[Transcriber's note]

[Table of Contents]

[List of Maps]

[List of Illustrations]

[Note on Illustrations]

[Errata]

[Index]

A HISTORY OF THE
PENINSULAR WAR

BY
CHARLES OMAN, M.A.

FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE
AND CHICHELE PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
AND CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE REAL ACADEMIA
DE LA HISTORIA OF MADRID

Vol. III
Sept. 1809–Dec. 1810
OCAÑA CADIZ BUSSACO TORRES VEDRAS

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1908

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO

PREFACE

This, the third volume of the History of the Peninsular War, covers a longer period than either of its predecessors, extending over the sixteen months from Wellington’s arrival at Badajoz on his retreat from Talavera (Sept. 3, 1809) to the deadlock in front of Santarem (Dec. 1810), which marked the end of Masséna’s offensive campaign in Portugal. It thus embraces the central crisis of the whole war, the arrival of the French in front of the Lines of Torres Vedras and their first short retreat, after they had realized the impossibility of forcing that impregnable barrier to their advance. The retreat that began at Sobral on the night of Nov. 14, 1810, was to end at Toulouse on April 11, 1814. The armies of the Emperor were never able to repeat the experiment of 1810, and to assume a general and vigorous offensive against Wellington and Portugal. In 1811 they were on the defensive, despite of certain local and partial attempts to recover their lost initiative. In 1812 they had to abandon half Spain—Andalusia, Estremadura, Asturias, La Mancha, and much more,—despite of Wellington’s temporary check before Burgos. In 1813 they were swept across the Pyrenees and the Bidassoa; in 1814 they were fighting a losing game in their own land. Rightly then may Masséna’s retreat to Santarem be called the beginning of the end—though it was not for a full year more that Wellington’s final offensive commenced, with the investment of Ciudad Rodrigo on Jan. 8, 1812.

The campaign of Bussaco and Torres Vedras, therefore, marked the turning-point of the whole war, and I have endeavoured to set forth its meaning in full detail, devoting special care to the explanation of Wellington’s triple device for arresting the French advance—his combination of the system of devastation, of the raising of the levée en masse in Portugal, and of the construction of great defensive lines in front of Lisbon. Each of these three measures would have been incomplete without the other two. For the Lines of Torres Vedras might not have saved Portugal and Europe from the domination of Napoleon, if the invading army had not been surrounded on all sides by the light screen of irregular troops, which cut its communications, and prevented it from foraging far afield. Nor would Masséna have been turned back, if the land through which he had advanced had been left unravaged, and if every large village had contained enough food to subsist a brigade for a day or a battalion for a week.

The preparations, the advance, and the retreat of Masséna cover about half of this volume. The rest of it is occupied with the operations of the French in Northern, Eastern, and Southern Spain—operations which seemed decisive at the moment, but which turned out to be mere side-issues in the great contest. For Soult’s conquest of Andalusia, and Suchet’s victories in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia only distracted the imperial generals from their central task—the expulsion of Wellington and his army from the Peninsula. Most readers will, I think, find a good deal of new information in the accounts of the siege of Gerona and the battle of Ocaña. The credit due to Alvarez for the defence of the Catalonian city has never been properly set forth before in any English history, nor have the details of Areizaga’s miserable campaign in La Mancha been fully studied. In particular, the composition and strength of his army have never before been elucidated, and Appendices [V], [VI] of this volume consist of absolutely unpublished documents.

I have to offer my grateful thanks to those who have been good enough to assist me in the writing of this book, by furnishing me with stores of private papers, or hitherto unknown official reports. Two of the kind helpers who put me on the track of new information for the compiling of Volume II have passed away while Volume III was in progress. I bitterly regret the loss of my friends General Arteche and Colonel F. A. Whinyates. The former, with his unrivalled knowledge of the contents of the historical department of the Madrid War Office, had enabled me to discover many a lost document of importance. The latter had placed at my disposal his copious store of papers, letters, and diaries relating to his old corps, the Royal Artillery. In this present section of the history of the war I am still using much of the material which he lent me.

But new helpers have come to my aid while this volume was being written. To three of them I must express my special gratitude. The first is Mr. W. S. M. D’Urban, of Newport House, near Exeter, who has furnished me with copies of a collection of papers of unique interest, the diary and correspondence of his grandfather, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, who served as the Quarter-Master-General of the Portuguese army, under Marshal Beresford, during the two years covered by this section of my history. Thanks to the mass of documents furnished by Mr. D’Urban’s kindness, I am now in a position to follow the details of the organization, movements, and exploits of the Portuguese army in a way that had hitherto been impossible to me. Moreover, Sir Benjamin’s day by day criticisms on the strategy and tactics both of Masséna and of Wellington have the highest interest, as reflecting the opinions of the more intelligent section of the head-quarters staff. It is noteworthy to find that, while many of Wellington’s chief subordinates despaired of the situation in 1810, there were some who already felt an enthusiastic confidence in the plans of their leader, so much so that their criticisms were reserved for the occasions when, in their opinion, he showed himself over-cautious, and refused to take full advantage of the uncomfortable positions into which he had lured his enemy.

The second mass of interesting private papers placed in my hands of late is the personal correspondence of Nicholas Trant and John Wilson, the two enterprising leaders of Portuguese militia forces, to whom Wellington had entrusted the cutting off of Masséna’s communication with Spain, and the restriction of his raids for sustenance to feed his army. These letters have been lent me by Commander Bertram Chambers of H.M.S. Resolution, a collateral relative of Wilson. They fill up a gap in the military history of 1810, for no one hitherto had the opportunity of following out in detail the doings of these two adventurous soldiers and trusty friends, while they were engaged in the difficult task that was set them. For a sample of Trant’s breezy style of correspondence, I may refer the reader to [pages 399-400] of this volume. Unfortunately, when the two militia generals were in actual contact, their correspondence naturally ceased, so that the series of letters has many lacunae. But they are nevertheless of the highest value.

Thirdly, I have to thank Sir Henry Le Marchant for a sight of the private papers of his grandfather, the well-known cavalry brigadier, General John Gaspar Le Marchant, who fell at Salamanca. He did not land in the Peninsula till 1811, but during the preceding year he was receiving many letters of interest, some from his own contemporaries, officers of high rank in Wellington’s army, others from younger men, who had been his pupils while he was in command of the Military College at High Wycombe. Some of the seniors, and one especially, were among those down-hearted men—of the opposite type to Benjamin D’Urban—who were consistently expecting disaster, and looked for a hasty embarkation at Lisbon as the natural end of the campaign of 1810. The younger men took a very different view of affairs, and invariably sent cheerful accounts of the doings of the army.

I must mention, once more, kind assistance from the officials of the Historical sections of the War Ministries at Paris and at Madrid. My friend Commandant Balagny, who gave me so much help during the compilation of my second volume, has unfortunately been absent on a military mission to Brazil during the last three years. But the kind offices of M. Martinien have continually aided me in getting access to the particular sections of the Paris archives with which I was from time to time concerned. I must here take the opportunity of expressing once more my admiration for his colossal work, the Liste des officiers tués et blessés pendant les Guerres de l’Empire, which, on the numberless occasions when no casualty-return appears in the Paris archives, enables one to determine what regiments were present at any action, and in what proportion they suffered. At Madrid Captain Emilio Figueras has continued his kind services, offered during the compilation of my second volume, and was indefatigable in going through the papers of 1810 with me, during my two visits to the Spanish capital.

Among my English helpers I must cite with special gratitude four names. The first is that of Mr. C. T. Atkinson, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, who has read the proofs of the greater part of this volume, and given me many valuable corrections and pieces of information, from his wide knowledge of British regimental history. The second is that of Major John H. Leslie, R.A., who has compiled the Artillery Appendix to this section, corresponding to that which Colonel Whinyates compiled for the last. I am also most grateful to him for an early view of the useful ‘Dickson Papers,’ which he is publishing for the Royal Artillery Institution. The third is that of the Rev. Alexander Craufurd, who has continued to give me notes on the history of the Light Division, while it was commanded by his grandfather, the famous Robert Craufurd. The fourth is that of Mr. C. E. Doble of the Clarendon Press, who has again read for errors every page of a long volume.

Lastly, the indefatigable compiler of the Index must receive once more my heartfelt thanks for a labour of love.

The reader will find several topographical notes appended at the end of chapters, the results of my first and second tours along the borderland of Spain and Portugal. Two long visits to the battlefield of Bussaco, and some days spent between the Coa and the Agueda, and behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, gave me many new topographical facts of importance. Drives and walks in the Badajoz-Elvas country, and about Coimbra, also turned out most profitable. But my notes on the battlefields of Fuentes d’Oñoro and Albuera can only be utilized in my next volume, which I trust may not be long in following its predecessor into print.

The spelling of many of the Spanish, and more especially the Portuguese, names may appear unfamiliar to some readers. But I believe that correctness should be studied above all things, even though the results in cases like Bussaco with the double s, Golegão, or Santa Comba Dao, may produce a momentary shock to the eye. Portuguese spelling, both in personal names and in topography, was in a state of flux in 1810. For example, the General commanding the Artillery always appears as da Rosa in the official army lists, yet signed his name da Roza; countless other instances could be produced. Where it was possible I have followed the individual’s own version of his name: he ought to have known best. There are still, no doubt, errors of spelling surviving: no man is infallible, but I have done my best to reduce them to a minimum.

C. OMAN.

Oxford:
March 1, 1908.

CONTENTS

NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

[I. Spanish Infantry 1808]

This shows the old uniform of Charles IV. The Line regiments had white, the Foreign and Light regiments blue, coats. Both wore white breeches and black gaiters: the plume and facings varied in colour for each regiment.

[II. Spanish Infantry 1810]

Under the influence of the immense quantity of British materials supplied, the uniform has completely changed since 1808. The cut is assimilated to that of the British army—the narrow-topped shako, and long trousers have been introduced. The coat is dark-blue, the trousers grey-blue, the facings red. Grenadiers have the grenade, light-companies the bugle-horn on their shakos.

ERRATA

[Page 264], [line 13], for 318 read 333

[Page 277], [line 20], for 1811 read 1810

[Page 335]. Lord Blayney’s force had only a half-battalion, not a whole battalion of the 89th, but contained 4 companies of foreign chasseurs, not mentioned in the text. [See his Memoirs, i. pp. 5-6.]

SECTION XVII

FROM TALAVERA TO OCAÑA

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY. THE CENTRAL JUNTA. WELLESLEY AND WELLINGTON

Between the 20th of August, 1809, when Robert Craufurd’s Light Brigade[1] withdrew from the Bridge of Almaraz, to follow the rest of the British army across the mountains to the neighbourhood of Badajoz, and February 27, 1810, when part of that same brigade was engaged in the first skirmish of Barba del Puerco, not a shot was fired by any of Wellington’s troops. This gap of over six months in his active operations may appear extraordinary, and it was bitterly criticized at the time. Between August and March there was hard fighting both in the south of Spain and along the north-eastern frontier of Portugal; but the British army, despite many invitations, took no part in it. Wellington adhered to his resolve never to commit himself again to a campaign in company with the Spaniards, unless he should be placed in a position in which he could be independent of the freaks of their government and the perversity of their generals. Two months’ experience of the impracticability of Cuesta, of the deliberate disobedience of Venegas, of the fruitless promises of the commissary-general Lozano de Torres, of the insane demands and advice sent in by the Central Junta, had convinced him that he dare not risk his army in a second venture such as that which had led him to Talavera. If he were made commander-in-chief by the Spanish Government, and granted a free hand in the direction of the Spanish armies, matters would look different[2]. But there was at present no chance whatever that he would receive such a mark of confidence. Only a small minority of the leading men at Seville could endure with patience the idea of a British commander-in-chief. Wellington himself had long dismissed the project—which Frère had broached in the spring[3]—as impracticable.

Meanwhile the French advance had no sooner ceased—after the rather objectless combat of Arzobispo—than the Junta began to press upon the British general schemes for a resumption of the offensive and a second march toward Madrid. The political situation, and not any military considerations, was the originating cause of their untimely activity. They felt that their authority was waning, that their popularity had vanished, that their critics were daily growing more venomous, and they saw that success in the war would be the only possible way out of their difficulties. Hence at the very moment when Wellington was withdrawing his half-starved army from the Tagus, and impeaching in letters of stinging irony the conduct of the Junta’s mendacious commissaries, he was being pressed to resume the offensive. Countless appeals were made to him. Both formal and argumentative invitations from the ministers at Seville, and private remonstrances by individuals, Spanish and English, were showered upon him[4]. The Junta even went so far as to offer him command of the Spanish troops in Estremadura, though this offer was qualified by their statement that they intended to reduce those troops to 12,000 men, the larger half of the army being under orders to march eastward into La Mancha and join the force of Venegas. This proposal did not in the least meet Wellington’s main objection to resuming active operations; viz. that he could not trust the Spanish Government to feed his army, nor the Spanish generals to carry out with punctual accuracy any scheme for a joint campaign which might be laid before him. He put the matter very plainly—‘till the evils of which I think that I have reason to complain are remedied: till I see magazines established for the supply of the troops, and a regular system adopted for keeping them filled: till I see an army upon whose exertions I can depend, commanded by officers capable and willing to carry into execution the operations which have been planned by mutual agreement, I cannot enter upon any system of co-operation with the Spanish armies[5].’ This statement was for publication: in private correspondence with his brother, the ambassador at Seville, he added still more cogent reasons for declining to take the field with Venegas or Eguia. He had witnessed with his own eyes the panic of Portago’s division on the night before Talavera, ‘when whole corps threw away their arms and ran off in my presence, while neither attacked nor threatened with attack, but frightened (I believe) by their own fire’: he had seen Albuquerque’s cavalry, the day after the combat of Arzobispo, lurking in every village for twenty miles round, and ‘had heard Spanish officers telling of nineteen or twenty actions of the same description as that of Arzobispo, an account of which (I believe) has never been published.’ The army of Estremadura consisted, he concluded, ‘of troops by no means to be depended upon’—on every ground, therefore, he ought to avoid ‘risking the King’s army again in such company[6].’

There was no getting over this fundamental objection of Wellington’s, and his brother, therefore, was placed in a very uncomfortable position. During all his negotiations with the Central Junta, Lord Wellesley’s task indeed was a most invidious one. He had been directed by his government to profess an earnest desire to aid the Spaniards in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and to pledge the aid of Great Britain, yet he was forced to refuse every definite proposal made to him by the Junta. On the other hand, there were clauses in his instructions which provoked the most openly-displayed suspicion and resentment, when he touched upon them in his conversations with Martin de Garay and the other Spanish ministers. Such were the proposal to place the whole Spanish army under a British commander (i.e. Wellington), the attempt to open up the subject of a certain measure of free trade with Spanish America, and—most of all—the offer to send British troops to garrison Cadiz. For despite the fiasco of the preceding winter, the Portland ministry were still harping on this old string, and allusions to it occur in nearly every dispatch sent from London to the ambassador at Seville[7].

Wellesley’s position was made even more difficult by the fact that all the Spanish factions opposed to the Central Junta tried to draw him into their schemes, by making lavish professions of what they were ready to do if only the present government were evicted from office. Of these factions there were many: the old ‘Council of Castile,’ which the Junta had superseded, still clung together, making protests as to the legality of their successor’s position. The local assemblies were equally jealous of the central authority—the Juntas of Estremadura and Valencia, in especial, were always intriguing behind its back, and the former at least made many tempting proposals both to Wellesley and to Wellington. But the most dangerous enemies of the existing government were the malcontents close at its gates—the Andalusian conspirators, led by the members of the old Junta of Seville, and by the intriguers like the Conde de Montijo, the dukes of Infantado and Ossuna, and Francisco Palafox. The dissatisfaction caused by the incapacity, indecision, and—as it was openly said—the nepotism and venality of the Junta was so general, that a plan was formed in Seville to seize them, deport them all to the Canaries, and proclaim a Regency. The troops in the place were tampered with, some demagogues were ready to raise the mob, and Infantado[8], who was in the thick of the plot, came to Wellesley one night to divulge the arrangements for the ‘Pronunciamento’ and to bespeak his aid. Much as he disliked the Junta and its methods, the Ambassador scornfully refused to make himself a member of a conspiracy, and after warning Infantado of his intention, went straight to the Secretary Garay and gave him all the information as to the project, though without divulging any names. Some of the plotters fled, others were arrested. ‘For the last two days,’ writes Wellesley to his brother, ‘I have been employed in endeavouring to save the necks of these caitiffs from the just fury and indignation of the people and soldiery, and I have succeeded. A regular plot was formed to seize (and I believe to hang) them all. But I could not suffer such outrages under my nose, so I interfered and saved the curs from the rope. They were all gratitude for an hour [Wellesley was offered and refused the Order of the Golden Fleece next morning], but now that they think themselves secure they have begun to cheat me again[9].’

Much as every patriot should deprecate the employment of coups d’état while a foreign war is on hand, there was much to excuse the conduct of the enemies of the Junta. That body was now more than a year old; it had been from the first regarded as a stop-gap, as a provisional government which was destined to give place to something more regular and constitutional when occasion should serve. A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ which fails to preserve the state stands self-condemned, and the history of the Central Junta had been one record of consistent disaster. A body of over thirty persons is too large for a ministry, too small for a representative assembly. Every intelligent Spaniard, whatever his politics, was desirous of seeing it give place to a regular government. The Conservatives and bureaucrats would have been contented if it had appointed a Regency of four or five persons, and then abdicated. The Liberals demanded that it should summon the national Cortes, and leave to that body the creation of an executive. Pamphlets were showered by dozens from the press—now more or less free, for the first time in Spanish history—to advocate one or other of these courses. The Junta, however, had no intention of surrendering its power, whatever pretence of disinterestedness it might assume and proclaim. Its first attempts to put off the evil day when it must yield to public opinion were ingeniously absurd. It issued, as early as May 22, a proclamation acknowledging the advisability of summoning a Cortes, and then invited all well-thinking Spaniards to send in schemes and suggestions during the next two months concerning the best way in which the national assembly could be organized, and the reforms and constitutional improvements which it should take in hand. These documents were to be read and pondered over by a Commission, mainly composed of members of the Junta, which was to issue a report in due time, embodying the best of the suggestions and the results of its own discussion[10]. This was an admirable device for wasting time and putting off the assembly of the Cortes. The Commission finally decided, on September 19, after many weeks of session, that a supreme Executive Council of five persons should be appointed, carefully avoiding the name of Regency. But only existing members of the Central Junta were to be eligible as Councillors, and the Council was to be changed at short intervals, till every member of the Junta had taken a turn in it[11]. The only laudable clause of this scheme was one providing that Spanish America should be represented in the Junta, and therefore ultimately in the Executive Council. The arrangement satisfied nobody—it merely substituted a rapidly changing committee of the Junta for the whole of that body as the supreme ruling power: and it was clear that the orders of the Council would be those of the Junta, though they might be voiced by fewer mouths. The assembly of the Cortes would be put off ad infinitum.

Any effect which the report of the Commission might have had, was spoilt by the fact that it was followed by a minority report, or manifesto, drawn up by the Marquis of La Romana, who had been one of the Commissioners. The Junta had called him back from Galicia, and compelled him to surrender the army that he had re-formed, under the pretext that he had been co-opted as a member of their own body. A death-vacancy had been created in the representation of the kingdom of Valencia: he had been named to fill it, summoned to Seville, and placed on the constitutional Commission. Dissenting from every word of the report of the majority, he published on October 14 a counter-scheme, in which he declared that the venality, nepotism, and dilatory incapacity of the Junta made it necessary for Spain to seek a new executive which should be wholly independent of that body. Accordingly he suggested that a Regency of five members should be constituted, as the supreme governing body of the realm. No member of the Junta was to sit therein. It was to be assisted, for consultative purposes, by a body of six persons—one of whom was to be a South American. This second committee, to be called ‘the Permanent Deputation of the Realm,’ was to be considered to represent the Cortes till that assembly should meet. It was not to meddle with executive matters, but was to devote itself to drawing up the details of the constitution of the future Cortes, and to suggesting practical reforms.

So far as the declaration in favour of a Regency went, most sensible Spaniards liked La Romana’s scheme, and it obtained Wellesley’s approval also. But the idea of the ‘Permanent Deputation’ frightened the Liberals, who feared that its existence would be made the excuse for putting off the summoning of the Cortes for an indefinite time. Moreover it was rumoured that La Romana intended to resign his seat in the Junta, and to become a candidate for the position of Senior Regent, so that his proposals must be intended to benefit himself. The suspicion that his personal ambitions inspired his patriotic denunciation of the Junta’s misdoings was made the more likely by events that occurred at the same moment in Valencia. There the leading personage of the moment was the governor, General José Caro, the younger brother of La Romana, who had complete control of the local Junta, and exercised what his enemies called a tyranny in the province. He and his following were already on the worst terms with the Seville Government, and now took the opportunity of bursting out into open rebellion. They issued a sounding manifesto against the Supreme Junta, declared their intention of refusing to obey it any longer, and republished and sent in all directions to the other local Juntas La Romana’s report in favour of a Regency, of which Caro had struck off 6,000 copies. They threatened to turn back by force General Castro whom the Supreme Junta had sent to supersede Caro, and declared their second representative in that body, the Conde de Contamina, deposed for ‘disobedience to the will of the people.’ It looked as if La Romana might be intending to overthrow the central government by means of his brother’s Valencian army. Apparently he must be acquitted of this charge, his fiery and ambitious kinsman having gone far beyond his intentions.

In the midst of all these intrigues, plots, and manifestos the Central Junta had only one hope—to rehabilitate themselves by means of a great military success. With ruinous consequences they tried to direct the course of the war with political rather than strategical ends in view. Of the unhappy autumn campaign which their rashness precipitated we shall speak in its proper place; but before narrating the disasters of Ocaña and Alba de Tormes, we must turn back for some months to consider the situation of Eastern Spain, where the continuous chronicle of events has been conducted no further than Blake’s rout at Belchite in June, and St. Cyr’s victory of Valls in February 1809. Much had happened in Catalonia and Aragon even before the day of Talavera. Much more was to take place before the ill-judged November campaign of the Junta’s armies in New Castile and Leon had begun.

N.B.—This is a military history: for the war of pamphlets and manifestos, plots and intrigues, between the Seville Government and its adversaries, the reader who is anxious to master the disheartening details may consult Toreno’s Tenth Book; Schepeler, iii. 460-86; Baumgarten, vol. i. chapter viii; Arteche, vol. vii. chapter vi, and above all the volume of the Marquis of Wellesley’s Spanish Dispatches (London, 1838). There is a good and lively description of the chief members of the Junta and the ministry, and of the intrigues against them, in William Jacob’s Travels in the South of Spain (London, 1811).

SECTION XVII: CHAPTER II

EVENTS IN EASTERN SPAIN DURING THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1809. THE SIEGE OF GERONA BEGUN

In the spring of 1809 the theatres of operations of the two French army-corps entrusted with the reduction of Aragon and of Catalonia were still divided by a broad belt of territory which was in the hands of the Spaniards, around the fortresses of Lerida, Mequinenza, and Tortosa. Only once had communication been opened between Suchet and St. Cyr, and then the force which had crossed from Aragon into Catalonia found itself unable to return. The only way of getting a dispatch from Saragossa to Barcelona was to send it by the circuitous road through France. Co-operation between the 3rd and the 7th Corps would have been difficult in any case; but since each of the two corps-commanders was interested in his own problems alone, and found them all-absorbing, the war in Catalonia and the war in Aragon went on during 1809 and the first half of 1810 as separate affairs from the French point of view. It was otherwise with the Spaniards: Blake had been placed in command of the whole of the Coronilla, the three provinces of Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia which had formed the ancient kingdom of Aragon[12]. He had Suchet on his left and St. Cyr on his right, was equally interested in the operations of each, and might, so far as the rules of strategy go, have turned his main force against whichever of the two he might please, leaving a comparatively small force to ‘contain’ the other. Unfortunately he proved unable to make head against either of his adversaries. We have already seen how, in the early summer, he threw himself upon Suchet, and was beaten off at Maria and routed at Belchite. In the later months of the year it was mainly with St. Cyr that he had to deal, and his efforts were equally unsuccessful. It would seem that he found it very difficult to concentrate any preponderant portion of his troops for a blow to either side: very few battalions from Catalonia accompanied his Valencians and Aragonese to Maria: very few Valencians were brought up to aid the Catalans in the operations about Gerona. The problems of food and transport had something to do with this, but the main difficulty was that the armies of both provinces, more especially the Catalans, were essentially local levies, and disliked being drawn far from their homes. There was always some threatening danger in their own district which made them loath to leave it unguarded, while they were taken off on some distant expedition. The complaints and arguments of the Juntas, the manifest unwillingness of the officers and men, fettered the hands of the commander-in-chief, whenever he strove to accomplish a general concentration. Hence it came to pass that for the most part St. Cyr was opposed by Catalan troops only, Suchet by Valencians and Aragonese only, during the campaigns of 1809.

The tasks of the commander of the 3rd Corps in the months that followed his victories over Blake were both less interesting and less important than those imposed upon his colleague in Catalonia. They were however laborious enough; after having driven the Spanish regular armies out of Aragon, Suchet had now to tame the country-side. For even after Belchite he held little more than the towns of Saragossa and Jaca, and the ground on which his camps were pitched from day to day. When he had concentrated his corps to fight Blake, the rest of the province had slipped out of his hands. Its reconquest was a tedious matter, even though he had only to contend with scattered bands of peasants, stiffened by stragglers from the army that had dispersed after Belchite. The plain of the Ebro, which forms the central strip of Aragon, was easily subdued, but the mountains to the north and south were well fitted to be the refuge of insurgents. The Aragonese, along with the Galicians, were the first of the Spaniards to take to systematic guerrilla warfare. Undismayed by the fate of Blake’s army, they had resolved to defend themselves to the last. There was more than one focus of resistance: a colonel Renovales, who had been one of the defenders of Saragossa, and had escaped after the capitulation, was at the head of the bands of the north-western mountains, in the vale of Roncal and on the borders of Navarre. In the north-eastern region, about the upper waters of the Cinca and the hills beyond Jaca, two local chiefs named Perena and Sarasa kept the war on foot, getting their stores and ammunition from the Catalans on the side of Lerida. In an entirely distinct part of the province, south of the Ebro, lay Gayan and Villacampa, whose centres of activity were Daroca and Molina, mountain towns from which they were often driven up into that central ganglion of all the ranges of Spain, the Sierra de Albaracin, from which descend in diverging directions the sources of the Tagus, the Guadalaviar, and the Xucar. Both Gayan and Villacampa were officers of the regular army, holding commissions under Blake: the band of the former had as its nucleus the regiment of La Princesa, whose extraordinary escape across northern Spain after the combat of Santander has been told in another place[13].

Suchet’s work, during the later summer and the autumn of 1809, was to break up and as far as possible to destroy these bands. His success was considerable but not complete: in July he stormed Gayan’s stronghold, the mountain sanctuary of Nuestra Señora del Aguila, captured his magazines, and drove him up into the mountains of Molina. Continuing his campaign south of the Ebro, he sent the Pole Chlopiski against Villacampa, who abandoned Calatayud, Daroca, and the other hill towns, and retired into the Sierra de Albaracin, where he took refuge at the remote convent of El Tremendal, one of the most out-of-the-way spots in the whole Peninsula. Here, nevertheless, the partisan was followed up on Nov. 23-4 by a column under Colonel Henriot, who manœuvred him out of his position, surprised him by a night attack, and drove him over the Valencian border. The convent was blown up, the dependent village of Orihuela sacked, and the French withdrew[14].

These operations had been carried out by Musnier’s division; but meanwhile movements of a very similar sort were being undertaken by another division, that of Laval, on the other side of Aragon, along the slopes and gorges of the Pyrenees[15]. In the end of August a column of 3,000 men stormed the convent of San Juan de la Peña, close to Jaca, which Sarasa and Renovales were wont to make their head quarters. It was an ancient building containing the tombs of the early kings of Aragon, who reigned in the mountains before Saragossa had been recovered from the Moor; it had never seen an enemy for eight hundred years, and was reputed holy and impregnable. Hence its capture dealt a severe blow to the confidence of the insurgents. Renovales, however, held out in the western upland, continuing to defend himself in the valley of Roncal, till he was beset on all sides, for Suchet had obtained leave from Paris to call up the National Guards of the Ariége, Basses Pyrénées and Haute Garonne, and their bataillons d’élite attacked the insurgents in the rear from across the high mountains, while the 3rd Corps advanced against them from the front. After much scattered fighting Renovales capitulated, on condition that he should be allowed a free departure. He retired to Catalonia with some of his men: the rest dispersed for the moment, but only to reassemble a few weeks later, under another and a more wary and obstinate chief, the younger Mina, who commenced in this same autumn to make the borders of Aragon and Navarre the theatre of his hazardous exploits. But the region was comparatively quiet in September and October, and Suchet transferred the activity of his movable column further to the eastward, where he drove some partidas out of the valleys of the Cinca and Essera, and tried to open up a new line of communication with France by way of the valley of Venasque. This was accomplished, for a moment, by the aid of national guards from beyond the Pyrenees, who entered the valley from the north while the troops of Suchet were operating from the south. But the road remained unsafe, and could only be used for the passage of very large bodies of troops, so that it was practically of little importance.

In December Suchet completed the formal conquest of Aragon, by moving up the whole of Laval’s division into the high-lying district of Teruel, in the extreme south-east of the province, the only part of it that had never yet seen the French eagles. The Junta of Aragon fled from thence over the border of the kingdom of Valencia, but Villacampa and his bands remained in the mountains unsubdued, and while they continued to exist the conquest of the upland was incomplete. The moment that its towns ceased to be held by large garrisons, it was clear that the insurgents would descend to reoccupy them. Nevertheless Suchet had done much in this year: besides the crushing of Blake he had accomplished the complete subjection of the plains of Central Aragon, and had obtained a grip upon its two mountain regions. He had fortified Monzon, Fraga, Alcañiz, and Caspe as outposts against the Catalans, and, having received large drafts from France in the autumn, was on the last day of the year at the head of a fine corps of 26,000 men, from which he might hope to produce in the next spring a field army sufficient for offensive operations against Catalonia or Valencia, after providing garrisons for his various posts of strength[16]. The weak point of his position was that the guerrilleros had learned caution, refused for the future to fight save under the most favourable conditions, and devoted themselves to the safe and vexatious policy of intercepting communications and cutting up small parties and stragglers. They were much harder to deal with, when once they had learnt that not even in fastnesses like El Tremendal or San Juan de la Peña was it wise to offer the French battle. Unless Suchet left a garrison in every town, nay, in every considerable village, of the sierras, the insurgents dominated the whole region. If he did take such measures for holding down the upland, he was forced to immobilize a very large proportion of his army. We shall note that in 1810 he was only able to draw out 12,000 of his 26,000 men for the invasion of Western Catalonia.

While the commander of the 3rd Corps was making steady progress with the conquest of Aragon, the fortunes of his colleague of the 7th Corps had been far more chequered. Indeed for the greater part of 1809 St. Cyr was brought to a complete standstill by the unexpected obstinacy of the gallant garrison of Gerona, who for no less than eight months kept the main body of the army of Catalonia detained in front of their walls.

When last we dealt with the operations in this region we left St. Cyr victorious at the well-contested battle of Valls, after which he advanced into the plain of Tarragona, made some demonstrations against that fortress, but returned after a few weeks to Barcelona (March 18) without having made any serious attempt to turn his victory to practical account. This retreat after a brilliant success may be compared to Victor’s similar evacuation of Southern Estremadura after Medellin, and was brought about, in the main, by the same cause, want of supplies. For when he had consumed the resources of the newly-subdued district between Valls and Tarragona, St. Cyr had no means of providing his army with further subsistence. Barcelona, his base, could not feed him, for the city was itself on the edge of famine: it was still beset to north and west by the local miqueletes, who had returned to their old haunts when the main French army had gone off southward on the campaign of Valls. It was stringently blockaded on the sea side by the British Mediterranean fleet, and it could not draw food from France by land, because the high-road to Perpignan passed through the fortress of Gerona, which was still in Spanish hands. St. Cyr himself, it will be remembered, had only reached Barcelona by turning off on to side tracks through the mountain, and winning his way down to the shore by the hard-fought battle of Cardadeu. Till Gerona should fall, and the garrison of Barcelona be placed in direct communication with France, there was little use in making ambitious offensive movements against Tarragona or any other point in Southern or Central Catalonia. It was absolutely necessary to reduce Gerona, and so to bring the division left behind under Reille, in the Ampurdam and on the frontier of Roussillon, into free communication with the remainder of the 7th Corps. From the moment when St. Cyr passed the mountains during the winter Reille had been fighting out a petty campaign against the northern Catalans, which had no connexion whatever with his superior’s operations at Molins de Rey and Valls, and had little definite result of any kind.

No one saw more clearly than Napoleon the need for the reduction of Gerona: as early as January he had issued orders both to St. Cyr and to Reille to prepare for the enterprise. But St. Cyr was now out of touch, and Reille was far too weak in the early spring to dream of any such an adventure: he had been left no more than seven depleted battalions to maintain his hold on Northern Catalonia, when St. Cyr took the rest of the army across the hills to Barcelona. The Emperor was not slow to realize that the 7th Corps must be reinforced on a large scale. He did so by sending thither in the spring of 1809 a brigade of Berg troops (four battalions), the regiment of Würzburg (two battalions), and a division (seven battalions) of Westphalians: it will be noted that now, as always, he was most chary of drafting native French troops to Catalonia, and always fed the war in that direction with auxiliaries in whose fate he was little interested: the campaign in eastern Spain was, after all, but a side issue in the main struggle[17]. When these reinforcements had arrived Reille began to collect material at Bascara on the Fluvia, to which siege-guns laboriously dragged across the Pyrenees were added: several companies of heavy artillery and sappers were brought up from France.

St. Cyr meanwhile, four weeks after his retreat from the plain of Tarragona, moved on to Vich upon April 18, with the divisions of Souham, Pino, Lecchi, and Chabot, leaving Duhesme with his original French division, which had held Barcelona since the outbreak of the war, in charge of his base of operations. His departure was partly designed to spare the stores of Barcelona, where the pinch of famine was beginning to be felt; for he intended to subsist his army on the upland plain of Vich, a rich corn-bearing district hitherto untouched by the war. But a few days after he had marched forth Barcelona was freed from privation, by the lucky arrival of a squadron of victuallers from Toulon, convoyed by Admiral Cosmao, which had put to sea in a storm and eluded the British blockading squadron (April 27). The position of Vich, however, had been chosen by St. Cyr not only for reasons of supply, but because the place was happily situated for covering the projected siege of Gerona against any interruption by Blake. If the Spanish commander-in-chief brought up the wrecks of the old Catalan army from Tarragona, with his Valencian levies added, he would almost certainly take the inland road by Manresa and Vich, since the coast-road was practically barred to him by the French occupation of Barcelona. As a matter of fact the commencement of the leaguer of Gerona was not vexed by any such interruption, for Blake had his eyes fixed on Saragossa in May and June, and was so far from dreaming of an assault on St. Cyr, that he drew off part of the Catalan army for his unhappy invasion of Aragon, which finished with the disaster of Belchite. During the early months of this long siege the only external helpers of the garrison of Gerona were the small force of regulars under the Swiss Wimpfen, and the miqueletes of Claros and Rovira from the Ampurdam, Reille’s opponents during the spring. At Tarragona the Marquis of Coupigny, the senior officer now in Catalonia, had no more than 6,000 men left of Reding’s old army, and was helpless to interfere with St. Cyr who had some 20,000 men concentrated at Vich.

The preparations for the siege therefore went on in the end of April and the beginning of May without any hindrance, save from the normal bickerings of the French outlying detachments with the local somatenes, which never ceased. Around Vich matters were particularly lively, for the whole population of the town and the surrounding plains had gone up into the hills, where they wandered miserably for three months, much hunted by French foraging parties, which they occasionally succeeded in destroying. St. Cyr opened up his communications with Reille by sending to him Lecchi’s Italian division, which cut its way amid constant skirmishes along the banks of the Ter to Gerona, and met the troops from the Ampurdam under its walls. Reille had moved forth from Bascara on May 4, and on the eighth expelled the Spanish outposts from all the villages round the fortress, not without some lively skirmishing. He had brought up some 10,000 infantry—including his own old division and all the newly arrived Germans—with some 1,300 artillerymen and engineers. Almost at the same moment arrived dispatches from Paris, announcing that the Emperor, just before departing for the Austrian war, had superseded both St. Cyr and Reille, being discontented with their handling of affairs in Catalonia. It is unfortunate that no statement in detail of his reasons appears in the Correspondance[18], but it would seem that he thought that the victories of Molins de Rey and Valls should have had greater results, disapproved of St. Cyr’s retreat from in front of Tarragona, and thought that Reille had shown great weakness in dealing with the insurgents of the Ampurdam. He ignored the special difficulties of the war in Catalonia, thinking that the 30,000 men of the 7th Corps ought to have sufficed for its complete conquest. Indeed he showed his conception of the general state of affairs by recommending St. Cyr in March to undertake simultaneously the sieges of Gerona, Tarragona, and Tortosa[19]. The leaguer of one, and that the smallest, of these places was destined to occupy the whole army of Catalonia, when largely reinforced, for eight months. If it had been cut up according to the imperial mandate, it is probable that at least one of its sections would have been destroyed. St. Cyr wrote in his memoirs that his master was jealous of him, and wished to see him fail, even at the cost of wrecking the 7th Corps. This is of course absurd; but there can be no doubt that the Emperor disliked his lieutenant, all the more because of the long string of complaints, and of demands for more men, money, and stores, which he was now receiving week by week from Catalonia. He loved generals who achieved the impossible, and hated grumblers and frondeurs, a class to which St. Cyr, despite all his talents, undoubtedly belonged. It is possible that Napoleon’s determination to replace him may have been fostered by intrigues on the part of the officer to whom the 7th Corps was now turned over. Marshal Augereau had served with great credit in the old republican campaign in Catalonia during 1793 and 1794, imagined himself to have a profound knowledge of the country, and was anxious to try his hand in it. It was many years since he had been trusted with an independent command; both in the wars of 1806-7 and in that of 1809 he had been lost in the ranks of the Grand Army. His nomination to supersede St. Cyr was made early in May, but on his way to the seat of war he was seized with a fit of the gout, and was detained in bed at Perpignan for many weeks. Thus his predecessor, though apprised of his disgrace, was obliged to continue in command, and to commence the operations of which the Marshal, as he well knew, would take all the credit. At the same moment Reille was displaced by Verdier, the general who had conducted the first unlucky siege of Saragossa—an experience which seems to have made him very cautious when dealing with Spaniards behind walls.

Lecchi’s division forced its way back to St. Cyr on May 18, bringing him the intelligence of his supersession, but at the same time apprising him that Augereau would not arrive as yet, and that the duty of commencing the siege of Gerona would still fall to his lot. At the same time Verdier sent letters urging that his 10,000 infantry formed too small a force to surround such a large fortress, and that he must ask for reinforcements from the covering army. If they were denied him, he should refuse to begin the siege, throwing the responsibility for this disobedience of the Emperor’s commands on his superior: he had reported the situation to Paris. St. Cyr was incensed at the tone of this dispatch[20], above all at the fact that Verdier was appealing straight to the Emperor, instead of corresponding through his hierarchical superior, according to the rules of military etiquette. But he saw that Verdier had a good case, and he had just learnt that Blake had turned off against Aragon, so that no trouble from that quarter need be feared. Accordingly he, very grudgingly, sent back Lecchi’s division to Gerona. It was the worst that he possessed, being composed of no more than four Neapolitan and three Italian battalions, with a strength of little over 3,000 bayonets[21]. He added to it a regiment of Italian light horse, several of his own batteries, and nearly all the engineers and sappers of his corps, so that the total reinforcement sent to Verdier consisted of more than 4,000 men.

Having received these succours, which brought up his total force to 14,000 infantry and cavalry, and 2,200 artillerymen, sappers and engineers, Verdier commenced on May 24 his operations against Gerona: on that day Lecchi’s division took its post in the plain of Salt, on the west of the town, while the French and Westphalian divisions were already close to the place on its eastern and northern sides. The head quarters and the French brigades of Joba and Guillot lay by Sarria and the bridge of Pont-Mayor, where the magazines were established, while the Germans had been sent up on to the heights east of the fortress and held the plateaux of Campdura, San Medir, and Domeny. The rocky southern side of Gerona, in the direction of the gorge of the Oña, was not yet properly invested.

Something has already been said, in an earlier volume of this work, concerning the situation of Gerona, when its two earlier sieges by Duhesme were narrated[22]. It must suffice to repeat here that the town is built on the steep down-slope of two lofty heights, with the river Oña at its foot: the stream is crossed by two bridges, but is fordable everywhere save in times of spate. Beyond it lies the suburb of the Mercadal, surrounded by fortifications which form an integral part of the defences of the city. The river Ter, coming from the west, joins the Oña at the north side of the Mercadal and washes the extreme north-western corner of the walls of the city proper. The two heights upon whose lower slopes Gerona is built are separated from each other by a deep ravine, called the Galligan, down which run an intermittent watercourse and a road, the only one by which approach to the city from the east is possible. The northern height is crowned by the strong fort of Monjuich, the most formidable part of the city defences, with its three outlying redoubts called San Narciso, San Luis and San Daniel. The crest of the southern height is covered in a similar fashion by the three forts of the Capuchins, Queen Anne, and the Constable, with the Calvary redoubt lower down the slope above the Galligan, facing San Daniel on the other side of the ravine. Two other small fortifications, the redoubts of the ‘Chapter’ and the ‘City,’ cover the path which leads down from the forts to Gerona. Neither the Monjuich nor the Capuchin heights are isolated hills; each is the end of a spur running down from the higher mountains. But while the southern summit rises high above the hilly reach which joins it to the mountain of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, the northern summit (where lies Monjuich) is at the end of a plateau extending far to the north. The Capuchin heights, therefore, can only be attacked uphill, while Monjuich can be assailed from ground of a level little inferior to itself. But except on this point both heights are very strong, their slopes being in many places absolutely precipitous, especially towards the Galligan, and everywhere steep. Nevertheless there are winding paths leading up both, from Sarria and Pont-Mayor in the case of Monjuich, from Casa de Selva and other villages towards the east and the sea in the case of the Capuchin heights. All the ground is bare rock, with no superincumbent soil.

All the fortifications were somewhat antiquated in type, nothing having been done to modernize the defences since the war of the Spanish Succession[23]. Ferdinand VI and Charles III had neglected Gerona in favour of the new fortress of Figueras, nearer to the frontier, on which large sums had been expended—for the benefit of the French who seized it by treachery in 1808, and were now using it as their base of operations. The actual wall of enceinte of the city was mediaeval—a plain rampart twenty-five feet high, too narrow for artillery and set thickly with small towers; only at its two ends, on the Oña and the Ter, two bastions (called those of La Merced and Santa Maria) had been inserted, and properly armed. This weakness of the walls went for little so long as Monjuich, the Capuchins, and the other forts held firm, since the enemy could only approach the town-enceinte at its two ends, where the bastions lay. Far more dangerous was the feebleness of the Mercadal, whose ramparts formed the southern section of the exterior defences of the place. Its circuit had five plain bastions, but no demi-lunes or other outer defences, no covered way nor counterscarp: its profile, only some eighteen or twenty feet high, was visible, across the flat ground which surrounds it, from the foot to the summit of the wall, for want of ditch or glacis. The ground leading up to it was favourable for siege approaches, since the soil was soft and easy to dig, and was seamed with hollow roads and stone walls, giving much cover to an assailant. Aware of the defects of the fortifications of the Mercadal, the Spaniards had prepared a line of defence behind it, along the further bank of the Oña. They had made the river-front of the city proper defensible to a certain extent, by building up the doors and windows of all the houses which abut upon the water, mining the two bridges, and fixing a stockade and entanglements in the bed of the Oña, along the considerable space, where it is fordable in dry weather[24]. They had indeed repaired the whole circuit of the defences since Duhesme’s sieges of 1808, having cleared out the ditches of Monjuich and of the bastions of La Merced and Santa Maria, walled up many posterns, and repaired with new and solid masonry all the parts of the walls that had been dilapidated at the moment of the first siege. They had also pulled down many isolated houses outside the walls, and demolished the nearer half of the suburban village of Pedret, which lies (most inconveniently for the defence) along the bank of the Ter between the water and the slopes of Monjuich.

All these precautions must be put to the credit of the governor, Mariano Alvarez de Castro, a man to be mentioned with all honour and respect, and probably the best soldier that Spain produced during the whole Peninsular War. He was a veteran of the Revolutionary and Portuguese wars, and had a good reputation, but no special credit for military science, down to the moment when he was put to the test. He had been the officer in charge of the castle of Barcelona on the occasion when it was seized by Duhesme in March 1808: his spirit had been deeply wounded by that vile piece of treachery, and he had at once adhered to the national cause. Since then he had been serving in the Ampurdam against Reille, till the moment when he was appointed governor of Gerona. Alvarez is described by those who served under him as a severe, taciturn man of a puritan cast of mind. ‘I should call him,’ wrote one of his brigadiers, ‘an officer without the true military talents, but with an extreme confidence in Providence—almost, one might say, a believer in miracles. His soul was great, capable of every sacrifice, full of admirable constancy; but I must confess that his heroism always seemed to me that of a Christian martyr rather than of a professional soldier[25].’ General Fournas, who wrote this somewhat depreciatory sketch of his chief, was one of those who signed the capitulation while Alvarez was moaning no quiero rendirme on his sick-bed, so that his judgement is hardly to be taken as unprejudiced; but his words point the impression which the governor left on his subordinates. The details of his defence sufficiently show that he was a skilful and resourceful as well as an obstinate general. His minute care to utilize every possible means of defence prove that he was no mere waiter on miracles. That he was a very devout practising Catholic is evident from some of his doings; at the opening of the siege a great religious ceremony was held, at which the local patron saint, Narcissus, was declared captain of the city and presented with a gold-hilted sword. The levy en masse of the citizens was called ‘the Crusade,’ and their badge was the red cross. The ideas of religion and patriotism were so closely intertwined that to the lay companies of this force were afterwards added two clerical companies, one composed of monks and friars, the other of secular priests: about 200 of these ecclesiastics were under arms[26]. Even the women were organized in squads for the transport of wounded, the care of the hospitals, and the carrying of provisions to the soldiery on the walls: about 300 served, under the command of Donna Lucia Fitzgerald and Donna Maria Angela Bibern, wives of two officers of the regiment of Ultonia. Five of this ‘company of St. Barbara’ were killed and eleven wounded during the siege.

The garrison at the moment of Verdier’s first attack consisted of about 5,700 men, not including the irregulars of the Crusade. There were seven battalions of the old army, belonging to the regiments of Ultonia[27], Borbon, and Voluntarios de Barcelona, with three battalions of miqueletes, two local corps, 1st and 2nd of Gerona, and the 1st of Vich. Of cavalry there was a single squadron, newly levied, the ‘escuadron de San Narciso.’ Of artillery there were but 278 men, a wholly insufficient number: the officers of that arm were given 370 more to train, partly miqueletes of the 2nd Gerona battalion, partly sailors having some small experience of gunnery. It was difficult to make proper use of the great store of cannon in the fortress, when more than half the troops allotted to them had never before seen, much less served, a heavy gun of position. To the above 5,700 men of all arms must be added about 1,100 irregulars of the ‘Crusade’—seven lay and two clerical companies of fusiliers and two more of artificers. But these were set to guard almost unapproachable parts of the wall, or held in reserve: most of the stress fell upon the organized troops. The defence was altogether conducted on scientific principles, and had nothing in common with that of Saragossa. Here the irregulars formed only a small fraction of the garrison[28], and were never hurled in senseless fury against the French batteries, but used carefully and cautiously as an auxiliary force, capable of setting free some part of the trained men for service on the more important points of the enceinte[29].

For the first two months of the siege Alvarez received no help whatever from without: in May the central government of Catalonia had been left in a perfectly paralysed condition, when Blake went off himself and took with him the best of the regular troops, in order to engage in the campaign of Alcañiz and Maria. Coupigny, the interim commander at Tarragona, had only 6,000 organized men, and he and the Catalan provincial junta were during that month much engrossed with an enterprise which distracted them from the needs of Gerona. A wide-spread conspiracy had been formed within the walls of Barcelona, with the object of rising against the garrison in St. Cyr’s absence. A secret committee of priests, merchants, and retired officers had collected all the arms in the city, smuggled in many muskets from without, and enlisted several thousand persons in a grand design for an outbreak and a sort of ‘Sicilian Vespers’ fixed—after two postponements—for the 11th of May. They opened communication with Coupigny and with the captains of the British frigates blockading the port. The one was to bring his troops to the gates, the others to deliver an attack on the port, upon the appointed night. No Spaniard betrayed the plot, though 6,000 citizens are said to have been in the secret, but it was frustrated by two foreigners. Conscious that the town could not be freed if the citadel of Monjuich was retained by the French, the conspirators sounded two Italian officers named Captain Dottori, fort adjutant of Monjuich, and Captain Provana, who was known to be discontented and thought to be corruptible. They offered them an immense bribe—1,000,000 dollars, it is said—to betray the postern of Monjuich to the troops of Coupigny, who were to be ready in the ditch at midnight. But they had mistaken their men: the officers conferred with Duhesme, and consented to act as agents provocateurs: they pretended to join the conspiracy, were introduced to and had interviews with the chiefs, and informed the governor. On the morning before the appointed date many of the leaders were arrested. Duhesme placed guards in every street, and proclaimed that he knew all. The citizens remained quiet in their despair, the chiefs who had not been seized fled, and the troops on the Llobregat retired to Tarragona. Duhesme hanged his captives, two priests named Gallifa and Pou, a young merchant named Massana, Navarro an old soldier, and four others. ‘They went to the gallows,’ says Vacani, an eye-witness, ‘with pride, convinced every one of them that they had done the duty of good citizens in behalf of king, country, and religion[30].’

Engrossed in this plot, the official chiefs of Catalonia half forgot Gerona, and did nothing to help Alvarez till long after the siege had begun. The only assistance that he received from without was that the miqueletes and somatenes of the Ampurdam and the mountain region above Hostalrich were always skirmishing with Verdier’s outposts, and once or twice cut off his convoys of munitions on their way from Figueras to the front.

The French engineers were somewhat at variance as to the right way to deal with Gerona. There were two obvious alternatives. An attack on the weak front of the Mercadal was certain to succeed: the ground before the walls was suitable for trenches, and the fortifications were trifling. But when a lodgement had been made in this quarter of the town it would be necessary to work forward, among the narrow lanes and barricades, to the Oña, and then to cross that river in order to continue similar operations through the streets of Gerona. Even when the city had been subdued, the garrison might still hold out in the formidable works on the Monjuich and Capuchin heights. The reduction of the Mercadal and the city, moreover, would have to be carried out under a continuous plunging fire from the forts above, which overlooked the whole place. This danger was especially insisted upon by some of the engineer officers, who declared that it would be impossible for the troops to work their way forward over ground so exposed. As a matter of fact it was proved, after the siege was over and the forts had been examined by the captors, that this fear had been exaggerated; the angle of fire was such that large sections of the town were in no way commanded from the heights, and the streets could not have been searched in the fashion that was imagined. But this, obvious in December, could not have been known in May[31]. The second alternative was to commence the attack on Gerona not from the easiest but from the most difficult side, by battering the lofty fort of Monjuich from the high plateau beside it. The defences here were very formidable: the ground was bare exposed rock: but if Monjuich were once captured it was calculated that the town must surrender, as it was completely overlooked by the fort, and had no further protection save its antiquated mediaeval wall. The deduction that it would be cheaper in the end to begin with the difficult task of taking Monjuich, rather than the easier operations against the Mercadal, seemed plausible: its fault was that it presupposed that Alvarez and his garrison would behave according to the accepted rules of siegecraft, and yield when their situation became hopeless. But in dealing with Spanish garrisons the rules of military logic did not always act. Alvarez essayed the impossible, and held out behind his defective defences for four months after Monjuich fell. The loss of men and time that he thereby inflicted on the French was certainly no less than that which would have been suffered if the besiegers had begun with the Mercadal, and worked upwards by incessant street fighting towards the forts on the height. But it is hard to say that Verdier erred: he did not know his adversary, and he did know, from his experiences at Saragossa, what street fighting meant.

It may be added that Verdier’s views were accepted by the engineer-general, Sanson, who had been specially sent from France by the Emperor, to give his opinion on the best mode of procedure. The document which Verdier, Sanson, and Taviel (the commanding artillery officer of the 7th Corps) sent to Paris, to justify their choice of the upper point of attack, lays stress mainly on the impossibility of advancing from the Mercadal under the fire of the upper forts[32]. But there were other reasons for selecting Monjuich as the point of attack. It lay far nearer to the road to France and the central siege-dépôts beside Sarria and the Pont Mayor. The approaches would be over highly defensible ground where, if a disaster occurred, the defeated assailant could easily recover himself and oppose a strong front to the enemy. The shortness of the front was suitable for an army of the moderate strength of 14,000 men, which had to deal with a fortress whose perimeter, allowing for outlying forts and inaccessible precipices, was some six miles. Moreover, the ground in front of the Mercadal had the serious inconvenience of being liable to inundation; summer spates on the Ter and Oña are rare, but occur from time to time; and there was the bare chance that when the trenches had been opened all might be swept away by the rivers[33].

Verdier’s opinion was arrived at after mature reflection: the French had appeared in front of Gerona on May 8: the outlying villages on the east had been occupied between the twelfth and eighteenth: Lecchi’s Italians had closed the western exits by occupying the plain of Salt on the twenty-fourth: the inner posts of observation of the Spaniards had been cleared off when, on May 30, the Italians seized the suburban village of Santa Eugenia, and on June 1 the Germans took possession of the mountain of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. But it was only on June 6 that the besiegers broke ground, and commenced their trenches and batteries on the plateau of Monjuich. It was necessary to make a beginning by subduing the outer defences of the fort, the towers or redoubts of San Luis, San Narciso, and San Daniel: two batteries of 24-pounders were constructed against them, while a third battery of mortars on the ‘Green Mound’ by the Casa den Roca on the west bank of the Ter, was to play upon the north end of the town: Verdier hoped that the bombardment would break the spirit of the citizens—little knowing the obstinate people with whom he had to deal. Five thousand bombs thrown into the place in June and July produced no effect whatever. More batteries on the heights were thrown up upon the 13th and 15th of June, while on the former day, to distract the attention of the Spaniards, Lecchi’s division, in the plain below, was ordered to open a false attack upon the Mercadal. This had good effect as a diversion, since Alvarez had expected an assault in this quarter, and the long line of trenches thrown up by the Italians in front of Santa Eugenia attracted much of his attention. Three days of battering greatly damaged San Luis and San Narciso, which were no more than round towers of masonry with ditches cut in the rock, and only two or three guns apiece. The French also took possession on the night of the fourteenth and fifteenth of the remains of the half-destroyed suburb of Pedret, between Monjuich and the Ter, as if about to establish themselves in a position from which they could attack the low-lying north gate of the town and the bastion of Santa Maria.

Hitherto the defence had seemed a little passive, but at dawn on the morning of the seventeenth Alvarez delivered the first of the many furious sallies which he made against the siege lines. A battalion of Ultonia rushed suddenly down-hill out of Monjuich and drove the French, who were taken completely by surprise, out of the ruins of Pedret. Aided by a smaller detachment, including the artificers of the Crusade, who came out of the Santa Maria gate, they destroyed all the works and lodgements of the besiegers in the suburb, and held it till they were driven out by two French and one Westphalian battalion sent up from Verdier’s reserves. The Spaniards were forced back into the town, but retired in good order, contented to have undone three days of the besiegers’ labour. They had lost 155 men, the French 128, in this sharp skirmish.

