Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (74 page)

¹
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
17, 50.

²
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
88-90.
See also Leslie,
83-5.

Unless otherwise ordered, one company of every battalion served as outlying piquet, placed sentinels at all approaches and stood to arms from an hour before sunrise until a grey horse could be seen a mile away.
¹
Officers on outpost duty were expected personally to examine all inhabitants for information, reconnoitre all fords, morasses, bridges and lanes in the neighbourhood and post sentries in pairs, who were relieved every two hours, in all commanding hedges and woodlands, and at night on the reverse slopes of hills. If attacked, sentries were instructed to give the alarm and fall back obliquely so as not to reveal the position of the main guard. In addition patrols were sent out .every hour to visit posts and bring back information.

Wi th less than 3000 British infantry so trained and their Portuguese and Hanoverian auxiliaries, Craufurd for six months guarded a river line of more than forty miles between the Serra da Estrella and the Douro, broken by at least fifteen fords and with an open plain in front. His men were never less than an hour's march of 6000 French cavalry with 60,000 infantry in support. Yet they never suffered their lines to be penetrated or allowed the slightest intelligence of Wellington's strength and movements to reach the enemy. "The whole web of communication," as Sir Charles Oman has written, "quivered at the slightest touch.
²

On one occasion, on the night of March 19th, 1810, a greatly superior force of Voltigeurs attempted to surprise a detachment of the 95th Rifles at the bridge of Barba del Puerco. A French general had been informed by a Spanish traitor that the British officers were in the habit of getting drunk every night and accordingly assembled six hundred picked troops at midnight under the rocks at the east end of the bridge. Creeping across in the shadows cast by the rising moon, with every sound drowned by the roar of the mountain torrent below, they succeeded in surprising and bayoneting the two sentries at the other end before they could open fire. But a sergeant's party higher up the rocks saw them and gave the alarm to the piquet company. Within a few minutes the rest of the regiment, with hastily donned belts and cartridge boxes slung over flapping shirts, led by Colonel Beckwith in dressing-gown, night-cap and slippers, was tumbling them down the rocks and across the bridge whence they had come. The French casualties in the affair were forty-seven, the British thirteen. It was the first and last attempt to surprise a Light Infantry piquet at night.
³

¹
Standing Orders,
47-8;
Smith, I,
185;
Kincaid,
33-5.
- Oman,'I
II,
238.

³
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
52-6, 59;
George Napier, I,
113;
Simmons,
56;
Costello,
28-9;
Oman, III,
236-8;
Burgoyne, I,
69;
Forte
scue, VII,
465.

It was through this screen and its patrols of riflemen and hussars, ranging far beyond the enemy's lines into Spain, that Wellington obtained his knowledge of French movements. It was work which required, as Kincaid said, a clear head, a bold heart and a quick pair of heels, all three being liable to be needed at any hour of the day or night. Founded on the training, habits and virtues, of a few hundred humble British soldiers, its effect on the course of the European war was incalculable. For, in conjunction with the work of the Spanish guerrillas, it deprived the enemy of all knowledge of Wellington's strength and dispositions. While the British Commander knew from day to day what was happening on the other side of the lines and saw his enemy silhouetted, as it were, against the eastern sky, the French faced only darkness. This outweighed all their superiority in numbers. For it meant that, when the time came to strike, Goliath with his mighty sword lunged blindly. David with his pebble and sling had no such handicap.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Torres Vedras

" Napoleon's plan was always to try to give a great battle, gain a great victory, patch up a peace, such a peace as might leave an opening for a future war, and then hurry back to Paris. We starved him out. We showed him that we wouldn't let him fight a battle at first except under disadvantages. If you do fight, we shalj destroy you; if you do not fight, we shall in time destroy you still."

Wellington.

"The flame which we have so effectually kindled in Portugal will extend itself far and wide."

Walter Scott.

W

ith
the summer of 1810 the hour of decision, long delayed by Joseph's Andalusian adventure, was drawing near. The quarter of a million French troops originally in Spain had been joined by another sixty thousand: forty thousand more were waiting on the frontier at Bayonne. But, contrary to expectation and his own repeated declarations, the Emperor did not appear in person to lead them. Instead, he stayed behind to enjoy his new wife and parade her before his subjects in France and the Rhineland. This was in part the result of inclination: like his soldiers, Napoleon had come in the past two years to detest the very name of Spain. He affected to treat the war there as a mere colonial campaign, waged beyond the pale of civilisation against barbarians and the handful of British mercenaries who so wickedly assisted them.

Yet there was more in Napoleon's decision than reluctance to sacrifice time and reputation to a tedious campaign. He knew the importance of the Peninsula too well to miss any chance of completing its conquest. He did not maintain 300,000 soldiers there merely to provide a throne for his brother Joseph. For all his victories on the Danube, his Imperial marriage and the defeat of the Walcheren invasion, he was uneasy. For, though he tried to conceal the fact even from himself, the English, inch by inch, were forcing him on to the defensive. Two and a half years before, he had entered Spain to secure a bridge into North Africa and make the Mediterranean a French lake. But instead of breaking the ring of sea-power and carrying his Eagles into Africa a
nd Asia, his
venture had ended in his opponents themselves securing a bridgehead in Europe and, what was worse, retaining it in the teeth of his personal intervention. With their sea-ring still unbroken, they were perpetually stirring up trouble round the European circumference. In the previous year they had made Austria their catspaw. Now, though he had dealt with that Power, Russia—hampered in her trade by the Continental blockade—was in turn growing restless. Pier Czar's petty grievances—the French creation of a Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the dispute over Constantinople, the slight to his sister—threatened, under British encouragement, to become serious matters. For, so long as England's cruisers could carry her corrupting wares and gold to every back door in Europe, there was always a court of appeal for Napoleon's dissatisfied friends and clients.

