The Age of Elegance (5 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Salamanca Summer

"I made a mistake about England, in trying to conquer it. The English are a brave nation."

Napoleon

T

he
price of Badajoz had been 5000 British and Portuguese casualties, 3500 of whom, the flower of the army, fell in the assault. When the sun rose on the morning after the attack the ditch before the breaches was a lake of smoking blood. Yet the price had been worth the sacrifice.
¹
The key fortress of western Spain with nearly 5000 prisoners was in Wellington's hands. So for the first time in the war was the initiative. Possessing Badajoz as well as Ciudad Rodrigo, he could now concentrate against either of the two French armies barring the road to Spain. With the use of interior lines, he could attack Marmont in the north or Soult in the south before either could come to the other's aid. Nor could either, with the Spanish frontier fortresses in their way, effectively invade Portugal in his absence. On Napoleon's orders, Marmont had attempted to do so during the siege of Badajoz, but though his marauding troops, helped by a panic among the Portuguese militia, had penetrated fifty miles, they were quickly forced back starving to their base at Salamanca. Three weeks later, after returning to the north, Wellington sent Hill's corps of observation in Estremadura to seize Almaraz —Soult's last bridge across the Tagus below Toledo. Thus all direct communication between Soult and Marmont was lost, and the two Marshals could henceforward only communicate through Madrid. Simultaneously, Wellington's engineers improvised a suspension-bridge of ropes and cables—the first of its kind in Europe—across the Tagus gorge at Alcantara, so giving him direct north-to-south

¹
"The capture of Badajoz affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as has ever been displayed, but I anxiously hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test as that to which they were put last night. . . . When I ordered the assault I was certain I should lose our best officers and men. It is a cruel situation for any person to be placed in, and I earnestly recommend to your lordship to have a corps of sappers and miners formed without loss of time." Wellington to Liverpool, April 7th, 1812. Oman,
Wellington's Army,
284-5.

communication along the frontier. It was for this he had been campaigning for the past year.

Yet Napoleon could still make Spain s
ecure. He had a quarter of a mill
ion troops in the Peninsula to Wellington's 45,000 British and 25,000 Portuguese regulars. He had only to call off his attack on Russia to reinforce these to a point beyond which they could not be challenged by so few. But the flaw in his character which Wellington had always seen gave England her chance. Instead of regarding the loss of Badajoz as a warning, the Emperor greeted the news with one of his famous fits of rage, and then, forbidding all reference to it, behaved as though it had never happened. Turning Ms back on Wellington, he marched on June 24th into Russia with half-a .million men.

By that time Wellington was himself across the frontier. As in 1809, the outbreak of war in eastern Europe enabled him to take the offensive. Throughout May he had been preparing magazines for an advance towards the Douro. True to his unchanging strategy of doing nothing to distract Soult from his selfish preoccupation with his Andalusian viceroyaky, and leaving a token force under Hill to watch the Tagus and the road over the Sierra Morena, he concentrated against the northern highway from Ciudad Rodrigo to Salamanca and Valladolid. It was the road Moore had followed when he struck at Napoleon's communications. It offered

Yet Wellington, though numerically inferior, had certain advantages; it was his genius as a commander that, seeing the war whole and steadily, he never lost sight of any of them. One was that, so long as he could keep it supplied, his entire force was free for field operations, while the French were preoccupied in garrisoning a vast, turbulent country. Neither General Caffarelli's Army of the North, nor Marsh
al Suchet's Army of the East, n
or King Joseph's and Marshal Jourdan's Army of the Centre, still less Soult's Army of Andalusia, could reinforce the Ar
my of Portugal without abandon
ing a large part of Spain to the guerrillas and the Spanish hill armies. Here Wellington's second asset operated: that, thanks to Napoleon's system of ruling by division, no one of his Marshals trusted any other or would willingly send troops from his own domain to help the common cause. His third asset was that the Peninsula was almost surrounded by sea over which his country enjoyed complete mastery. Her ships could succour the Spanish guerrillas at any point and keep the French in continual alarm and uncertainty. Because of this, Caffarelli in Biscaya, Suchet in Catalonia and Soult in Andalusia instinctively faced, not westwards towards Wellington, but north, east and south towards the sea. Even Marmont, on Napoleon's orders, had had to send part of his army to the Asturias, where the Cantabrian guerrillas and the Spanish Army of Galicia were armed and supplied by the Royal Navy.

in planning his summer campaign Wellington made use of these factors. His object was to destroy Marmont while keeping the latter's colleagues busy elsewhere. The Spanish general, Ballasteros, with his raggle-taggle army in the mountains round Seville, supported by Hill's corps of observation in distant Estremadura, was to tie down Soult by threatening as many Andalusian towns as possible. In the east a British expeditionary force of 10,000 men, temporarily released from garrison duty in Sicily by the departure of Murat's Neapolitan army for Russia,
¹
together with 7000 Spanish troops from Alicante and Majorca, were to be landed by the Mediterranean Fleet on the Valencian coast to harry Suchet's communications. And in the north, along the Atlantic cliffs, that erratic champion of amphibious war, Commodore Sir Home Popham, with two battleships, half a dozen frigates, a battalion of marines and a company of marine artillery was to keep the coastline from Gijon to the French frontier in an uproar. So sustained, the guerrillas of the Basque country and Navarre—the most serious of all the thorns in King Joseph's flesh— were to make it impossible for the harassed Caffarelli to reinforce Marmont. At the same time the Spanish Army of Galicia was to take the offensive against the latter's northern wing, lay siege to Astorga and prevent even the Army of Portugal from concentrating.

