One observer described the spectacle of the British army that morning on the Plain of Obidos:
The arms piled, and the men occupied as they usually are on all occasions of a morning halt – some sitting on their knapsacks, others stretched on the grass, many with a morsel of cold meat on a ration biscuit for a place in one hand, with a clasp-knife in the other, all doing justice to the contents of their haversacks, and not a few with their heads thrown back and canteens at their mouths, eagerly gulping down his Majesty’s grog or the wine of the country, while others, whiffing their pipes, were jestingly promising their comrades better billets and softer beds for the next night, or repeating the valorous war-cry of the Portuguese.
But to the person of reflecting mind there was more in this condensed formation than a causal halt required. A close observer would have noticed the silence and anxious looks of the several general officers of brigades, and the repeated departure and arrival of staff-officers and aides-de-camp, and he would have known that the enemy was not far distant, and that an important event was on the eve of taking place.
Wellesley divided his army in two, sending 4,000 towards the French rear, also to intercept Loison if he should arrive. Laborde in response occupied a ridge overlooking the Lisbon road, where he looked down upon the advancing British, inflicting great damage before again withdrawing to avoid being outflanked on both sides. The British lost some 500 men, the French around the same, but they retreated intact. The first little battle of the Peninsular War between two able generals had been a stand off.
Learning that British reinforcements were being landed to the west at Vimeiro, Wellesley lengthened his position to protect them. There were now up to 17,000 infantry and 18 guns, as well as the 1,500 Portuguese. Wellesley decided to march for the defile of Torres Vedras, but Sir Henry Burrard had just arrived and assumed command. He ordered Wellesley to adopt a defensive position until further reinforcements arrived. Wellesley was incensed, believing he had a good opportunity to seize Lisbon, but had no choice but to obey. He took up a defensive position on a ridge to the east and on Vimeiro hill, south of the village of that name.
Junot himself had arrived to take command of his 13,000 troops and twenty-four guns; his 70,000 remaining men were left in and around Lisbon to maintain order there. His aim was to drive the inexperienced British forces to the east. Wellesley sent his skirmishers forward along and down the sides of the ridge while placing his main forces intact behind it. The French came bravely forward under fire from their flanks and in front, unaware that a larger force awaited them on the reverse slope.
British artillery opened up, using shrapnel for the first time – named after the captain who invented it – a shell which blew up in the air raining grapeshot on the men below. Rifleman Harris described the motionless lines in the August sunshine ‘glittering with bright arms, the stern features of the men as they stood with their eyes fixed unalterably upon the enemy, the proud colours of England floating over the heads of the different battalions and the dark cannon on the rising ground’. At close range the volleys were fired at fifteen-second intervals by the disciplined British soldiers, drawn up in two lines of 800 men. After the volleys a textbook bayonet attack decisively dispersed the French, exhausted by the uphill walk under intense fire and surprised by the main British army.
As they broke and ran, Wellesley’s few horse were ordered forward where they at first put the French infantry to flight. But they went too far, to Wellesley’s irritation, and came up against superior French cavalry before galloping back to the main British lines with a quarter of the men lost. A renewed French attack on the left failed and by midday Junot’s force was in full retreat. They had lost some 2,000 men to 700 British casualties as well as fifteen guns.
Wellesley rode up to Burrard who had arrived on the battlefield and urged him to march on Torres Vedras. ‘We shall be in Lisbon in three days,’ he said. The cautious general flatly refused, and was reinforced in his dithering by Sir Hew Dalrymple who arrived the following day. Moore, who arrived several days later, took Wellesley’s view: ‘Several of our brigades had not been in action; our troops were in high spirits and the French so crestfallen that probably they would have dispersed. They could never have reached Lisbon.’ But it was too late: the French had entrenched themselves at Torres Vedras.
