The War of Wars (101 page)

Wellington, camped along the Spanish frontier, was himself in a dilemma. He could not risk striking deep into Spain without dangerously over-extending his lines, especially as the French controlled the key fortresses of Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz on both his flanks. He set out to win back control. He rode down furiously to Badajoz to give orders to Beresford for taking the fortress, which the French had enormously reinforced; he was nearly captured on the way. He rode equally swiftly back north on learning that in three weeks Masséna had regrouped to stage an offensive to relieve the British siege of Almeida with an army of nearly 50,000.

Wellington, with only 21,000 British soldiers and some 10,000 Portuguese, needed to take Almeida to hold his position along the Spanish frontier, and so had no choice but to fight to prevent Masséna’s army relieving the fortress. He deployed his exhausted army in woods and hills five miles from Almeida. The French army marched from the south from Ciudad Rodrigo to channel their forces into a hammer-blow of three forces against Wellington’s weakest point, his right flank at the village of Fuentes de Onoro. The French succeeded in gaining control of most of the streets in the village before Wellington ordered a counter-attack. This drove them out of most of the village in brutal hand-to-hand fighting

Thus blocked, Masséna went probing to the north-west in search of a way around the British position, while Wellington sought to counter this by sending 1,000 British and nearly 4,000 Portuguese in the same direction, at the cost of weakening his centre. On the morning of 3
May Masséna sent some 17,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry to attack the British right, while simultaneously ordering a fresh attack against the weakened British centre at Fuentes de Onoro again. It was a desperate moment for the heavily outnumbered British. Wellington decided to risk the centre and throw more of his sparse forces in to counter the threat on his right. However there was a danger that a division would be cut off by the reinforced French attack in the centre. The division withdrew in good order under repeated attack from heavily superior French forces. The British soldiers fought in squares in a beautifully executed and difficult movement across three miles of open plain, where they were at their most exposed, to the safety of rocky hillocks.

The French with 50,000 men launched their main attack against the British centre at Fuentes de Onoro. They drove back the 71st and 79th Highlanders, who fought with desperate bravery down the bloodied streets of the village again against hugely superior odds as far as the church and graveyard. But the British were able to bring forward new reserves to relieve the Highlanders and drive the French out. Both attacks had failed, at a cost of more than 2,000 French casualties to the British total of 1,400. The French withdrew southwards to Salamanca, claiming they had won a victory by driving the British back some three miles. But the siege of Almeida was resumed, and the town fell to the British, although most of the garrison escaped at night. It had been Wellington’s narrowest victory in the whole campaign, and his costliest one yet. Still, he could now concentrate his forces on Badajoz.

Unknown to him, though, events had changed rapidly. Soult’s army had marched northwards to relieve the besieged garrison against which Beresford, with his antiquated guns opposing the formidable fortifications, had made little impression. On learning that Soult was approaching with an army of 25,000, Beresford decided to move forward to meet him with his 10,000 British and 12,000 Portuguese soldiers. His aim was to rendezvous with three Spanish armies amounting to 15,000 men fighting in Extremadura under the overall command of General Castaños. This would give him numerical superiority; but it would also involve fighting in open flat country where the French had the advantage and the Spanish were traditionally bad at manoeuvre. Moreover Soult had cavalry and artillery superiority – some 8,000
horse compared with 5,000 under Beresford, only a quarter of them British, and some fifty guns compared with fewer than forty. The British were also at a tactical disadvantage: they had their backs to the Guadiana river, with only one crossing available to them.

On 15 May Beresford’s army took up position at Albuera along a low ridge across which the main road to Badajoz passed. It was expected that the French, coming along the road, would attack frontally. Instead, on the following morning, while minor attacks were staged in the centre, the great bulk of the French marched off the highway through olive groves to attack the lightly defended allied right with the intention of encircling Beresford’s men and forcing them off the ridge to fight on the exposed plain below or lose their line of communications with Portugal. It was a brilliant French manoeuvre, carried out largely in darkness.

They fell upon the Spanish forces defending the flank, catching them by surprise and throwing them into confusion, although most fought bravely. Beresford, equally surprised, ordered 500 British troops from the centre under General William Stewart to rush to the rescue. They moved with speed but with little order. At the same time, the Second Division also marched crack troops which had fought at Oporto and Talavera from its position in the centre. Portuguese cavalry were also deployed.

At that moment a hailstorm obscured all visibility for more than a few yards. There was complete confusion and great carnage. The allies were reinforced by another two brigades which threw themselves into the mêlée. The British were outnumbered by some 8,000 to 3,000, exchanging fire across a shallow valley. The fighting caused appalling bloodshed on both sides with neither side yielding. After what seemed an eternity, British reinforcements arrived late to the battle under the command of General Lowry Cole, consisting of 2,000 British and 3,000 well-trained Portuguese under Harvey, now Beresford’s chief of staff and chief liaison between him and Wellington.

Soult promptly threw in his reserves of some 10,000 men, which he had withheld, believing the battle to be his, but the Portuguese were as
resolute as the British and faced down the French cavalry. Major Napier provided the finest description of that celebrated advance:

Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke, and rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude, startled the enemy’s heavy masses, which were increasing and pressing onwards as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and then vomiting forth a storm of fire, hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front, while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery whistled through the British ranks. Myers was killed, Cole, the three colonels, Ellis, Blakeney, and Hawkshawe, fell wounded, and the Fusilier battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled, and staggered like sinking ships.

But suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and majesty the British soldier fights. In vain did Soult, by voice and gesture, animate his Frenchmen; in vain did the hardiest veterans, extricating themselves from the crowded columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the advancing line.

Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry. No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm, weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front, their measured tread shook the ground, their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation, their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd, as slowly and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There, the French reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to sustain the fight, but the effort only increased the irremediable confusion, the mighty mass gave way and like a loosened cliff went headlong down the steep. The rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and fifteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill.

Soult withdrew at last to Seville, licking his wounds, declaring furiously: ‘They were completely beaten, the day was mine and they did not know it and would not run.’ Beresford’s mistaken deployment of his troops had very nearly caused a major British defeat: he had been saved by the extraordinary resolution of his riflemen and that brave single-line attack by Cole and Harvey’s men. But it had been an appallingly costly victory – some 7,000 allied casualties of the total 35,000 involved in the fighting and no fewer than 4,400 of the actual 6,500 infantry in the thick of the fighting. The French also lost 7,000, nearly a third of their total force.

Wellington arrived soon afterwards with reinforcements from the north, and renewed the siege of Badajoz with quixotic fury, but his guns were all but useless and two assaults resulted in half those taking part being killed. In the north Masséna had been replaced by the dashing thirty-six-year-old Marshal Marmont, one of Napoleon’s personal protégés, and he was hurrying to join up with the weakened Soult. At Merida the two armies joined up in the middle of June 1811, forming a force of some 60,000 men. This huge army promptly marched to relieve Badajoz.

Learning of Marmont’s approach, General Sir Brent Spencer, whom Wellington had left in charge in the north, moved with equal speed to reinforce him, swelling his own army to some 54,000 men. Wellington withdrew to the Portuguese frontier across the Guadiana and then to one of his carefully chosen defensive positions along a twelve-mile line of hills stretching north from Elvas. The French wheeled about in front of this but warily refused to do battle.

Back in Seville and Andalucia to the south, two Spanish armies had started to challenge Soult’s control of the region. Soult decided to shift the bulk of his army back to protect it, infuriating Marmont: he was left with 50,000 troops, reversing the odds against the British who were now the superior force; yet Wellington had no more intention of descending from his carefully chosen positions to fight the French on the plain than the French had of attacking him uphill. The two armies remained in stalemate opposite each other for a fortnight in the intense heat of the Spanish summer.

Eventually the growing scarcity of provisions to plunder and a series of guerrilla offensives by the Spaniards in the regions stripped of their French troops by Marmont forced the French general to blink first and withdraw in mid-July. With Portugal no longer under threat of French invasion, Wellington did likewise, withdrawing further north to more temperate and well-stocked land around Portalegre and Castelo Branco. There the army recovered from ‘Guadiana fever’, ate well, and was reinforced from England. There was a pause; the old standoff continued: Wellington had driven the French out of Portugal but could not yet invade Spain for fear of leaving the French-controlled fortresses on his flanks and over-extending himself: the French had been driven out of Portugal but had succeeded in keeping the British bottled up.

The Peninsular War is traditionally viewed as one between these two nations and their armies. But of course it was much more than that. For all the shambolic incompetence of ill-equipped, ill-commanded Spanish armies in the field, with their absence of tactics and manoeuvrability, their medieval notions of discipline and their persistent refusal – unlike the Portuguese – to learn anything or be trained or commanded by the British, the countryside was up in arms against the French. Brave and ruthless guerrilla bands continued to encircle and isolate French armies of occupation whose colossal total of 370,000 was incapable of controlling any part where they were not represented in force.

In Figueras, practically on the Catalan border with France in the far north-east of Spain, guerrillas broke in and massacred the French garrison. The Spanish commander, Martinez, and just 4,000 men then held out the entire summer against a huge French force. Another Catalan force actually crossed into France and laid waste a remote French canton – to Napoleon’s humiliation and intense anger. Further south, although the French at last captured Tortosa, the garrisons of Tarragona and Vanecia still held out.

South in Andalucia the enterprising guerrilla leader Ballesteros was helped by British ships to land at various points along the coast to attack French outposts, forcing the French to march and counter-march to try and intercept this raiding brigand. In north-western Spain two celebrated
guerrilla leaders, Porlier and Longa, raided remorselessly from the Asturias mountains and were joined by the warlord of Navarra, Mina. The shambolic Army of Galicia descended from its mountain fastnesses to threaten León. Julian Sanchez, the greatest and most murderous brigand leader, terrorized Ciudad Rodrigo with his attacks.

The effectiveness of the guerrillas was hardly in doubt. Comte Miot de Melito, King Joseph’s closest adviser, wrote:

By that time the Junta had . . . adopted the formidable system of guerrillas. Spread out in parties in every part of the territory . . . that the French occupied, they did us more damage than the [Spanish] regular armies by intercepting all our communications and forcing us never to send out a courier without an escort or leave isolated soldiers on the roads . . . Large parties of guerrillas . . . often advanced to the gates of the capital. General Franceschi . . . one of the most distinguished officers of the army, was taken prisoner by them, along with young Antoine, a nephew of the King who was then an aide-de-camp of Marshal Soult. The hatred and fury of the Spaniards was carried to the last excess: they breathed vengeance and exercised it on any Frenchman who fell into their hands. This small-scale warfare quietly undermined us. We only possessed the ground actually occupied by our armies, and our power did not extend beyond it. The business of administration ceased, and there was neither order, nor justice, nor taxation.

A French hussar commented: