Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (83 page)
1
Gomm,
204, 207;
Schaumann,
290-2;
Simmons,
143-4;
Grattan,
57-9.
—in torrential rain—it resumed its advance, it was numerically weaker than the enemy it was pursuing.
But Wellington knew by now that Massena was in no state to fight. On the night of March 18th, 1811, after a rearguard action at Ponte Murcella, the French abandoned all attempt at any further stand and made a forced march of twenty miles over the mountains. During the following day the allied cavalry gathered in 800 stragglers, while the Portuguese militiamen, descending from their hiding places, slew many more. By the 22nd Massena's main body had readied Celorico, thirty miles from the Spanish frontier and a few days' march from its bases at Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca. The invasion of Portugal was virtually over.
Massena's pride would not let him admit it. His army's morale had been undermined by starvation, but he still retained a French Marshal's belief in the capacity of the human will to achieve the impossible. He refused to trail ignominiously back over the Spanish frontier at the point where he had crossed it so triumphantly eight months before. Having temporarily shaken off his pursuers, he conceived the idea of marching his sullen, shoeless, mutinous army across the four-thousand-foot mountains of central Portugal into the Tagus valley and there renewing the threat to Lisbon. When Ney defied his order and tried to take his corps back to Salamanca, Massena had him arrested. The Army of Portugal, almost beside itself with rage, turned its back on its bases and set off under its grim chief towards the south-east.
But after two days the remaining corps commanders, Reynier and Junot, faced by stark starvation, announced that their men could go no farther. Massena at last recognised the inevitable and countermanded his orders. He was almost too late. On April 29th, while his main body was falling back on Ciudad Rodrigo, Wellington's advance guard surprised two of his divisio
ns in the mountain town of Guai
da, taking three hundred prisoners and hustling the remainder out in such haste that' they again left their dinners untasted. Had the British had their guns and cavalry up, they might have taken far bigger game. But their supply difficulties were overwhelming. Flead, bugged, cen
tipeded, beetled, lizarded and e
arwigged, as an officer of the Light Division wrote, the men had been marching for days from four in the morning till seven at night, living on maggoty biscuits and even at times, according to Charles Napier, on shoe-leather.
1
On the afternoon of April 1
st they came up with the French
1
"Though not a bad soldier, hang me if I can relish maggots!"—Charles Napier, I
164.
See also
Journal
of
a Soldier,
104-5;
Donaldson,
169-70;
Simmons,
156-7.
army, standing on the line of the Coa at Sabugal. Next day, as Massena seemed disposed to linger, Wellington resolved to drive him out. The reinforcements from Lisbon had now joined him, increasing his strength by 6000, while that of the enemy had sunk to under 40,000. A loop in the river, inside which Reynier's 2nd Corps was somewhat dangerously extended, gave him his chance, and at dawn on the 3rd, the 3rd,
5th
and Light Divisions and two brigades of cavalry moved forward towards the river. Unfortunately a fog so thick that the cavalry were unable to see the ears of their own horses delayed the start of the two flanking divisions. Then, as part of a chapter of accidents, Erskine—"a near-sighted ass," Harry Smith called him—refused to wait and sent the leading brigades of the Light Division under Colonel Beck with across a deep ford—the wrong one—straight into the middle of the 2nd French Corps. Thus a battalion of the 43rd, four companies of the Rifles and three of Portuguese Cacadores—1500 men in all—found themselves committed without support to an attack on a strong position held by at least three times their own number.
Their training and Beckwith's magnificent leadership, aided by the fog and rain, saved them. Three times they attacked up the slope, only to be driven back by growing force. Yet each time as they withdrew they kept up a steady fire from behind the stone walls, re-formed and returned with the bayonet. Bcckwith, a thirty-nine-year-old giant who had commanded the
95th
under Moore at Corunna, proved himself worthy that day of his master. His calm, resounding voice could be heard wherever the danger was greatest. "Now, my lads," he would cry, "we'll just go back a little if you please. No, no," he continued as some of the men began to run, " I don't mean that—we are in no hurry—we'll just walk quietly back, and you can give them a shot as you go along." AH the while he continued riding in their midst, the blood streaming down his face from a head wound, until he judged the moment was ripe and faced about, crying, "Now, my men, this will do—let us show our teeth again!"