There was then an offer from Junot to withdraw all French forces from Portugal. To Dalrymple and Burrard this seemed a vindication of their caution, although Wellesley fumed at ‘Dowager Dalrymple and Betty Burrard’. In fact Junot had shrewdly assessed that it would have been disastrous for him to remain at Lisbon. The British had assembled a fleet under Sir Charles Cotton which could bottle up or attack the Russian and French ships in the Tagus and bombard Lisbon from the sea. They had an army approaching from the north which could trap the French in an enclave surrounded on three sides by water. In addition the people of Lisbon were highly restive and might stage an insurrection.
The two generals reached agreement with the French General Kellerman at the Convention of Cintra, then ordered Wellesley to sign the terms. He read them with astonishment, describing them as ‘very extraordinary’, but obeying his superiors’ orders in an untypical show of humility. The terms were surprising indeed: the French were to be evacuated by the Royal Navy, to a French port no less, and retain their arms and baggage and all their personal property. French troops were to be allowed to return to the fight from the port in which they were landed. Those Portuguese who had collaborated with the French were not to be punished. The Russian fleet was to be allowed to depart for the Baltic.
Wellesley promptly wrote to Castlereagh to dissociate himself from the agreement, but it was too late. The French interpreted the agreement to mean that they could take everything they could plunder from the capital away with them, including £25,000 from the Portuguese treasury. At first, as news of the French defeat at Vimeiro reached Britain at the end of August, a nation so long accustomed to the failure of British armies on the continent, there was a great outburst of popular emotion. Lady Errol wrote: ‘I hear that hero Kellerman, who last November was dictating strict humiliating terms to Emperors and Kings, was obliged to go down upon his knees to Sir Arthur Wellesley – I like it loads and quantities.’
In mid-September news of the agreement signed by the three British generals arrived and joy turned to fury. Wellesley had begged Castlereagh to relieve him of his post as he could not continue in a subordinate capacity to these two old gentlemen, and departed after making arrangements for the French withdrawal. After his spectacular victory and his bottling up of the French army in a trap where it faced certain defeat, he was now unfairly blamed for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: The enemies of the Wellesleys – of which there were many – closed ranks and attacked him as well as Richard and William.
In November an inquiry was set up at the Royal Hospital at Chelsea at which Dalrymple and Wellesley gave conflicting accounts. The army proceeded to exonerate all three officers. Parliament voted to thank Wellesley for the victory at Vimeiro. Dalrymple was dismissed as governor of Gibraltar, while Burrard was retired to domestic duty. It had been a major scandal smoothed over in traditional British fashion so as not to ruffle feathers. Wellesley himself retired to Dublin bitter and angry at what seemed a terminal setback to his career.
Chapter 60
CORUNNA
Command in the Peninsula now devolved upon the capable shoulders of Sir John Moore. Admiral Sir Charles Cotton, in charge of the British squadron off Portugal, insisted that the three generals had no right to decide naval dispositions and ignored the Convention of Cintra; instead he forced the Russian admiral to give up his ships to the British until the end of the war, a minor but significant victory.
Castlereagh determined that Britain should go on the offensive. He had agreed to despatch a fresh army of 30,000 troops to the Peninsula. In the event 14,000 infantry, 4,000 cavalry and 800 artillerymen were sent under Sir David Baird, Wellesley’s ol
d bête noire, to Corunna in northern Spain. There they were to link up with the 20,000 of the 30,000 troops in Portugal under Moore’s command. Quite quickly Britain’s commitment in Portugal had escalated to the status of major intervention.
Good news started to flood in across the Peninsula. Imaginations were kindled by the defiance of Zaragoza and the story of the brave girl named Augustina who fought against the invaders in the ruins of her burnt house with a cutlass at her side and dressed in pantaloons. After just eleven days, Joseph had fled Madrid for Burgos, and then for Vitoria in the north. Some 60,000 French troops were now confined to the north-east of Spain behind the Ebro, leaving behind some 40,000 dead or prisoner. It had been a reversal for the French in an area which Napoleon had contemptuously believed would be a walkover.
British opinion came to the conclusion that the war was all but won, that the British and Spaniards united could drive France out of the Peninsula and march on Paris. The ever-realistic Moore did not share that illusion. He had a different task ahead: to march to Salamanca across the mountains and join up with a force that was being shipped to Corunna, under Sir Henry Barclay, before, as he feared, Napoleon could reinforce his army in northern Spain and launch a counter-offensive.
