soldiers to a single lieutenant. It is strange that he did not resolve to descend into Spain himself during the summer of 1811, for European politics were at the moment so quiet that he was actually thinking of concentrating 80,000 men at Boulogne, for a real or a threatened descent on the British Isles[282], a project which he had not been able to dream of since Trafalgar. The tension between France and Russia, which was to increase in a dangerous fashion during the autumn, was not so great in May or June as to make the idea of a Spanish campaign impossible. If it was possible to think of an invasion of England at this moment, it was surely equally feasible to consider the advantages of a descent on Lisbon or Cadiz. But apparently it was the physical distance between Paris and the further end of the Peninsula which deterred the Emperor from seizing what turned out to be the last available opportunity for a sally beyond the Pyrenees. As he himself observed on another occasion, he would be at the end of the world in Portugal, and a crisis might arise behind his back before he got any adequate news of it[283]. This was different from campaigning in central Europe; when at Vienna or Berlin he was still in touch with Paris. The only parallel to an invasion of Portugal would be an invasion of Russia, and it will be remembered that Napoleon’s apprehensions were absolutely justified by what occurred in the autumn of 1812 during his absence at Moscow. The astounding conspiracy of General Malet was within an ace of succeeding,[p. 222] because it was possible to put about all manner of false rumours, when the Emperor was lost to sight on the steppes. A handful of plotters—we might almost say a single plotter, Malet himself—with no assets save impudence and reckless courage, seized the imperial ministers, mustered an armed force, and almost established a provisional government and mastered Paris. This was only possible because the Emperor and the grand army had got so far off that the touch between them and France had been lost, and absence of news for many days had set the tongue of rumour loose[284]. Under such circumstances almost anything might happen, for imposing as was the Colossus of the French Empire, it stood on no firm base, its feet were of clay. Napoleon hoped to build a permanent structure, but there can be no doubt that all through his reign its stability depended on his own life and strength. If he had been cut off suddenly by a cannon-ball at Jena or Wagram, or by the knife of a fanatic such as Staps—Spain could have produced such enthusiasts by the score—chaos would have supervened in France. When once the rumour was set about that the Emperor was dead, anything became possible in Paris. No one knew this better than himself; in his cynical moments he would remark to his confidants that he was well aware that if sudden death came to him the public feeling would be one of relief rather than of sorrow. It was the constraining force of his own indomitable will alone which kept everything together, and if he removed himself to some very remote corner of Europe, from which his orders could not be transmitted continuously and at short intervals, there was grave danger that the machine might run down.