On June 13 th Wellington crossed the Agueda with 51,000 men, including 18,000 Portuguese and 3000 Spaniards. Marmont, with

¹
By April, 1812, such was the concentration of troops for the impending march to Moscow, only one French division remained in Italy. Oman, V, 342.

one division in the Asturias and the rest of his army dispersed, could offer little immediate resistance. Ordering a concentration, he fell back across the Tormes. As the British entered Salamanca on the 17th, a surge of ecstatic humanity broke over the red-coated columns in the sun-bathed Palaza Mayor. It was the first Spanish city to be liberated in three years. Even Wellington, as he sat writing orders on his sabretache, was almost unhorsed by a charge of ladies.
¹

He remained, however, cautious. During the next ten days he blockaded three small forts which Marmont had built outside Salamanca. He made no attempt to bring the French to battle. Instead he covered the siege and awaited their attack in one of those innocent-looking but carefully chosen positions which had so often proved fatal to them. But Marmont, taught by experience, was cautious, too. After several half-hearted attempts at relief, he allowed the forts and their garrisons to fall.

Thereafter he fell back for thirty miles across the rolling Leon plain to the Douro. Here with his army concentrated and almost equal in size to Wellington's, and with ample reserves behind, he had only to hold the crossings from Toro to Tordesillas to bring the British offensive to an end. If he could stay there until the harvest was gathered, the French position in northern Spain would be secure for another year. For a fortnight at the beginning of July, while far away Napoleon's interminable columns drove through Lithuania into Russia, the two armies faced one another across the shallow, sunlit Douro. Then on the 16th, seeing nothing to stop him, Marmont recrossed the river at Tordesillas and feinted at Wellington's right flank. Next day, as the latter parried the stroke, he deftly shifted his forces eastwards and, crossing again at Toro, struck at his left. Like a true son of the Revolution and a Marshal of France, he was in search of glory: to survive he had to outshine his rivals.

To the disgust of his army Wellington promptly retreated. Unlike his adversary, who could live by plundering the country, he was dependent on his commissariat wagons. Rather than risk his communications with Portugal, he fell back towards the hillier and more barren
terrain
whence he had come and where he would have Marmont once more at a disadvantage. For the next six days the two armies within easy striking distance of one another marched and

¹
Tomkinson, 162. See also Gomm,
272; Kincaid, 150; Oman, V, 36
0; Simmons, 236.

manoeuvred under a burning sun, steadily moving south-westwards as Marmont tried to cut off Wellington from his base and Wellington gave ground to prevent him. Both, like skilful fencers, kept their forces closely concentrated, neither for a moment
lowering his guard. On July 18
th, when there was some skirmishing, and again on the 20th, the two armies marched within gunshot all day in parallel columns, their accoutrements glittering in the sunlight, while swarms of vultures cruised overhead.
¹

The French, who were slightly the better marchers, reached the Tormes first, crossing the river at the ford of Huerta, ten miles east of Salamanca, at midday on the 21st. Wellington recrossed the river the same evening about two miles above Salamanca. Marmont was driving straight for his communications, and, though the gloom of the liberated city now surpassed its ecstasy of a month earlier, the British commander resolved that night to abandon it and retire on Ciudad Rodrigo. Without a major blunder by his opponent he could not hope for a decisive victory or for one without losses which he could not replace. The two armies were by now almost equal, the French having 48,500 men with a marked superiority in guns to the Anglo-Portuguese 50,000. And thanks to the guerrillas' interception of French dispatches Wellington, unlike Marmont, knew that 15,000 men under King Joseph and Jourdan were hastening to Marmont's aid from Madrid. He had also learnt that the British Commander-in-Chief in Sicily had failed to make a diversion on the Valencian coast and was contemplating instead an expedition to Italy. Faced with the possibility of Suchet also reinforcing Marmont, there seemed nothing for it but to abandon the offensive for another year. He could not afford to be cut off from Portugal or to fight a battle which he was not reasonably sure of winning.

To those whose lives he was so prudently husbanding Wellington's decision to retreat came as a bitter disappointment. Their confidence in their own prowess, the warmth of their welcome from the Spanish people, the hopes of diving deeper into the romantic land before them, had ended in the old way. To add to their humiliation, that night as they lay tentless and hungry in the open fields they were assailed by a fearful thunderstorm. Flashes lit the blackness of the plain, horses broke from their piquets and galloped into the

¹
"I was frequently impressed with the horror of being wounded without the power to keep them off." Tomkinson, 190.

enemy lines, and the earth threw up multitudes of drowning worms. The summer dawn of the 22nd found the British soaked, aching and sullen.