What followed was to become one of the great epics in British military history. Moore immediately set about organizing his dispersed men outside Lisbon. The British troops there were openly contemptuous of the Portuguese. In spite of the incredible beauty of the city, its streets were littered with dead horses, sewage and refuse piled in the famous ‘dunghills’. Some 10,000 pariah dogs, which normally acted as mobile waste disposal units, had been shot by the fastidious French, merely adding to the mountains of rotting food in the streets. One soldier wrote: ‘What an ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, dirty, lousy set of devils are the Portuguese. Without seeing them it is impossible to conceive there exists a people in Europe so debased. The filthiest pig sty is a palace to the filthy houses in this dirty stinking city, and all the dirt made in the houses is thrown into the streets, where it remains baking for months until a storm of rain washes it away.’
Moore instilled a new spirit into his men through his energy. On 16 October 1808 he led 20,000 on a march into Spain which was to cross some 300 miles across mountains rising to 4,000 feet. He had very few horses and no heavy artillery because the roads were unable to bear it: just 6-pounders pulled by 4,000 troops along the main road to Madrid, where they would be unable to support his main forces in the north.
At first the going was easy across the pleasant Portuguese countryside, through prosperous villages amidst hills and valleys. Then the troops began to climb into sparsely populated areas, and finally mountain passes where the men had to carry equipment across rough tracks, through torrential rain and close to precipices. They bore all their supplies with them, as there were none available here, and no shelter either.
After these rigours they descended into the gentler regions of western Spain. There, according to Rifleman Harris: ‘We had fought and conquered and felt elated. Spain was before us and every man in the Rifles seemed only too anxious to get a rap at the French again. It was a glorious sight to see our colours spread in those fields. The men seemed invincible and nothing, I thought, could beat them.’ The goal was Salamanca, where they were to rendezvous with Barclay’s army, which had arrived off Corunna on 13 October and had been following behind three weeks later. From there they intended to march to join three Spanish armies and converge on the French in northern Spain.
The British and Spaniards had underestimated the enemy they were dealing with. Napoleon had always regarded Spain as a ‘sideshow’, on a par with the almost bloodless seizure of Naples. A string of disasters, first at Bailen and then at Gerona, Valencia, Zaragoza and Vimeiro, had brought him down to earth. He feared that failure might be contagious across Europe and was bent on a crushing revenge and re-establishment of French authority in the Peninsula. He poured vitriol on his commanders in Spain whom he blamed for the debacle. Writing to his brother Joseph, he complained:
I don’t like the tone of your letter of the 24th. There is no question of dying, but of fighting, and of being Victorious. I shall find in Spain the pillars of Hercules, not the bounds of my power. In all my military career I have seen nothing more cowardly than these mobs of Spanish soldiers . . . I can see from the report of the cuirassier officer that Dupont’s corps will have to retreat. The whole thing is inconceivable. Brute! Fool! Coward! Dupont has lost Spain to save his baggage! It’s a spot on my uniform! . . . The enclosed documents are for you alone; read them with a map, and you will be able to judge whether there was ever anything since the world was created so senseless, so stupid, and so dastardly! Here are the Macks and the Hohenlohes justified! One can see clearly enough, by General Dupont’s own report, that all that happened resulted from his inconceivable folly. This loss of 20,000 picked men, with the moral effect which it is bound to have, have made the King take the grave decision of falling back towards France. The influence which it will have on the general situation prevents my going to Spain in person; I am sending Marshal Ney there.
The knowledge that you have been thrown into the midst of events that are beyond your range of experience and of character grieves me, my dear friend. Dupont has covered our standards with infamy. An event like this makes my presence in Paris necessary. I feel the sharpest pang at the thought that at such a moment I cannot be at your side and in the midst of my soldiers. Let me know that you are keeping your spirits up, that you are well, and getting used to soldiering – here is a splendid opportunity for studying the business . . . What is going on in Spain is lamentable. My army is not commanded by generals who have made war, but by postal inspectors.