Hence it may perhaps be said that the Peninsula was saved from the presence of the Emperor in 1811 because of the necessary limitations of a one-man power. He dared not remove himself from the centre of affairs; he would not make one of his jealous and ambitious lieutenants over-great, by giving him supreme command. This being so, the bad old system had to go on, and that system of over-late orders grounded on over-late information[285], and followed (or not followed) by over-late[p. 223] execution, was bound to fail, when the enemy’s movements were guided by the cool and resolute brain of Wellington. More than once Napoleon wrote in a petulant mood to complain that it was absurd that all his Spanish armies should be detained and kept in check by a mere 30,000 British troops[286]; he refused for a long time to take the Portuguese seriously, and would only reckon the Spanish guerrilleros as ‘brigands’ or ‘canaille.’ What he failed to see was that a small army worked by a general on the spot, who had minute local knowledge and admirable foresight, was necessarily superior to a much larger force directed by orders from a distance, and commanded by several marshals who were bitterly jealous of each other. Moreover he never thoroughly comprehended the way in which the movements of his armies were delayed by the fact that they were moving in a country where every peasant was their enemy, where provisions could only be collected by armed force, and where no dispatch would reach its destination unless it were guarded by an escort of from 50 to 250 men. And he refused to see that a division or an army corps was in Spain practically no more than the garrison of the province which it occupied—that, if it moved, that province immediately became hostile soil again, and would have to be reconquered. He was always prescribing the concentration of large bodies of men, by means of the evacuation of places or regions of secondary importance[287]. His marshals, knowing the[p. 224] practical inconveniences of such evacuations, were loth to carry them out. To disgarrison a region meant that all communications were cut off, and that the nearest posts were at once blockaded by guerrillero bands. Whenever the Army of Andalusia concentrated, it ceased to receive its dispatches or its convoys from Madrid, and soon learned that Granada and Seville were being menaced. Whenever the Army of the North concentrated, the road between Vittoria and Burgos was cut, and the partidas descended from the Cantabrian mountains to threaten all the posts in Old Castile. And the concentration, when made, could only continue for a few days for lack of food, for there is hardly a region in Spain where a very large army, 80,000 or 100,000 men, can live on the country for a week. It was this, and no mere jealousy of rival generals, which forced Soult and Marmont to part, as we shall see, in June 1811, and Marmont and Dorsenne in September of the same year, and which in November 1812 prevented the immense body formed by the united Armies of the South, Centre, North, and Portugal, from pursuing Wellington to Ciudad Rodrigo. If such a force as 80,000 men were concentrated, it had to be fed; after a few days of living on the country it would be forced to ask for convoys. But convoys coming from long distances were the destined prey of the guerrilleros; if not captured they were at least delayed ad infinitum. Meanwhile the army in front would run out of provisions, and be forced to scatter itself once more in order to live. After Masséna’s venture no French marshal ever dared to think of plunging into Portugal, where he knew that he would find before him a country systematically devastated. No one was better aware of this limitation of the French power than Wellington. He had written as early as 1809 that the enemy could not turn him out of the Peninsula with anything less than 100,000 men, and that he could make such arrangements that an army of that number could not live in the country. The prophecy was fulfilled over and over again. With the enormous strength of the imperial armies it was not impossible to collect 80,000 or 100,000 men—but it was impossible to feed them. All concentrations must be but temporary. When the enemy was massed, the Anglo-Portuguese army might have to give ground, or only to accept an action under the most favourable conditions. But the[p. 225] French would soon have to scatter, and then Wellington regained his freedom of action.

It was useless, therefore, for the Emperor to reiterate his orders that his marshals were to join their armies and ‘livrer enfin une belle bataille’ against Wellington[288]. It takes two sides to fight a battle, and Wellington was determined never to accept a general action, when the numbers were hopelessly against him. He would give back into Portugal, and the enemy could not follow him for more than a march or two.

Meanwhile, though he could not undertake to descend himself into Portugal, Napoleon did not cease to pour troops across the Pyrenees. It is often said that after Masséna’s expedition of 1810 he began to neglect the Peninsula, and to turn all his thoughts towards the growing tension with Russia. This is not correct; it ignores the fact that the French armies in Spain rose to their highest numbers during the year 1811. While not ceasing to send their regular drafts to all the corps there engaged, the Emperor dispatched three new divisions of his best troops to the front during the summer. These were no collections of newly-raised fourth battalions or régiments de marche, but old units of high reputation, drawn partly from the Army of Italy, partly from the garrisons of the coasts of France. One division, under General Souham, ultimately went to join the Army of Portugal, the second, under General Caffarelli, was absorbed in the Army of the North, the third, under General Reille, was sent to reinforce the garrison of Navarre and Aragon, where Suchet wanted fresh troops to occupy the land behind him, when he was pushing forward towards Catalonia and Valencia. In addition, two fresh regiments of Italian troops were requisitioned from the Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais for service in eastern Spain[289]. The total reinforcement to the armies beyond[p. 226] the Pyrenees amounted to some 25,000 men, in addition to the regular annual draft of conscripts. The deficit in the strength of the French forces caused by Masséna’s losses in Portugal was more than made up, and the gross total in October 1811 amounted to no less than 368,000 men. Nothing was withdrawn from the Peninsula till the following winter.