not only hearten the Spaniards, stiffen the Russians in their resistance and suggest to a restless Europe that French power was on the wane, but would give the British the advantage of interior lines in any future operations against Soult. With the whole Tagus valley and both ends of the Madrid-Badajoz highway in his hands, Wellington then could bring up Hill's 21,000 men from Estremadura more quickly than Soult could attack him. He would also gain the main French arsenal in Spain.
In glorious weather the army crossed the Guadarramas and began to move on Madrid. Never had Spain shown such a welcoming face. In every village were bands of music, girls with streamers and laurel crowns to shower kisses on the victors, shouts of "Viva el gran Capitan" and 11 Viva los Heroes Ingleses los Salvadores" The rough, battle-worn men responded in character to this romantic Iberian flattery, and for once, though there were many opportunities for drink, drunkenness was almost unknown. At the royal summer-palace of San Ildefonso there was a fete in the gardens under the blue mountains; bands played in the walks, and the waterworks threw up glittering cascades. At twilight, as Wellington, surrounded by generals and grandees, entered the gardens, every band broke into "See the Conquering Hero Comes," and thousands swelled the chorus, while hundreds of ladies saluted and embraced him as their saviour.1
Meanwhile in Madrid Joseph's satellites prepared for flight. All night carriages and carts rolled out of the city on the southern road, laden with household goods and terrified collaborators flying from their countrymen's ferocious patriotism. As there was no news of Soult, who was still ignoring all orders to quit his beloved Andalusia, the King, after probing the strength of Wellington's army, abandoned the capital. To have fought the victor of Salamanca with only 15,000 men would have been madness. Once more summoning the disobedient Duke of Dalmatia to join him, he set out across the high barren hinterland for Valencia.
Next day, August 12th, Wellington entered Madrid, with every bell pealing, palms waving, fountains flowing wine, and women casting shawls before his horse. Everyone was shouting "God save
1 Those present remembered it as one of the most intoxicating nights of pleasure they had ever known. "When the shrill note of the bugle aroused us from our sleep all that had passed seemed but as a dream." Grattan, 261-4; Granville, II, 454-5; Simmons, 247; Kincaid, 176; Bell, I, 55.
King Ferdinand!" "Glory to the English Nation!" "Long live Wellington!" Ballet-dancers pirouetted before the columns; the ranks were broken by householders with gifts and wine; soldiers were dragged into doorways and feasted. All night the triumph continued, and even next day when the 3rd Division, still followed by an immense and excited multitude, advanced against the Retiro; as the troops moved up to the attack, every roof-top within sight of the fortress resounded with vivas. Fortunately the French commander, recognising that his defences were untenable, surrendered after a few shots, leaving the victors possession of nearly 200 cannon, 20,000 stands of arms and 2500 more prisoners. After that the city gave itself up to a round of fetes, balls and bull-fights, while blissful parties of ill-looking patriots roamed the streets, breaking into houses and dragging off to dungeons and midnight executions anyone who was believed to have held a post under King Joseph. No one gave a thought to making any preparations for further military operations. That was left to the British and the mountain guerrillas.
Wellington did not remain in Madrid. He moved three divisions south to the Tagus to counter any move by Soult and quartered the remainder of his troops at the Escorial, twenty miles to the north. Then, learning that Soult was still lingering in Andalusia and that no attack from the south was likely for four or five weeks, he marched north again with half his army to rejoin Clinton at Valladolid, ordering Hill in Estremadura to reinforce Madrid if Soult moved against it. His object was to take the fortress of Burgos, eighty miles beyond Valladolid on the road to France, and so pin the Armies of Portugal and the North beyond the upper Ebro. For if he could barricade them out of central Spain and return to Madrid in October, he might, with Hill's aid and his interior lines, be able to fend off Soult and Joseph, especially if the Spanish Army of Murcia and the British expedition from Sicily, which had now landed at Alicante, continued to keep Suchet occupied.