Napoleon’s main worry was that the Austrians, in spite of their formal treaties, were planning to open a new offensive. As early as 25 July 1808, he had written perceptively: ‘Austria is arming, but denies it; she is therefore arming against us. She is spreading the report that I demand some of her provinces: she is therefore trying to cloak as a rightful defence an unprovoked and hopeless attack. Since Austria is arming, we too must arm. I am therefore ordering the Grand Army to be reinforced. My troops are concentrating at Strasbourg, Mainz, Wesel.’ His first preoccupation was to deter an Austrian attack and to this end he sought to renew his links with Russia.
However, after Tilsit the Tsar had become increasingly dissatisfied: he was also under fire at court for having been too subservient to Napoleon on the raft. Many Russians were furious that the French now occupied the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, traditionally a sphere of Russian influence and that, contrary to their promises, they still occupied three-quarters of Prussia. Moreover, Russia had lost its lucrative export market to Britain, one of its chief customers for wood and corn. Alexander was no longer as naïve as Napoleon believed he was, although he was still possessed of a highly erratic temperament.
Moreover he had secured an extraordinary spy: Napoleon’s chief foreign adviser, Talleyrand, an aristocratic traditionalist, who by that time regarded Napoleon as ‘a devil’ leading France to disaster, and hated him. He believed in a general settlement in Europe which would put France at peace with Austria, Russia and England.
Napoleon decided to hold a summit with the Tsar at Erfurt. He ordered all his vassal princes to attend in an extraordinary attempt to overpower the Tsar into renewing his support for him. The conference was to last for two and a half weeks. Napoleon said he wanted ‘the Emperor Alexander to be dazzled by the spectacle of my power’.
A gorgeous array of thirty-six princes was on hand to meet the Tsar. Talleyrand was also there, proposing to the Tsar that they should meet secretly every evening at the house of a sister of the formidable Queen of Prussia. Alexander spent his time there each evening either talking to the wily French diplomat or making love to Princess Stephanie of Baden. Talleyrand told him baldly at the first meeting: ‘Sire, it is in your power to save Europe, and you will only do so by refusing to gi
ve way to Napoleon. The French people are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized and his people are not: the sovereign of Russia should therefore be the ally of the French people.’
Talleyrand argued that the French people were desperate for peace and believed that if Alexander resisted Napoleon’s demands it would be possible to secure it for Europe. Alexander was only too happy to oblige. In fact, Talleyrand was not close to Russia: he was an ally of the Austrian Habsburgs who had paid him the colossal sum of a million francs for his services. Metternich, the equally able and devious Austrian ambassador in Paris was his partner. Talleyrand was not just deceiving Napoleon, but also Alexander while posing as his secret friend: he was a triple agent and one being rewarded very handsomely.
He completely outwitted his French master. The final treaty was a gift to the Russians. Alexander was to be given a free hand in Finland, as well as part of modern Romania, in exchange for France abandoning its support for the Ottoman empire. Most important of all, Russia was vague about whether it would support France in the event of renewed hostilities with Austria – which had been Napoleon’s main concern. He had no wish to go to Spain leaving weakened eastern boundaries of his empire to be attacked by Austria. The Austrians, indeed, had not been invited to Erfurt.
For all the splendour and lavish entertainment, huge shooting parties and nine performances by the Comédie Française, Napoleon left without the assurances he needed. As in politics, so in diplomacy: Napoleon could be easily outmanoeuvred: it was only in warfare that he really excelled. In the event Napoleon, having achieved little, also refused to moderate his policies of aggression. He set off personally to put down the rebellion in Spain.
As Napoleon departed on his long journey, some 60,000 French troops were ordered to reinforce the army along the Ebro. Napoleon took a further 100,000 along with his best marshals, Lannes, Soult, Ney, Victor and Lefebvre. It was to be a war of annihilation: crushing Spanish resistance and slaughtering their allies in the civilian population – one of the most brutal campaigns ever mounted.
The War of Wars Page 67