In Marmont's mind Wellington's iron self-restraint had by now established the idea that he was incapable of any but a defensive role. It had even eradicated the painful
impression of British invincibili
ty forced on the French consciousness by the battles of the past four years. It caused the Marshal to throw all caution to the winds. On the morning of July 22nd he saw his chance—the greatest of his career. Before the elusive British could slip away again to the Portuguese mountains, he would treat them as his master had treated the Austrians and Prussians. By reverting to the
elan
of revolutionary tradition, he would do to the stiff-necked redcoats what Junot, Victor, Soult, Ney, Massena, even Napoleon had failed to do.

With this intention the Marshal resumed his westward march on the morning of the 22nd, edging as he had done before round the right flank of the mainly invisible British, while his guns maintained a brisk cannonade against such of their positions as he could see. Presently, mistaking adjustments in Wellington's disposition for signs of an immediate retreat, he resolved to hasten the pace of his march towards the Salamanca-Rodrigo highway. He therefore ordered his advance-guard—the left flank of the line he presented to the British—to hurry ahead to envelop their right and cut their communications. By so doing he extended his force in the presence of an enemy still concentrated.

The British Commander-in-Chief, guardian of the only army England possessed, had told his Government that he would never risk a general encounter at a disadvantage. But he had never said that he would not seize victory if it was offered him. Between two and three in the afternoon the leading French division, which was marching across his front along a low ridge about a mile away, began to race ahead. Seeing the gap between it and the more slowly moving centre widen, Wellington dropped the chicken leg he was eating and seized a telescope. Then, with a quick, "That will do," he sent off his aides with orders to his divisional commanders, and, mounting his horse, galloped three miles across the stony fields to the village of Aldea Tejada where, about two miles north of the point on which the French advance-guard was moving, he had posted the 3 rd Division in reserve. Here he bade his brother-in-law, Edward P
aken
ham, move forward, take the heights in his front and drive everything before him. Then, before the colours could be encased and the men receive their orders to prime and load, he was on his way back to his position in the British centre. He had three hours of daylight and a chance that might never recur.

Before him the French army was spread out on a series of low rolling hills, moving in column of march in a great semicircle westwards and on a scattered front of more than five miles. It was a sight not dissimilar to that which confronted Nelson at Trafalgar. The marching columns had their right flanks towards him. Because of the rolling and wooded nature of the country and the skill with which he had placed his own formations out of sight, they seemed unaware of the compact force which they were so hopefully passing and attempting to encircle. Indeed, misled by the westering movement of Wellington's baggage-train on the Salamanca-Rodrigo highway, Marmont was under the impression that the British army had already begun its retreat. Between his leading division, that of Thomieres, and those of Maucune, Clausel and Brennier in his centre there was a gap of more than a mile, while another of equal size separated the centre from the four scattered divisions following.

Wellington, as always in an enemy's presence, had his force closely in hand. While his left, consisting of the ist and Light Divisions and Bock's German cavalry—just over 10,000 men—faced eastwards, the bulk of his army, which in view of the French encircling movement he had earlier in the day wheeled towards the south, was grouped around the little village of Arapiles. Here 14,000 British infantry of the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Divisions, most of Cotton's cavalry, nearly 14,000 Portuguese and Espana's 3000 Spaniards—a force of some 34,000—were drawn up in line of battle within a mile of the 18,000 marching men of Marmont's centre. Further to the west another 6000 British and Portuguese, under Pakenham, were moving up from Aldea Tejada to strike at the head of Thomieres' strung-out advance-guard of 4500 infantry and attendant cavalry. The rest of the French army, more than 24,000 strong, was still coming up from the east.

Marmont, as Wellington remarked to his Spanish aide-de-camp, was lost. Supported by D'Urban's Portuguese cavalry, the 3 rd Division cut across Thomieres' line of march, in Napier's phrase, like a meteor. As it reached the summit of the plateau, it deployed and opened fire. The French were caught strung out on the march, surprised and at a hopeless disadvantage. Thomieres was killed, half his division mown down and all its guns captured. The survivors were driven back into the ranks of those behind.

Here the British 4th and 5th Divisions, with their flanks covered by Bradford's Portuguese and Cotton's cavalry, had been moving in line across a shallow depression towards the French centre. As soon as Marmont had seen the British coming up over the opposing ridge, he had realised his mistake: Wellington was not a purely defensive

general after all. But it was too late to retrieve it; a few minutes later, while galloping forward, he was struck down by a shell. Though his artillery, with 78 guns to the British 54, raked the oncoming scarlet lines, nothing could break that confident advance; it came on like the bore of a tidal river. Behind, in support, followed the 6th and 7th Divisions. For some reason Maucune's men awaited the attack in square, a little in rear of the crest along which they had been moving. They could not have chosen a more disastrous formation. The 5th Division, marching with review precision, breasted the ridge and, at an order from General Leith, fired a tremendous volley. Then, through the smoke and darkness, it charged the shattered French squares with the bayonet.