Yet he was under no illusions. With less than 80,000 troops of mixed nationality, half of them operating north of the Guadarramas and the other half a hundred and fifty miles away on the Tagus, he had to face an attack before the winter by two French armies from the north, and two—possibly three—from the south. For his very success had exposed him to the danger he had hitherto contrived to avoid—a concentric movement of all the French forces in the Peninsula. Beyond that lay a still worse threat: the return of Napoleon and a victorious Grande Armee from Russia. The news from the east was ominous: the Emperor, overcoming all resistance, was driving towards Moscow at tremendous speed to compel the Czar's surrender before the winter. "Though I still hope to be able to maintain our position in Castile and even to improve our strength," Wellington wrote to his brother on August 23 rd, "I shudder when I reflect upon the enormity of the task which I have undertaken, with inadequate powers myself to do anything and without assistance of any kind from the Spaniards. ... If by any chance I should be overwhelmed or should be obliged to retire, what will the world say? What will the people of England say?"
On September 16th, having marched another hundred and sixty miles, he appeared before Burgos with four of his eight divisions. Two days earlier Napoleon had entered Moscow after defeating the Russians in a great battle at Borodino. About the same time Soult, who had at last abandoned Seville and his lines before Cadiz, sulkily set out from Granada with 45,000 troops to join King Joseph and Suchet in Valencia. Meanwhile the guerrilleros, intoxicated by their successes, began to congregate in the liberated cities to plunder and murder collaborators. Their pressure on the French, therefore, relaxed.
The attack on Burgos castle did not go as Wellington had intended. Despite the lessons of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, he had underestimated the strength of the place, and failed, until it was too late, to order up enough heavy artillery. Nor had the sappers for whom he had asked yet reached him from England. As before, he had to use storming parties to do the work of guns and mines. Yet, shaken by the casualties of Badajoz, he did not dare to use them decisively. After losing 2000 men in five minor assaults, he was forced on October 21st to abandon the siege. By that date not only were the French Armies of Portugal and the North, half again as strong as his own, marching to the fortress's relief, but Soult and Joseph with 60,000 men were threatening Madrid from Valencia. The British were in danger of being crushed between the upper and nether millstones.
In victory Wellington had displayed some of the weaknesses of his country. He had been a little too easy-going and sanguine, and had shown signs, most unusual in him, of preferring to hope for, rather than to ensure, success. But when the storm broke he acted with wonderful resolution and presence of mind. Years later, when asked what was the test of a great general, he replied, "To know when to retreat and to dare to do it." Marching his men in silence through the streets of Burgos on the night of October 21st, he gained a day on the relieving army before the French were aware that he had gone. Yet, with 6000 cavalry to his own 1300 dragoons, they were able to press him very hard. The weather, too, turned against him, making muddy rivers of the primitive Castilian roads.1 His men were weakened by sickness and sulky at having to withdraw; in the little wine town of Torquemada 12,000 of them broke into the wine vaults with the usual disgraceful results. None the less, he brought them back with few casualties to the Douro in five days. Here he intended to stand, facing northwards across the river, while Hill, a hundred miles to the south on the other side of the Guadarramas, faced southwards across the Tagus to keep Joseph and Soult from Madrid. With 55,000 Anglo-Portuguese and 25,000 Spaniards operating on interior lines, there seemed at least a hope of being able to hold the summer's gains and prevent the 50,000 men of the French Armies of Portugal and the North from unitin
g with the 60,000 of the Armies of the South and Centre.
But that autumn Wellington's star was not in the ascendant. He failed to hold the Douro because, during the evening of October 29th, a party of French volunteers with splendid daring swam across what was thought to be an impassable reach near-the shattered bridge at Tordesillas and surprised and routed a regiment of German infantry, thus enabling Foy's sappers to get a pontoon bridge across the flooded stream. And Hill was unable to hold the Tagus because die autumnal rains which had set in with such violence north of the Guadarramas had still to fall in New Castile. Not only did the rivers south of Madrid fail as a result to bar Soult's and Joseph's advance, but General Ballasteros, the erratic commander of Spain's southern army, omitted, in a fit of sulks, to make his promised move against the French flank in La Mancha. Both halves of the British army were thus forced into the open, and both, being outnumbered —particularly in cavalry—were left with no alternative but retreat.
1 In England the equinoctial gales that stormy October strewed the Channel with wrecks, and the Thames at Westminster rose so high that it flowed into Westminster Hall. See Colchester, 11, 466-7; Daniell, I, 106.
Ordering Hill to blow up the Retiro and cross the Guadarramas to join him, Wellington prepared to fall back on Salamanca. On the last day of October the British marched out of Madrid, watched by reproachful multitudes. Then, knowing there was an end to peace and pleasure so long as a Frenchman remained in Spain, the men, bronzed and strapped under their packs, swung out in the familiar columns towards the snow-capped mountains. "A splendid sight it was," wrote Bell, "to see so grand an army winding its way zig-zag up the long pass so far as the eye could see. The old trade was going on, killing and slaying and capturing our daily bread." On either side of the track lay dead beasts and murdered peasants, slain no one knew how or by whom. Spain was like that.
As soon as Hill was through the Guadarrama, Wellington resumed his retreat, their roads converging. By November 9th 30,000 British and Germans, 20,000 Portuguese and 25,000 Spaniards were concentrated on the Tormes in front of Salamanca, while 50,000 Frenchmen moved cautiously against them from the north-east and 60,000 from the south-east. With perfect judgment Wellington had brought the two halves of his army back two hundred miles in the face of a superior enemy without losing a gun and hardly a prisoner. It would have been possible for him at that moment to throw his united force against either of his still divided adversaries. There was not a man in the British ranks who did not hope and believe that he would. But without counting the Spaniards who, through lack of discipline, were still almost impossible to manoeuvre, Wellington had not sufficient men to win a decisive victory over either French army—to one of which, without the Spaniards, he was inferior, and to the other about equal. And in the event of victory over one adversary, he would still, with depleted ranks, have had to encounter the other; while, had he failed, he must have been crushed between their approaching pincers. True, therefore, to his unchanging principle, he avoided needless risks and, allowing the French to join armies—that grand concentration which he had so long and successfully avoided—awaited their attack in one of his usual well-chosen positions. As they were a third again as strong as his own force, he had every reason to expect one.
But the French, remembering Salamanca, were taking no risks either. Pursuing the same strategy as Marmont, Soult crossed the Tormes on the 14th and began to work his way southwards and westwards round Wellington's southern flank, while the Army of Portugal faced him from the east. But, unlike Marmont, who had tried to envelop Wellington by cutting straight across his front, Soult took so broad and cautious a sweep that his adversary was never in any danger of being encircled at all. And as it was clear that the French were not going to attack him on his own ground but were merely hoping, without an encounter, to cut his communications with Portugal, the British commander resolved to fall back to his base at Ciudad Rodrigo. It meant abandoning Salamanca, but there was nothing now to be gained by remaining there for the winter.
On the afternoon of November 15 th, therefore, he gave the order to retreat, so bringing the campaign of 1812 to an end. Though he had been forced to relinquish his gains in Castile and Leon, it had proved more profitable than any he had yet undertaken. Twenty thousand French prisoners had been sent to England and 3000 guns had been taken or destroyed, the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Almaraz and Alcantara were in his hands, and Santander and the Asturian coast ports had been won by Popham and the guerrillas as a sea base for future operations. A British force from Sicily was established at Alicante in the east, and Estremadura and the whole of the south had been liberated. Indeed, the very concentration of French armies that had driven Wellington from Madrid and Valladolid had given to the Spanish guerrillas and patriot armies the control of vast new areas. With the Cortes installed at Seville instead of being penned in Cadiz, Joseph's pretence of being King of Spain was almost at an end. His very capital, though he did not know it, had been reoccupied as soon as his troops left by the guerrilla chief, El Empecinado.
Still, it was humiliating for the British to have to retrace their steps and withdraw from the scene of their triumphs to the bleak hills of the Portuguese frontier. On the day their retreat began, the equinoctial gales set in with an intensity of cold and rain unprecedented at that season. Within a few hours every stream and watercourse was a torrent and the roads rivers of icy mud which, rising to men's ankles and sometimes to their knees, sucked the boots off their feet. For four days, until the Agueda could be reached, there was no prospect of any bivouac but the drenched ground. That night it became known that there was small hope of food either.
For through an administrative blunder the rations had gone astray. Like every- British commander in the field, Wellington suffered much from the War Office or, as it was then called in its administrative part, the Horse Guards. In pursuit of some time-honoured formula of transfer and promotion that institution, with an Olympian disregard of his wishes, had posted his 'Quartermaster-General, George Murray, to Ireland and replaced him by an inexperienced nominee of its own. This functionary, on receiving orders to retire to Ciudad Rodrigo, sent off the supply-train by a route far to the north of the army's line of retreat on the assumption that the road farthest from the enemy was the safest. By forgetting that his first business was not to preserve his stores but to feed the troops, he inflicted greater suffering and loss on them than the concentration of four French armies. Had it not been for the excessive caution of Soult's pursuit—a legacy of Corunna and Albriera—they 'might 'have had to fight without the strength to do so.
For four dreadful days, as they fell angrily back, the men were Without rations. Not knowing why, they assumed some disaster had occurred and that the French in some unaccountable way had out-manoeuvred them and won a bloodless victory. For the veterans the retreat revived memories of the race to Coruna. No coat could keep out the wet and icy wind from hurigry bodies; soaked, footsore, their old wounds aching and their teeth chattering with ague, weighed down with heavy packs and arms, the frostbitten men trudged across that bitter upland without comfort or hope. At night they bivouacked in drenching woods and fed on acorns or raw carrion cut from dead bullocks and on such unmilled wheat as the harassed commissariat officers could find. "Queer music it was," wrote one, "to see and hear an army sitting on the sod, each man with two big stones grinding his dinner." Kincaid confessed he was so sharply set he could have eaten his boots.1
"On the Second night, an encounter with a herd of swine in a forest provided an unexpected dinner for several thousands. But the greater part of the army remained without rations for four days. As a result more than three thousand men fell by the way out of sheer exhaustion and were gathered up by the French.
1 Bell, I, 66-7, 73-4; Kincaid, 186-7, 192. See also Goram, 290; Grattan, 291-4, 304-6; Larpent, I, 20,29, 42; Bessborough, 231; Kincaid, 187-8,194; Simmons, 255-6,265; Costello, 142; Oman, VI, 143-8, 159.
Yet, though in some regiments
, especially those fresh from England, discipline momentarily failed, there was little grumbling. Famished, with bleeding feet, racked with ague and dysentery, the men still had the heart to make light of their lot. Courage, pride and comradeship kept the army together. In the rearguard, formed by the Light Division, the rough veterans of the 95th offered their precious biscuits to the eighteen-year-old son of Lord Spencer as he sat pale and shivering over the acorns he had gathered: in such times, wrote Rifleman Costello, lords found they were men and men that they were comrades.1
There was one incident of the retreat that deserves to be recorded, for it belongs to the heritage of the British race. It was taken down by a subaltern of the 34th—to-day the Border Regiment—from the lips of his laundress, the wife of one of his Irish soldiers.2 "Yer honour minds," she said, "how we were all kilt and destroyed on the long march last winter, and the French at our heels, an' all our men droppin' an dyin' on the roadside, waitin' to be killed over again by them vagabones comin' after us. Well, I don't know if you seed him, sir, but down drops poor Dan, to be murdered like all the rest, and says he, 'Biddy dear, I can't go no furder one yard to save me life.' 'O, Dan jewel,' sis I, Til help you on a bit; tak' a hould av me, an' throw away your knapsack.' Til niver part wid my knapsack,' says he, 'nor my firelock, while I'm a soger.' 'Dogs then,' sis I, 'you 'ont live long, for the French are comin' up quick upon us.' Thinkin', ye see, sir, to give him sperret to move, but the poor crather hadn't power to stir a lim'; an' now I heerd the firin' behind, and saw them killin' Dan, as if it was! So I draws him up on the bank and coaxed him to get on me back, for, sis I, 'the French will have ye in half an hour, an' me too, the pagans'; in thruth I was just thinkm' they had hould av us both, when I draws him up on me back, knapsack an' all. 'Throw away your gun,' sis I. 'I won't,' says he, 'Biddy, I'll shoot the first vagabone lays hould av your tail,' says he. He was always a conthrary crather when anyone invaded his firelock. Well, sir, I went away wid him on me back, knapsack, firelock, and all, as strong as Samson for the fear I was in; an' fegs, I carried him half a league after the regiment into the bivwack; an' me back was bruck entirely from that time to this, an1 it'll never get strait till I go to the Holy Well in Ireland, and have Father McShane's blessin', an' his
The Age of Elegance Page 6