Two days later the towers of San Luis and San Narciso, which had been reduced to shapeless heaps of stone, were carried by assault, with a loss to the French of only 78 men; but an attempt to carry San Daniel by the same rush was beaten off, this redoubt being still in a tenable state. Its gorge, however, was completely commanded from the ruins of San Luis, and access to or exit from it was rendered so dangerous that Alvarez withdrew its garrison on the next night. The possession of these three outworks brought the French close up to Monjuich, which they could now attack from ground which was favourable in every respect, save that it was bare rock lacking soil. It was impossible to excavate in it, and all advances had to be made by building trenches (if the word is not a misnomer in this case) of sandbags and loose stones on the surface of the ground. The men working at the end of the sap were therefore completely exposed, and the work could only proceed at a great expense of life. Nevertheless the preparations advanced rapidly, and on the night of July 2 an enormous battery of sandbags (called the Batterie Impériale) was thrown up at a distance of only four hundred yards from Monjuich. Next morning it opened on the fort with twenty 16- and 24-pounders, and soon established a superiority over the fire of the defence. Several Spanish pieces were dismounted, others had to be removed because it was too deadly to serve them. But a steady fire was returned against the besiegers from the Constable and Calvary forts, on the other side of the Galligan ravine. Nevertheless Monjuich began to crumble, and it looked as if the end of the siege were already approaching. On July 3 there was a breach thirty-five feet broad in the fort’s north-eastern bastion, and the Spanish flag which floated over it was thrown down into the ditch by a chance shot. A young officer named Montorro climbed down, brought it up, and nailed it to a new flagstaff under the fire of twenty guns. Meanwhile long stretches of the parapet of Monjuich were ruined, the ditch was half-filled with débris, and the garrison could only protect themselves by hasty erections of gabions and sandbags, placed where the crest of the masonry had stood.

By this time St. Cyr and the covering army had abandoned the position in the plain of Vich which they had so long occupied. The general had, as it seems, convinced himself at last that Blake, who was still engaged in his unlucky Aragonese campaign, was not likely to appear. He therefore moved nearer to Gerona, in order to repress the efforts of the local somatenes, who were giving much trouble to Verdier’s communications. On June 20 he established his head quarters at Caldas de Malavella, some nine miles to the south-east of Gerona. That same evening one of his Italian brigades intercepted and captured a convoy of 1,200 oxen which the Governor of Hostalrich was trying to introduce into the beleaguered city along one of the mountain-paths which lead to the Capuchin heights from the coast. St. Cyr strung out his 14,000 men in a line from San Feliu de Guixols on the sea to the upper Ter, in a semicircle which covered all the approaches to Gerona saving those from the Ampurdam. He visited Verdier’s camp, inspected the siege operations, and expressed his opinion that an attack on the Mercadal front would have been preferable to that which had been actually chosen. But he washed his hands of all responsibility, told Verdier that, since he had chosen to correspond directly with Paris, he must take all the praise or blame resulting from his choice, and refused to countermand or to alter any of his subordinate’s dispositions. On July 2 however he sent, with some lack of logic, a summons of his own to Alvarez, inviting him to surrender on account of the desperate state of his defences: this he did without informing Verdier of his move. The Governor returned an indignant negative, and Verdier wrote in great wrath to complain that if the siege was his affair, as he had just been told, it was monstrous that his commander should correspond with the garrison without his knowledge[34]. The two generals were left on even worse terms than before. St. Cyr, however, gave real assistance to the siege operations at this time by storming, on July 5, the little fortified harbour-town of Palamos, which lies on the point of the sea-coast nearest to Gerona, and had been hitherto used by the miqueletes as a base from which they communicated by night with the fortress, and at the same time kept in touch with Tarragona and the English ships of the blockading squadron.

On the night of the 4th and 5th of July the defences of Monjuich appeared in such a ruinous condition that Commandant Fleury, the engineer officer in charge of the advanced parallel, took the extraordinary and unjustifiable step of assaulting them at 10 p.m. with the troops—two companies only—which lay under his orders, trusting that the whole of the guards of the trenches would follow if he made a lodgement. This presumptuous attack, made contrary to all the rules of military subordination, was beaten off with a loss of forty men. Its failure made Verdier determine to give the fort three days more of continuous bombardment, before attempting to storm it: the old batteries continued their fire, a new one was added to enfilade the north-western bastion, and cover was contrived at several points to shelter the troops which were to deliver the assault, till the actual moment of the storm arrived[35]. But three hundred yards of exposed ground still separated the front trenches from the breach—a distance far too great according to the rules of siegecraft. The Spaniards meanwhile, finding it impossible under such a fire to block the breach, which was now broad enough for fifty men abreast[36], threw up two walls of gabions on each side of it, sank a ditch filled with chevaux-de-frise in front of it, and loopholed some interior buildings of the fort, which bore upon its reverse side.

Monjuich, however, looked in a miserable state when, just before sunrise on July 7, Verdier launched his columns of assault upon it. He had collected for the purpose the grenadier and voltigeur companies of each of the twenty French, German, and Italian battalions of the besieging army, about 2,500 men in all[37]. They were divided into two columns, the larger of which went straight at the breach, while the smaller, which was furnished with ladders, was directed to escalade the left face of the demi-lune which covers the northern front of Monjuich. The troops passed with no great loss over the open space which divided them from the work, as its guns had all been silenced, and the fire from the more distant forts was ineffective in the dusk. But when they got within close musketry range they began to fall fast; the head of the main column, which was composed of some sapper companies and the Italian Velites of the Guard, got up on to the face of the breach, but could never break in. Every officer or man who reached the cutting and its chevaux-de-frise was shot down; the concentric fire of the defenders so swept the opening that nothing could live there. Meanwhile the rear of the column was brought to a stand, partly in, partly outside, the ditch. The Spaniards kept playing upon it with musketry and two or three small 2- and 4-pounders, which had been kept under cover and reserved for that purpose, firing canister into it at a distance of twenty or thirty yards. Flesh and blood could not bear this for long, and the whole mass broke and went to the rear. Verdier, who had come out to the Batterie Impériale to view the assault, had the men rallied and sent forward a second time: the head of the column again reached the breach, and again withered away: the supporting mass gave way at once, and fell back much more rapidly than on the first assault. Yet the General, most unwisely, insisted on a third attack, which, made feebly and without conviction, by men who knew that they were beaten, only served to increase the casualty list. Meanwhile the escalade of the demi-lune by the smaller column had been repelled with ease: the assailants barely succeeded in crossing the ditch and planting a few ladders against the scarp: no one survived who tried to mount them, and the troops drew off.

This bloody repulse cost the French 1,079 casualties, including seventy-seven officers killed or wounded—much more than a third of the troops engaged. It is clear, therefore, that it was not courage which had been lacking: nor could it be said that the enemy’s artillery fire had not been subdued, nor that the breach was insufficient, nor that the 300 yards of open ground crossed by the column had been a fatal obstacle; indeed, they had been passed with little loss. The mistake of Verdier had been that he attacked before the garrison was demoralized—the same error made by the English at Badajoz in 1811 and at San Sebastian in 1813. A broad breach by itself does not necessarily make a place untenable, if the spirit of the defenders is high, and if they are prepared with all the resources of the military art for resisting the stormers, as were the Geronese on July 7-8. The garrison lost, it may be remarked, only 123 men, out of a strength of 787 present in the fort that morning. The casualty list, however, was somewhat increased by the accidental explosion, apparently by a careless gunner, of the magazine of the tower of San Juan, alongside of the Galligan, which was destroyed with its little garrison of twenty-five men.

The repulse of the assault of Monjuich thoroughly demoralized the besieging army: the resistance of the Spaniards had been so fierce, the loss they had inflicted so heavy, that Verdier’s motley collection of French, German, Lombard, and Neapolitan regiments lost heart and confidence. Their low spirits were made manifest by the simultaneous outbreak of desertion and disease, the two inevitable marks of a decaying morale. All through the second half of July and August the hospitals grew gradually fuller, not only from sunstroke cases (which were frequent on the bare, hot, rocky ground of the heights), but from dysentery and malaria. The banks of the Ter always possessed a reputation for epidemics—twice in earlier centuries a French army had perished before the walls of Gerona by plagues, which the citizens piously attributed to their patron, San Narciso. It was mainly because he realized the depression of his troops that Verdier refrained from any more assaults, and went on from July 9 to August 4 battering Monjuich incessantly, while he cautiously pushed forward his trenches, till they actually reached the ditch of the demi-lune which covers the northern front of the fort. The garrison was absolutely overwhelmed by the incessant bombardment, which destroyed every piece of upstanding masonry, and prevented them from rebuilding anything that was demolished. They were forced to lurk in the casemates, and to burrow for shelter in the débris which filled the interior of the work. Three large breaches had been made at various points, yet Verdier would never risk another assault, till on August 4 his approaches actually crowned the lip of the ditch of the demi-lune, and his sappers had blown in its counterscarp. The ruined little outwork was then stormed with a loss of only forty men. This put the French in the possession of good cover only a few yards from the main body of the fort. Proceeding with the same caution as before, they made their advances against Monjuich by mining: on the night of the 8th–9th August no less than twenty-three mines under the glacis of the fort were exploded simultaneously. This left a gaping void in front of the original breach of July 7, and filled up the ditch with débris for many yards on either side: part of the interior of the fort was clearly visible from the besiegers’ trenches.

Only one resource for saving Monjuich remained to Alvarez—a sortie for the expulsion of the enemy from their advanced works. It was executed with great courage at midday on August 9, while at the same time separate demonstrations to distract the enemy were made at two other points. The column from Monjuich had considerable success; it stormed two advanced batteries, spiked their guns, and set fire to their gabions; the French were cleared out of many of their trenches, but made head behind one of the rear batteries, where they were joined by their reserves, who finally thrust back the sallying force into the fort. The damage done, though considerable, could be repaired in a day. Verdier gave orders for the storm of the dilapidated fort on the night of August 11, and borrowed a regiment from St. Cyr’s covering army to lead the assault, being still very doubtful of the temper of his own troops. But at six on the preceding afternoon an explosion was heard in Monjuich, and great part of its battered walls flew up into the air. The Spaniards had quietly evacuated it a few minutes before, after preparing mines for its demolition. The French, when they entered, found nothing but a shapeless mass of stones and eighteen disabled cannon. The garrison had lost, in the sixty-five days of its defence, 962 men killed and wounded; the besiegers had, first and last, suffered something like three times this loss.

While the bombardment of Monjuich was going on, the Spanish generals outside the fortress had at last begun to make serious efforts for its assistance. Not only had the somatenes redoubled their activity against Verdier’s convoys, and several times succeeded in destroying them or turning them back, but Coupigny had at last begun to move, for he saw that since Blake’s rout at Belchite on June 18 he, and he alone, possessed an organized body of troops on this side of Spain, small though it was. Unable to face St. Cyr in the field, he tried at least to throw succours into Gerona by the mountain paths from the south, if he could do no more. The first attempt was disastrous: three battalions started from Hostalrich under an English adventurer, Ralph Marshall, whom Alvarez had suggested for the command of this expedition. They evaded the first line of the covering army, but at Castellar, on July 10, ran into the very centre of Pino’s division, which had concentrated from all sides for their destruction. Marshall escaped into Gerona with no more than twelve men: 40 officers and 878 rank and file laid down their arms; the rest of the column, some 600 or 700 men, evaded surrender by dispersion[38].

