Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (63 page)

¹
Schaumann,
156-7.
See also Burgoyne,
41-4;
Oman,
n,
346-63;
Gurwood,
258;
Fortescue, VII,
165-7;
Munste
r,
177-8.

victorious troops and reunited his army at Abrantes. In three weeks he had secured his northern flank and done all, or almost all, that he had set out to do.

The passage of the Douro took place at a moment when England sadly needed cheering. For several weeks no direct news had come from Germany, but salvoes and other signs of rejoicing on the French coast had had an ominous ring for those who remembered 1805.
¹
Then in the middle of May it became known in London that Napoleon had struck back at his foes with his customary swiftness. Leaving Paris on April 12 th, he had reached Donaiiwerth on the Bavarian plain at dawn on the 17th and thereafter in five successive days had won as many battles, culminating in the great victory of Eckmuhl on the 23rd. Forcing the Archduke Charles back into the Bohemian mountains with the loss of 30,000 men and a hundred guns, he had pressed on at high speed for Vienna. He entered the Austrian capital on May 13th, the day after Wellesley forced the Douro.

All tins happened while the British were still making preliminary arrangements for the second front which was to divert French forces from the Danube and accompany a general rising in northern Germany. On April 24th a formal alliance with Austria had been signed in London; on May 18th the command of the 'invasion army was offered to Lord Chatham. A second expedition, which was to sail from Sicily for the Italian mainland, was still unembarked when the Archduke John, after an initial victory over the Viceroy Eugene at Sacile, was forced to withdraw into Carinthia as a result of the French advance on the capital. Disregarding all Collingwood's efforts to hurry him, Lieutenant-General Sir John Stuart, the childishly vain victor of Maida, was still "dawdling and fretting in his quarters" in Messina with 15,000 unused troops when Napoleon entered Vienna. By not grasping the chance her sea power gave her with sufficient promptitude, England had once again failed to pin down her foe on the continental circumference at the crucial moment.

Yet the chances and changes of war are infinite. On May 22nd an England in sombre mood was startled by the Tower guns firing for the victory of the Douro.
²
On the same day Napoleon, worsted in the bloodiest battle of his career, fell back before the Archduke Charles on to the Danube island of Lobau. His ammunition was
exhausted and his one bridge broken behind him. Once more uncontrollable ambition and impatience had imperilled the fruits of his splendid genius. Resolved to end the campaign at a blow and contemptuously underestimating his enemy, he had started to cross the Danube in the presence of 80,000 Austrians. The Archduke Charles had counter-attacked when half the Grand Army was still on the far bank and, in two days of desperate fighting around the villages of Aspern and Essling, had inflicted more than 20,000 casualties. The battle, which made those of the Peninsula seem skirmishes, showed that Napoleon was mortal. With his army in deadly peril the hopes of Europe suddenly rose.

It was in the light of these hopes that Wellesley, having twice in nine months driven the French out of Portugal, prepared in June, 1809, to march into Spain. With the withdrawal of French troops to German battlefields and the temporary elimination of Soult, the war in the Peninsula had taken a turn which even the most optimistic could not have foreseen two months before. The entire French forces in the north-west were out of action or tied down in operations against the patriots of Galicia and Asturias, who in their mountain fortresses were now more than holding their own against the corps of Ney and Mortier. Elsewhere Spaniards were fighting bravely in Catalonia and Aragon, while the defeated armies of Estremadura and La Mancha, with the astonishing resilience of their country, were reforming south of the Tagus and in the Sierra Morena. But the greatest, sign of Spain's recovery was the mastery which her rustic guerrillas were establishing on every foot of her soil not actually occupied by the invader. So intense was this spontaneous explosion that the French found themselves unable to obtain the most elementary intelligence of British and Spanish movements and were hard put even to maintain communication between their own armies.

In these circumstances the British Government, wishing to denude northern France and the Dutch coast of defenders, had given Wellesley authority to extend his campaign beyond the Portuguese frontier. In its anxiety to release transports for the coming invasion of Europe it even agreed to make him temporarily independent of England by sending him 8000 additional troops. These included the veteran first battalions of the Light Brigade for which he had expressly asked and the Chestnut Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. By June, though the bulk of his reinforcements had still to arrive, he had some 25,000 British and German effectives—the Portuguese were still unfit for service beyond their own borders—with another

4500
in hospital. Facing them in Spanish Estremadura between the Tagus and Guadiana were Victor's
23,000,
watched—from the south bank of the Guadiana—by a ragged horde of more than
30,000
Spaniards, partly survivors of Medellin and partly new recruits, commanded by General Cuesta. The latter's proposal was that the British and Spanish armies should combine in one of those elaborate encircling movements which since Baylen had been the lodestar and bane of Spanish strategy. Its weakness lay in the assumption that Victor would remain motionless while his destroyers surrounded him.

Before Wellesley could join in this project he had to overcome immense difficulties. After five weeks' continuous marching and campaigning his troops were in need of shoes and clothing, as well as drastic reorganisation. Above all they needed transport and pack animals to enable them to advance through regions notoriously deficient in fodder and forage. This, in a land in which everything had to be paid for in cash, was not made easier by a serious shortage of specie; owing to the Treasury's currency troubles at home the British Commander for several weeks lacked money to defray even the most essential expenses. This in turn complicated the question of discipline. For the troops, being both underfed and unpaid, took to straggling and plundering the countryside. "They are a rabble," Wellesley reported angrily to Castlereagh, " who cannot bear success any more than Sir John Moore's army could bear failure; there is not an outrage of any description which they have not committed. . . . Take my word for it, either defeat or success would dissolve us." With so large a proportion of Irish militiamen in the ranks discipline was almost as much a problem on shore as it had been a decade earlier at sea. Its solution was not simplified by recent well-meaning political interference with the powers of provost-marshals or the application of the laws of civil evidence to the procedure of courts-martial—a piece of parliamentary folly against which Wellesley bitterly protested.

Not till June
27th
was the
army ready to move forward from
Abrantes. By that time any chance—if it ever existed—of getting between Victor and Madrid had passed, for, having eaten up Estremadura, the Marshal had crossed to the north bank of the Tagus and withdrawn towards Talavera. Following him with
21,000
British and German troops—
4000
more and the Portuguese remained under Beresford to defend Portugal—Wellesley reached Plasencia, the capital of High Estremadura, on July
8th.
Here he was only
125
miles from Madrid and within sixty of the Spanish army which was encamped near the Bridge of Almaraz on the Tagus.

Two evenings later, having ridden over from Plasencia, the British general inspected the latter's force by the light of torches and amid strains of medieval music. It was his first glimpse of a Spanish army. It was a strange spectacle: the swarthy faces of the sturdy young peasants in their soiled motley uniforms, the fiery, indisciplined way they handled their arms, the fantastic hats and long Toledo swords of the officers, the shaggy Barbary steeds of the cavalry and the wild movements of their riders. But the most remarkable sight of all was th
e aged Captain-General of Estre
madura precariously held on his horse by two pages. In spite of countless medals, gold lace and traditional trunk hose, he looked in his bob-tailed wig more like an elderly German shopkeeper than a soldier. Nearly seventy years of age, Don Gregoria de la Cuesta had been ridden over three months before by his own cavalry at Medellin and was now forced to travel in a vast, lumbering coach drawn by nine mules. As, however, he never inspected the ground or reconnoitred the enemy, but, like a true countryman of Don Quixote, based his actions on strong imaginative hypotheses that had little or no relation to reality, this constituted no handicap in his eyes. He regarded Wellesley with contempt as a pretender to the art of war.
¹

On this occasion he scarcely spoke to him, being consumed with a jealous suspicion that he was intriguing with his
rivals at Seville to deprive h
im of his command. The plan of campaign was therefore drawn up in consultation with his Chief of Staff, a very voluble officer of Irish descent named O'Donoju. Crossing to the north bank of the Tagusjhe Spaniards—33,000 strong—were to advance eastwards to Oropesa where they were to join forces with the British moving from Plasencia. The two armies were then to advance on Talavera and overwhelm Victor. Their northern flank was to be protected by a small contingent of Portuguese irregulars—the Lusitanian Legion—skirmishing eastwards along the southern slopes of the Sierra de Gredos under an adventurous young Englishman named Colonel Robert Wilson. Other Spanish forces were to remain behind to hold the mountain passes of Bafios and Perales to the north-west against any attempt of Soult to move down the Portuguese frontier against Wellesley's base at Plasencia. Meanwhile General Venegas with 23,000 troops of the Army of La Mancha was to emerge from his lair in the Sierra Morena and, driving through Mazanares and Aranjuez towards Madrid, was to prevent

¹
" A perverse, stupid old blockhead," John Colborne called him.—Seaton,
30.
See also Schaumann,
174-5,

2
Shand,
37;
Castlere
agh, VII,
85;
Stanhope,
46-7;
H. M. C
. Ba
thurst,
99;
Leith Hay, I,
168;
Stewart,
382-3;
Leslie,
471.

the French troops in the neighbourhood of the capital from reinforcing Victor.

But, as Wellesley soon found, strategic plans in Spain were one thing, their execution another. Even for the British army to perform its part in this elaborate converging movement, food and supplies were necessary. And none, despite grandiloquent promises, were forthcoming. Even in the fertile Vera of Plasencia the troops went hungry. Though the march into Spain, with its clean houses, pretty women, clear air and crisp, brisk language, at first delighted them, like Moore's men before them they found that it meant short commons. The Supreme Junta was far too busy disputing with its subordinate authorities, the Provincial Juntas of Andalusia and Valencia,
¹
to spare any time for provisioning a heretic army. Nor when it was prevailed upon by an importunate Ambassador to issue requisitions for its wants, would the Estremaduran peasantry honour them. The truth was that for all practical purposes Spain—distracted and poverty-stricken—was without a government. British generals and soldiers found it hard to understand this and in default attributed their sufferings to sloth and treachery.

Part of the trouble arose from the i
ncurable optimism and boast
fulness of the Spanish authorities: part from the inexperience of British commissaries who had still to learn the art of extracting sustenance from a wasted countryside. One irascible divisional commander, driven frantic by the wants of his men and horses, threatened to hang a commissary who, flying for redress to the Commander-in-Chief, was curtly informed: "If General Sherbrooke said he would hang you, he certainly will, so you'd better comply!"
²
Sir Arthur himself complained bitterly of his difficulties. "We really should not be worse off in an enemy's country," he wrote, "or indeed so ill, as we should there take by force what was required."

None the less he persisted in his bold course. He knew that a successful march on Madrid while Napoleon was hamstrung on the Danube might have incalculable consequences for Europe. He therefore disregarded the preparations which Soult was reported to be making for a dash over the mou
ntains to Plasencia. With Beres
ford. watching the Portuguese fron
tier and the high passes of Ban
os