Because of this Napoleon refused to commit either himself or the flower of his army to Spain. He knew too well that it might soon be needed elsewhere. He sent the Young Guard but not the Old, and transferred only a limited number of troops from central and eastern Europe. Instead he made up new drafts by anticipating the next two years' conscription and calling up 40,000 lads between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. This, together with growing taxation, did not enhance his popularity. After two years of war in the Peninsula a balanced budget had degenerated into a deficit of fifty-seven million francs. The Emperor did his best to reduce the drain of the campaign by reducing payments to the Peninsula armies and by imperative orders to Joseph to raise more money from his Spanish subjects. When that unhappy monarch, still anxious to win their hearts, raised objections, his kingdom was summarily divided into military districts under Governors directly responsible to Paris. Their corrupt and exorbitant demands destroyed his last chance of establishing an honest and therefore tolerable administration.

In his own place Napoleon sent against the British the most experienced and cunning of all his Marshals, Andre Massena, Prince of Essling and Duke of Rivoli. But, jealous as always of any power that might rival his own, he refrained from giving him any general authority and left Soult in Andalusia, Suchetr in Aragon and Augereau in Catalonia in independent command. This system of
divide et impera
enabled him to play off one Marshal against another and intervene personally in distant operations without leaving Paris. But it scarcely made for vigorous prosecution of the war. Massena's Arm
y of Portugal was confined to Ne
y's
6th
Corps on the frontiers of Leon, Reynier's 2nd Corps in the Tagus valley and Junot's
8th
Corps in Old Castile, numbering, together with Montbrun's Cavalry

Reserve and the garrison and administrative troops, some 138,000 men or perhaps 70,000 field effectives. Large though this force was compared with the British army, which it outnumbered by two to one, it was not big enough for its purpose.

In fact, as the test approached and the impression gained ground in England and Portugal that an evacuation was inevitable, the British Commander-in-Chief remained grimly confident. "I am prepared for all events," he wrote to the Military Secretary, "and, if I am in a scrape, as appears to be the general belief in England, a though certainly not my own, I'll get out of it!"
¹
He saw, as always, the inherent weakness in the imposing French structure—the rival Marshals, the lack of financial and administrative confidence, the slapdash arrangements for feeding and transporting so great a host through the wilderness. "This is not the way in which they have conquered Europe," he wrote to his brother, as June followed May and still MassJna made no move. "There is something discordant in all the French arrangements for Spain. Joseph divides his Kingdom into
prefetures,
while Napoleon parcels it out into governments; Joseph makes a great military expedition into the south of Spain and undertakes the siege of Cadiz, while Napoleon places all the troops and half the kingdom under the command of Masscna and calls it the Army of Portugal.
...
I suspect that the impatience of Napoleon's temper will not bear the delay of the completion of the conquest of Spain."
²

Wellington judged rightly. Massena's difficulties were immense. The Marshal did not minimise them when he addressed his officers on taking up his appointment on May 15th. He had not wanted to come to Spain at all. He was fifty-two and, after nearly twenty years of continuous war in an age when men aged rapidly, was losing his vigour. The spoils of victory and plunder had begun to soften his native toughness; he had learnt to love ease and luxury, including a most expensive and exacting mistress. The prospect of carrying an army of 70,000 men and their innumerable followers through two hundred miles of desolate mountain inhabited by vindictive savages appalled him. The very sight of that gaunt land filled him, as it did all Napoleon's Marshals, with an intense long-. ing for Paris.

None the less Massena was a great soldier—an old fox up to every trick of the game and worthy of Wellington's mettle. He was not a man in whose presence it was safe to take risks or to blunder.

¹
To Col. Torrens,
31st
March,
1810.
Gurwood. See Simmons,
51, 64;
Two Duchesses,
345;
Charles Napier,
1,
129.

2
To Rt. Hon. H. Wellesley, 11
th June,
1810.
Gurwood.

His chief lieutenant, the forty-year-old Ney, was one of the most daring captains of his age, the Sarlouis cooper's son who had routed Mack at Elchingen and, by his assault on the Russian lines at Friedland, won from Napoleon the title of the " bravest of the brave." During the years when most of the British general and regimental officers had been drilling on provincial parade-grounds or garrisoning remote naval stations and sugar islands, the leaders of the Army of Portugal had been fighting and conquering in every corner of Europe. Continental warfare had been their trade since boyhood. They regarded the English as clumsy novices and the Portuguese as cowardly
canaille.
They never doubted, in the words of Massena's proclamation, that they would drive the leopards into the sea. It was only a question of gathering the necessary bullocks, mules and wagons to drag their guns and munitions over the mountains.

Massena, a cautious and methodical man, took his time. He had a European reputation to preserve, and neither he nor his master meant there to be any mistake this time. Thrice in three years had a French army set out for Lisbon. The first under Junot, now a corps commander in the Army of Portugal, had reached it only to be ignominiously expelled by the British after Vimeiro; the second under Napoleon himself had had to turn back to crush Moore's threat to its communications; the third under Soult had met with disaster on the banks of the Douro at the hands of the same young general who had defeated Junot and was now once more in command of the British-Portuguese forces. The new advance was, therefore, to be no impetuous dash like Junot's costly march over the Estrella in November, 1807, but a slow, methodical avalanche which, gathering irresistible weight, should roll the British into the sea.