Equally disastrous, though on a smaller scale, was another attempt made on August 4 by a party of 300 miqueletes to enter Gerona: they eluded St. Cyr, but on arriving at the entry of the Galligan, close under the forts, made the unfortunate mistake of entering the convent of San Daniel, which the garrison had been compelled to evacuate a few days before. It was now in the French lines, and the Catalans were all taken prisoners. It was not till August 17, six days after the fall of Monjuich, that Alvarez obtained his first feeble reinforcement: the miquelete battalion of Cervera, with a draft for that of Vich already in the garrison, altogether 800 bayonets, got into the city on the west side, by eluding Lecchi’s Italians in the plain and fording the Ter. They were much needed, for Alvarez was complaining to the Catalan Junta that he had now only 1,500 able-bodied men left of his original 5,000[39].

Verdier had written to his master, after the capture of Monjuich, to announce that Gerona must infallibly surrender within eight or ten days[40], now that it had nothing but an antiquated mediaeval wall to oppose to his cannon. So far, however, was he from being a true prophet that, as a matter of fact, the second and longer episode of the siege, which was to be protracted far into the winter, had only just begun.

SECTION XVII: CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF GERONA. AUGUST–DECEMBER, 1809

When Monjuich had been evacuated, the position of Gerona was undoubtedly perilous: of the two mountain summits which command the city one was now entirely in the hands of the French; for not only the great fort itself but several of the smaller works above the ravine of the Galligan—such as the fortified convent of San Daniel and the ruined tower of San Juan—had been lost. The front exposed to attack now consisted of the northern section of the old city wall, from the bastion of Santa Maria at the water’s edge, to the tower of La Gironella, which forms the north-eastern angle of the place, and lies further up the slope of the Capuchin heights than any other portion of the enceinte. The space between these two points was simply covered by a mediaeval wall set with small round towers: neither the towers nor the curtain between them had been built to hold artillery. Indeed the only spots on this front where guns had been placed were (1) the comparatively modern bastion of Santa Maria, (2) a work erected under and about the Gironella, and called the ‘Redoubt of the Germans,’ and (3, 4) two parts of the wall called the platforms[41] of San Pedro and San Cristobal, which had been widened till they could carry a few heavy guns. On the rest of the enceinte, owing to its narrowness, nothing but wall-pieces and two-pounders could be mounted. The parts of the curtain most exposed to attack were the sections named Santa Lucia, San Pedro, San Cristobal, and Las Sarracinas, from churches or quarters which lay close behind them. With nothing but an antiquated wall, seven to nine feet thick, thirty feet high, and destitute of a ditch, it seemed that this side of Gerona was doomed to destruction within a few days.

But there were points in the position which rendered the attack more difficult than might have been expected. The first was that any approaches directed against this front would be exposed to a flanking fire from the forts on the Capuchin heights, especially from the Calvary and Chapter redoubts. The second was that the greater part of the weak sections of the wall were within a re-entering angle; for the tower of Santa Lucia and the ‘Redoubt of the Germans’ by the Gironella project, and the curtains between them are in a receding sweep of the enceinte. Attacks on these ill-fortified sections would be outflanked and enfiladed by the two stronger works. The only exposed part of the curtain was that called Santa Lucia, running from the tower of that name down to the bastion of Santa Maria. Lastly, the parallels which the French might construct from their base on Monjuich would have to be built on a down slope, overlooked by loftier ground, and when they reached the foot of the walls they would be in a sort of gulley or bottom, into which the defenders of the city could look down from above. The only point from which the north end of Gerona could be approached from flat ground and without disadvantages of slope, is the short front of less than 200 yards breadth between the foot of Monjuich and the bank of the Ter. Here, in the ruins of the suburb of Pedret, there was plenty of cover, a soil easy to work, and a level terrain as far as the foot of the Santa Maria bastion. The engineers of the besieging army selected three sections of wall as their objective. The first was the ‘Redoubt of the Germans’ and the tower of La Gironella, the highest and most commanding works in this part of the enceinte: once established in these, they could overlook and dominate the whole city. The other points of attack were chosen for the opposite reason—because they were intrinsically weak in themselves, not because they were important or dominating parts of the defences. The curtain of Santa Lucia in particular seemed to invite attack, as being in a salient angle, unprotected by flanking fire, and destitute of any artillery of its own.

Verdier, therefore, on the advice of his engineers, set to work to attack these points of the enceinte between La Gironella and Santa Maria. New batteries erected amid the ruins of Monjuich were levelled against them, in addition to such of the older batteries as could still be utilized. On the front by Pedret also, where nothing had hitherto been done, works were prepared for guns to be directed against Santa Maria and Santa Lucia. Meanwhile a perpetual bombardment with shell was kept up, against the whole quarter of the town that lay behind the selected points of attack. Mortars were always playing, not only from the Monjuich heights but from two batteries erected on the so-called ‘Green Mound’ in the plain beyond the river Ter. Their effect was terrible: almost every house in the northern quarter of Gerona was unroofed or destroyed: the population had to take refuge in cellars, where, after a few days, they began to die fast—all the more so that food was just beginning to run short as August advanced. From the 14th to the 30th of that month Verdier’s attack was developing itself: by its last day four breaches had been established: one, about forty feet broad, in the curtain of St. Lucia, two close together in the works at La Gironella[42], the fourth and smallest in the platform of San Cristobal. But the approaches were still far from the foot of the wall, the fire of the outlying Spanish works, especially the Calvary fort, was unsubdued, and though the guns along the attacked front had all been silenced, the French artillery had paid dearly both in lives and in material for the advantage they had gained. Moreover sickness was making dreadful ravages in the ranks of the besieging army. The malarious pestilence on which the Spaniards had relied had appeared, after a sudden and heavy rainfall had raised the Ter and Oña beyond their banks, and inundated the whole plain of Salt. By malaria, dysentery and sunstroke Verdier had lost 5,000 men, in addition to his casualties in the siege. Many of them were convalescents in the hospitals of Perpignan and Figueras, but it was hard to get them back to the front; the somatenes made the roads impassable for small detachments, and the officers on the line of communication, being very short of men, were given to detaining drafts that reached them on their way to Gerona[43]. Hence Verdier, including his artillerymen and sappers, had less than 10,000 men left for the siege, and these much discouraged by its interminable length, short of officers, and sickly. This was not enough to guard a periphery of six miles, and messengers were continually slipping in or out of Gerona, between the widely scattered camps of the French.

On August 31 a new phase of the siege began. In response to the constant appeals of Alvarez to the Catalan Junta, and the consequent complaints of the Junta alike to the Captain-General Blake, and to the central government at Seville, something was at last about to be done to relieve Gerona. The supreme Central Junta, in reply to a formal representation of the Catalans dated August 16[44], had sent Blake 6,000,000 reals in cash, and a peremptory order to march on Gerona whatever the state of his army might be, authorizing him to call out all the somatenes of the province in his aid. The general, who had at last returned to Tarragona, obeyed, though entirely lacking confidence in his means of success; and on the thirty-first his advance guard was skirmishing with St. Cyr’s covering army on the heights to the south of the Ter.

Blake’s army, it will be remembered, had been completely routed at Belchite by Suchet on June 18. The wrecks of his Aragonese division had gradually rallied at Tortosa, those of his Valencian divisions at Morella: but even by the end of July he had only a few thousand men collected, and he had lost every gun of his artillery. For many weeks he could do nothing but press the Junta of Valencia to fill the depleted ranks of his regiments with recruits, to reconstitute his train, and to provide him with new cannon. Aragon had been lost—nothing could be drawn from thence: Catalonia, distracted by Suchet’s demonstration on its western flank, did not do as much as might have been expected in its own defence. The Junta was inclined to favour the employment of miqueletes and somatenes, and to undervalue the troops of the line: it forgot that the irregulars, though they did admirable work in harassing the enemy, could not be relied upon to operate in large masses or strike a decisive blow. Still, the regiments at Tarragona, Lerida, and elsewhere had been somewhat recruited before August was out.

Blake’s field army was composed of some 14,000 men: there were five Valencian regiments—those which had been least mishandled in the campaign of Aragon—with the relics of six of the battalions which Reding had brought from Granada in 1808[45], two of Lazan’s old Aragonese corps, and five or six of the regiments which had formed the original garrison of Catalonia. The battalions were very weak—it took twenty-four of them to make up 13,000 infantry: of cavalry there were only four squadrons, of artillery only two batteries. Those of the rank and file who were not raw recruits were the vanquished of Molins de Rey and Valls, or of Maria and Belchite. They had no great confidence in Blake, and he had still less in them. Despite the orders received from Seville, which bade him risk all for the relief of Gerona, he was determined not to fight another pitched battle. The memories of Belchite were too recent to be forgotten. Though much obloquy has been poured upon his head for this resolve, he was probably wise in his decision. St. Cyr had still some 12,000 men in his covering army, who had taken no share in the siege: their morale was intact, and they had felt little fatigue or privation. They could be, and were in fact, reinforced by 4,000 men from Verdier’s force when the stress came. Blake, therefore, was, so far as regular troops went, outnumbered by the French, especially in cavalry and artillery. He could not trust in time of battle the miqueletes, of whom some 4,000 or 5,000 from the Ampurdam and Central Catalonia came to join him. He thought that it might be possible to elude or outflank St. Cyr, to lure him to divide his forces into scattered bodies by threatening many points at once, or, on the other hand, to induce him to concentrate on one short front, and so to leave some of the exits of Gerona open. But a battle with the united French army he would not risk under any conditions.

St. Cyr, however, was too wary for his opponent: he wanted to fight at all costs, and he was prepared to risk a disturbance of the siege operations, if he could catch Blake in the open and bring him to action. The moment that pressure on his outposts, by regular troops coming from the south, was reported, he drew together Souham’s and Pino’s divisions on the short line between San Dalmay on the right and Casa de Selva on the left, across the high road from Barcelona. At the same time he sent stringent orders to Verdier to abandon the unimportant sections of his line of investment, and to come to reinforce the field army at the head of his French division, which still counted 4,000 bayonets. Verdier accordingly marched to join his chief, leaving Lecchi’s Italians—now little more than 2,000 strong—to watch the west side of Gerona, and handing over the charge of the works on Monjuich, the new approaches, and the park at Pont Mayor, to the Westphalians. He abandoned all the outlying posts on the heights, even the convent of San Daniel, the village of Campdura, and the peak of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. Only 4,600 infantry and 2,000 gunners and sappers were left facing the garrison: but Alvarez was too weak to drive off even such a small force.

On September 1 Blake ostentatiously displayed the heads of his columns in front of St. Cyr’s position; but while the French general was eagerly awaiting his attack, and preparing his counter-stroke, the Spaniard’s game was being played out in another quarter. While Rovira and Claros with their miqueletes made noisy demonstration from the north against the Westphalians, and threatened the park and the camp at Sarria, Blake had detached one of his divisions, that of Garcia Conde, some 4,000 strong, far to the left beyond St. Cyr’s flank: this corps had with it a convoy of more than a thousand mules laden with provisions, and a herd of cattle. It completely escaped the notice of the French, and marching from Amer at break of day came down into the plain of Salt at noon, far in the rear of St. Cyr’s army. Garcia Conde had the depleted Italian division of the siege corps in front of him: one of the brigadiers, the Pole Milosewitz, was in command that day, Lecchi being in hospital. This small force, which vainly believed itself covered from attack by St. Cyr’s corps, had kept no look-out to the rear, being wholly intent on watching the garrison. It was surprised by the Spanish column, cut into two halves, and routed. Garcia Conde entered the Mercadal in triumph with his convoy, and St. Cyr first learnt what had occurred when he saw the broken remnants of the Italians pouring into the rear of his own line at Fornells.