1
But two battalions could not oppose an army corps indefinitely. The odds against them hardened with every minute. They were rescued, just as the French were launching a fourth attack to hurl them into the river, by their companion brigade under Colonel Drummond. Disregarding an order from Erskine, that officer, true
1
Kincaid,
Random Shots,
164-9;
Kincaid,
68-71.
See also Oman, IV,
188-94;
Smith, I,
45-6;
Fortescue, VIII,
100-11.
Throughout the battle a little spaniel, belonging to one or the officers of the
95th,
kept running about barking at the balls. "I once saw him," wrote Kincaid, "smelling at a live shell, which exploded in his face without hurting him." —Kincaid,
71.
to the traditions of the Light Division, had marched to the sound of the guns with both battalions of the 52nd, the ist Cacadores and four more companies of the
95th.
The 3500 light infantrymen, supported by two guns of Captain Bull's troop of horse artillery, thereupon resumed the offensive and, though still outnumbered, carried the French position. "I consider," wrote Wellington, "that the action fought by the Light Division with the whole of the 2nd Corps, to be one of the most glorious that British troops were ever engaged in."
The battle of Sabugal ended when the mist suddenly lifted, revealing to the French commander not only the true situation of the Light Infantry but the 3rd and
5th
divisions preparing to fall on his flank. He did not wait but, as Picton's men forded the river and opened their attack, withdrew rapidly under cover of a storm towards the Spanish frontier. Next morning the British resumed their advance, pressing on eastwards without catching a glimpse of the enemy all day
. But the road was strewn with
torn clothing and discarded arms, and there were signs that Massena was no longer in control of his men, whose atrocities had become those of
a rabble rather than of an army.
At one place all the villagers were trussed in rows with their heads in a stream; at another the chief magistrate's
w
ife
, with her lower garments torn off and blood pouring from her ears and mouth, was found lifeless under a granite rock in the middle of the street.
1
The Army of Portugal was disintegrating. Deep down, though it took a great adversary to reveal it, there was a fatal flaw in the French military system. The colossus had feet of clay. The
moustache's
God was the victorious engine of war under whose banners he marched: his religion his Emperor's will. Break
that engine, thwart that will,
and you robbed him of his faith and martial cohesion. The belief in Napoleon and his star was a mighty force; it could at times be most moving, as in the captured veteran who under the surgeon's knife flung his amputated arm into the air crying, "Vive l'Empereur! Vive Napoleon!"
2
But it was not a faith founded on the verities of existence. At its heart lay a pathetic and childlike lack of realism. The French were the slaves of an illusion.
In one corner of Europe at any rate that illusion had for the first time begun to crumble. There had seldom been a more striking
1
Two officers of the
95th
testified separately to this revolting atrocity.—Simmons,
160-1;
Kincaid. See also Smith, I,
46-7;
Donaldson,
180;
Schaumann,
292.
- Bell, I,
149.
exercise o
f military will-power than Masse
na's attempt to defy the forces of winter and hunger and drive Wellington out of Lisbon. It had failed, with every circumstances of horror and humiliation. For a moment the link that bound the French soldiers to their leaders seemed to snap; their invincible unity shrivelled at Wellington's cool, common sense touch. The war in Spain, they cried bitterly, is the fortune of generals, the ruin of officers and the grave of soldiers!
1
Yet Masse
na's army was only one of many. Behind it lay the entire martial machine created by the Terror, and a great nation with a military tradition far older than that of the Revolution. Though it had lost more than a third of its strength and nearly all its horses and baggage, it still had immense powers of recuperation. Massena, a great captain, was well aware of this. He refused to despair. His magazines and reinforcements were near, and he could give his hungry, shoeless, sullen men a rest. A few weeks' quiet, he knew, would work wonders.
On April
5th,
1811, the defeated army recrosscd the Spanish frontier; on the nth it reached its base at Salamanca. The British, still far ahead of their supplies, could not pursue further. As it was, the pace of their advance over the mountains had been a miracle of improvisation. Blockading the small French garrison left in Almeida, they followed the enemy across the frontier and went into canton
ments along the line of the Ague
da and Axava. Entering Spain after the vulture-haunted horror behind them was like, in the words of one them, stepping from the coal-hole into the parlour. Around them for the first time since they left the lines of Torres Vedras were cultivated fields and inhabited villages. They even slept in beds, ate off tables and met girls with rosy faces.
2
In twenty-eight days the British had advanced more than three hundred miles. Since the autumn they had inflicted on the principal French army then in the field nearly 30,000 casualties. Of these 8000 remained in their hands as prisoners, 2000 had fallen in battle and the remainder had perished—as Wellington had planned—of hunger and disease.
3
The British Commander-in-Chief—three years before an unknown Sepoy general—had become a major European figure. His name was now as familiar as that of Suvoroff or the Archduke Charles. The whole world read the proclamation which he issued in
1
Leslie,
216.
2
Kincaid,
72;
Random Shots,
177.
See
also Tomkinson,
95;
Charles Napier, I,
193;
Gnmm,
210.
3
Oman, IV,
203;
Fortescue, VIII,
112.
April to the people of Portugal, telling them that their country had been cleared of the enemy.
And the war in Spain, as he had foreseen, went on. Four days after the British re-entered the country from the west, three young Catalans gained admission to the fortress of Figueras, five hundred miles away, and let in the guerrillas to destroy the garrison. Though more than 300,000 of Napoleon's troops occupied the Peninsula, patriot forces, nourished from the sea by British cruisers, fought on in the Asturian, Biscay and Galician mountains, in Navarre and Estremadura, in the Sierra Nevada and in Murcia. On the east coast, where Suchet had captured Tortosa that January and laid siege to Tarragona, a Spanish army still held Valencia, and even in the conquered districts, hundreds of small French detachments—together amounting to whole divisions—were needed to prevent open rebellion and guard the roads and towns from the fierce, predatory partisans who infested the hills. The ruin the war had brought daily swelled the latter's numbers; every man who lost his livelihood or could not pay his debts took to the
wild and indulged the delicious
passion of revenge. Civil government and the collection of taxes were alike impossible. King Joseph—
el Rey Intruso
—was in Paris, pleading in despair with his inexorable brother for leave to abdicate. His troops had not been clothed nor fed for months, unpaid contractors had stripped his palace of its valuables, and his ambassadors abroad were in the direst poverty. "I live here," he wrote from his capital, "in the ruins of a great monarchy."
Napoleon paid little heed to his brother's lamentations. To avert the scandal of an abdication he bullied the unhappy man into returning to Madrid with a promise of a small monthly allowance. He also ordered three new divisions to Spain which, together with conscript drafts, made good Massena's losses and brought the French potential in the country to nearly 370,000. But though he had no other campaign on hand and all Europe remained in a stunned peace, he stayed away from the Peninsula himself. With his over-centralised State dependent on him for its smallest decision, he dared not bury himself again in that trackless, medieval labyrinth of desert and sierra. He feared that as in 1809 absence there might cause him to lose his grip on the Continent. And, with England's tentacles feeling inwards out of every sea; he was beginning to realise that he might lose it once too often.
For Napoleon's Empire was not so strong as it looked. It rested on the sword, and it was a sword that the Emperor dared allow no man to use but himself. Jealous of the slightest delegation of power, he surrounded himself with third-rate officials whose only talent was to say what he wished them to say. His Court became a place of infinite tedium, more servile in its rigid etiquette than anything produced by the Ancien Regime—"a slave galley," as one of its functionaries wrote, "where every courtier pulled the oar to the word of command." Fear had taken the place of enthusiasm as the motiveforce of French life. Only one canon of belief was permitted: absolute obedience to the supreme will. "To honour and serve our Emperor," ran the compulsory catechism imposed on schools, "is the same as to honour and serve God himself."
Outside the ranks of the Army, where he was still worshipped as divine, there was little love now left for Napoleon. Taxation and conscription to maintain the praetorian guard were killing it. Even the peasantry—the backbone of his former power—was growing alienated. In six years, in an agricultural country in which machine power was almost unknown, nearly a million youths had been taken by successive conscriptions. Those who watched them go knew by now that there was little chance of their returning. Throughout France that spring weeping mothers could be seen accompanying their sons to the highway as though to the grave.
1
What might still be mitigated in France by pride and patriotism, had nothing to soften it in conquered Europe. Belgium and Holland, Westphalia and the Rhineland, Switzerland and Italy, as well as the German satellite States, were made to furnish their regular quotas to the Eagles. To the latter's insatiable demands all pretences of liberation and revolutionary philanthropy were sacrificed. " Monsieur l'Abbe," Napoleon confided to one of his adherents, "I will tell you a secret. The small people in Germany wish to be protected against the big; the big people wish to govern according to their fancy. Now as I only want men and money from the Confederation, and as it is the big people, not the small, who can supply these, I leave the big people in peace."
2
French rule by 1811 had come to mean undisguised exaction, enforced by the sword. " When we have eaten up everything," replied General Casseloup to the poor Brunswicker who complained that the soldiers billeted on him were consuming his entire substance, "we shall eat you!" The Imperial administrator, Barante—devoted Bonapartist though he was—feared that his Emperor's Army would leave behind it an undying hatred of France among the entire German population and trembled at the instabiliy of a power so misused and its inevitable consequences.
3
For not only the European peoples, ground down by taxes, trade
1
Alsop,
13-15.
2
Bonapartism
,
54-5.
·
3
Barante,
45-6.
prohibitions, conscriptions and forced billetings, but their rulers were living for the day when they would be free again. All eyes were turned on Spain and the unexpected triumph of the British army. And far away at the other end of Europe, among steppes and impenetrable swamps, the great outer barbaric Power of Russia, still scarcely aware of her terrible strength, was turning from the policy of collaboration begun at Tilsit to a state of suspicious watchfulness. On the last day of the old year, as Massena's retreat from Torres Vedras became known, her Czar retaliated against Napoleon's lawless anne
xation of the Baltic post of Lu
beck by a ukase admitting colonial goods into his dominions.
The reaction against the New Order
1
was assisted by the wisdom and moderation—cunning and perfidy it seemed to Napoleon—of British foreign policy. From start to fi
nish England, with her single-
minded purpose and icy will, saw only one enemy in Europe— France. Others might be tin-own into the contest against her by the chances of war; intimidated by Napoleon's power, Spain, Holland, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Turkey had all at one time or another been enlisted under his banner. Yet the Foreign Office carefully refrained from any act or word that might make such quarrels permanent. In November, 1810, when Sweden was forced into war with England, Sir James Saumarez, the British Admiral commanding in the Baltic, scrupulously respected her trade. The door of reconciliation was always left ajar. The moment a coerced Power regained its freedom and turned against its jailer, London was ready with friendship, arms and money.
The successive collapse of the Third Coalition, of Russia and Prussia at Tilsit and of Austria in 1809, had temporarily deprived most Britons of faith in the Continent's power to shake off Napoleon. The failure of the Spanish armies, on which such exaggerated hopes had at first been built, had deepened this conviction. Only a small handful of Tory statesmen had persisted in believing that, so long as England maintained her undeviating opposition to French aggression, Europe was certain to rise again and in the end to triumph. As late as June, 1811, a patriot could express the hope that Russia would not break with France too soon, since a Continental war would only result in further subjection. But the belief, born of Ulm, Jena, Friedland and Wagram, that Napoleon could not be defeated on land, was now being banished by British triumphs in Portugal. During the early months of 1811 the bells of London
1
A New Order of things now guides the Universe."—Napoleon's Speech to the Senate,
9th
July,
1810.
Frischaucr,
226.
were set repeatedly ringing. In February a jubilant City learnt of the final elimination of French power from the Indian Ocean. In March and April came the tale of Graham's triumph at Barrosa, of the French retreat from Santarem, of Redhina, Foz do Arouce and Sabugal, of Massena's shattering losses,
1
and of the re-crossing of the Spanish frontier.
The greatest factor in Britain's reviving belief that France could be overthrown on the battlefields of the Continent was its new-found faith in Wellington. His Fabian warfare had produced results which scarcely anybody—even the most sanguine—had expected. Here, in "our Nelson on land" as Scott called him, was a man of genius and talent not deterred by obstacles or fettered by prejudices.
2
Even the French admitted him to be the first captain in Europe after Napoleon. -Instead of being chased out of Lisbon and off the Continent as almost every one had predicted, his troops were herding t
he victors of Auste
rlitz across the stony hills of Portugal like sheep.