That night Gerona was free of enemies on its southern and eastern sides, and Alvarez communicated freely with Rovira’s and Claros’s irregulars, who had forced in the Westphalian division and compelled it to concentrate in Monjuich and the camp by the great park near Sarria. The garrison reoccupied the ruined convent of San Daniel by the Galligan, and placed a strong party in the hermitage on the peak of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. It also destroyed all the advanced trenches on the slopes of Monjuich. On the next morning, however, it began to appreciate the fact that the siege had not been raised. St. Cyr sent back Verdier’s division to rejoin the Westphalians, and with them the wrecks of Lecchi’s routed battalions. He added to the force under Verdier half Pino’s Italian division—six fresh battalions. With these reinforcements the old siege-lines could be reoccupied, and the Spaniards were forced back from the points outside the walls which they had reoccupied on the night of September 1.

By sending away such a large proportion of the 16,000 men that he had concentrated for battle on the previous day, St. Cyr left himself only some 10,000 men for a general action with Blake, if the latter should resolve to fight. But the Spanish general, being without Garcia Conde’s division, had also no more than 10,000 men in line. Not only did he refuse to advance, but when St. Cyr, determined to fight at all costs, marched against him with offensive intentions, he hastily retreated as far as Hostalrich, two marches to the rear. There he broke up his army, which had exhausted all its provisions. St. Cyr did the same and for the same reasons; his men had to disperse in order to live. He says in his memoirs that if Blake had shown a bold front against him, and forced him to keep the covering army concentrated for two more days, the siege would have had to be raised. For the covering army had advanced against the Spaniards on September 2 with only two days’ rations, it had exhausted its stores, and eaten up the country-side. On the fourth it would have had to retire, or to break up into small fractions, leaving the siege-corps unprotected. St. Cyr doubted whether the retreat would have ceased before Figueras was reached. But it is more probable that he would have merely fallen back to join Verdier, and to live for some days on the dépôts of Pont Mayor and Sarria. He could have offered battle again under the walls of Gerona, with all his forces united. Blake might have got into close touch with Alvarez, and have thrown what convoys he pleased into the town; but as long as St. Cyr and Verdier with 22,000 men lay opposite him, he could not have risked any more. The situation, in short, would have been that which occurred in February 1811 under the walls of Badajoz, when Mortier faced Mendizabal, and would probably have ended in the same fashion, by the French attacking and driving off the relieving army. Blake, then, may be blamed somewhat for his excessive caution in giving way so rapidly before St. Cyr’s advance: but if we remember the quality of his troops and the inevitable result of a battle, it is hard to censure him overmuch.

Meanwhile Garcia Conde, whose movements were most happy and adroit, reinforced the garrison of Gerona up to its original strength of 5,000 bayonets, by making over to Alvarez four whole battalions and some picked companies from other corps, and prepared to leave the town with the rest of his division and the vast drove of mules, whose burden had been discharged into the magazines. If he had dedicated his whole force to strengthening the garrison, the additional troops would have eaten up in a few days all the provisions that the convoy had brought in[46]. Accordingly he started off at two a.m. on September 4 with some 1,200 men, by the upland path that leads past the hermitage of Los Angeles: St. Cyr had just placed Pino’s troops from the covering army to guard the heights to the south-east of Gerona, but Garcia Conde, warned by the peasants of their exact position, slipped between the posts and got off to Hostalrich with a loss of no more than fifty men[47].

Before he could consider his position safe, Verdier had to complete the lines of investment: this he did on September 5 by driving off the intermediate posts which Alvarez had thrown out from the Capuchin heights, to link the town with the garrison in the hermitage of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. Mazzuchelli’s brigade stormed the hermitage itself on the following day, with a loss of about eighty men, and massacred the greater part of the garrison. On that same day, however, the French suffered a small disaster in another part of the environs. General Joba, who had been sent with three battalions to clear the road to Figueras from the bands of Claros and Rovira, was beaten and slain at San Gregorio by those chiefs. But the miqueletes afterwards retired to the mountains, and the road became intermittently passable, at least for large bodies of men.

It was not till September 11, however, that Verdier recommenced the actual siege, and bade his batteries open once more upon Gerona. The eleven days of respite since Blake interrupted the bombardment on September 1 had been invaluable to the garrison, who had cleared away the débris from the foot of the breaches, replaced the damaged artillery on the front of attack, and thrown up interior defences behind the shattered parts of the wall. They had also destroyed all the advanced trenches of the besiegers, which had to be reconstructed at much cost of life. In four days Verdier had recovered most of the lost ground, when he was surprised by a vigorous sally from the gate of San Pedro: the garrison, dashing out at three p.m., stormed the three nearest breaching batteries, spiked their guns, and filled in all the trenches which were advancing towards the foot of the walls. Four days’ work was thus undone in an hour, and it was only on September 19 that Verdier had reconstructed his works, and pushed forward so far towards his objective that he considered an assault possible. He then begged St. Cyr to lend him a brigade of fresh troops, pleading that the siege-corps was now so weak in numbers, and so demoralized by its losses, that he did not consider that the men would do themselves justice at a storm. The losses of officers had been fearful: one battalion was commanded by a lieutenant, another had been reduced to fifty men; desertion was rampant among several of the foreign corps. Of 14,000 infantry[48] of the French, Westphalian, and Italian divisions less than 6,000 now remained. So far as mere siegecraft went, as he explained to St. Cyr, ‘the affair might be considered at an end. We have made four large practicable breaches, each of them sufficient to reduce the town. But the troops cannot be trusted.’ St. Cyr refused to lend a man for the assault, writing with polite irony that ‘every general has his own task: yours is to take Gerona with the resources placed at your disposal by the government for that object, and the officers named by the government to conduct the siege[49].’ He added that he considered, from its past conduct, that the morale of the siege-corps was rather good than bad. He should not, therefore, allow the covering army to join the assault; but he would lend the whole of Pino’s division to take charge of Monjuich and the camps, during the storm, and would make a demonstration against the Mercadal, to distract the enemy from the breaches. With this Verdier had to be content, and, after making two final protests, concentrated all his brigades save those of the Westphalian division, and composed with them four columns, amounting to some 3,000 men, directing one against each of the four breaches. That sent against the platform of San Cristobal was a mere demonstration of 150 men, but the other three were heavy masses: the Italians went against Santa Lucia, the French brigade against the southern breach in the ‘Redoubt of the Germans,’ the Berg troops against the northern one. A separate demonstration was made against the Calvary fort, whose unsubdued fire still flanked the breaches, in the hope that its defenders might be prevented from interfering in the main struggle.

Alvarez, who had noted the French columns marching from all quarters to take shelter, before the assault, in the trenches on the slopes of Monjuich and in front of Pedret, had fair warning of what was coming, and had done his best to provide against the danger. The less important parts of the enceinte had been put in charge of the citizens of the ‘Crusade,’ and the picked companies of every regiment had been told off the breaches. The Englishman, Ralph Marshall, was in charge of the curtain of Santa Lucia, William Nash, the Spanish-Irish colonel of Ultonia, commanded at the two breaches under La Gironella: Brigadier Fournas, the second-in-command of the garrison, had general supervision of the defences; he had previously taken charge of Monjuich during the great assault in August. Everything had been done to prepare a second line of resistance behind the breaches; barricades had been erected, houses loopholed, and a great many marksmen disposed on roofs and church towers, which looked down on the rear-side of the gaps in the wall.

At four o’clock in the afternoon of September 19 the three columns destined for the northern breaches descended from Monjuich on the side of San Daniel, crossed the Galligan, and plunged into the hollow at the foot of the ‘Redoubt of the Germans.’ At the same moment the fourth column started from the ruins of the tower of San Juan to attack the curtain of Santa Lucia. The diversion against the Calvary fort was made at the same moment, and beaten off in a few minutes, so that the fire of this work was not neutralized during the assault according to Verdier’s expectation. The main assault, nevertheless, was delivered with great energy, despite the flanking fire. At the two points of attack under La Gironella the stormers twice won, crossed, and descended from the breach, forcing their way into the ruined barracks behind. But they were mown down by the terrible musketry fire from the houses, and finally expelled with the bayonet. At the Santa Lucia curtain the Italians scaled the breach, but were brought up by a perpendicular drop of twelve feet behind it—the foot of the wall in this quarter chancing to be much higher than the level of the street below. They held the crest of the breach for some time, but were finally worsted in a long and furious exchange of fire with the Spaniards on the roofs and churches before them, and recoiled. The few surviving officers rallied the stormers, and brought them up for a second assault, but at the end of two hours of hard fighting all were constrained to retire to their trenches. They had lost 624 killed and wounded, including three colonels (the only three surviving in the whole of Verdier’s corps) and thirty other officers. The Spanish loss had been 251, among them Colonel Marshall, who was mortally wounded at his post on the Santa Lucia front.

Verdier accused his troops of cowardice, which seems to have been unjust. St. Cyr wrote to the Minister of War to express his opinion that his subordinate was making an excuse to cover his own error, in judging that a town must fall merely because there were large breaches in its walls[50]. ‘The columns stopped for ninety minutes on the breaches under as heavy a fire as has ever been seen. There was some disorder at the end, but that is not astonishing in view of the heavy loss suffered before the retreat. I do not think that picked grenadiers would have done any better, and I am convinced that the assault failed because the obstacles to surmount were too great.’ The fact was that the Spaniards had fought with such admirable obstinacy, and had so well arranged their inner defences, that it did not suffice that the breaches should have been perfectly practicable. At the northern assault the stormers actually penetrated into the buildings behind the gaps in the ruined wall, but could not get further forward[51]. In short, the history of the siege of Gerona gives a clear corroboration of the old military axiom that no town should ever surrender merely because it has been breached, and justifies Napoleon’s order that every governor who capitulated without having stood at least one assault should be sent before a court martial. It refutes the excuses of the too numerous commanders who have surrendered merely because there was a practicable breach in their walls, like Imaz at Badajoz in 1811. If all Spanish generals had been as wary and as resolute as Mariano Alvarez, the Peninsular War would have taken some unexpected turns. The moral of the defences of Tarifa, Burgos, and San Sebastian will be found to be the same as that of the defence of Gerona.

The effect of the repulse of September 19 on the besieging army was appalling. Verdier, after writing three venomous letters to the Emperor, the War Minister, and Marshal Augereau[52], in which he accused St. Cyr of having deliberately sacrificed the good of the service to his personal resentments, declared himself invalided. He then went off to Perpignan, though permission to depart was expressly denied him by his superior: his divisional generals, Lecchi and Morio, had already preceded him to France. Disgust at the failure of the storm had the same effect on the rank and file: 1,200 men went to the hospital in the fortnight that followed the assault, till by October 1 the three divisions of the siege-corps numbered little more than 4,000 bayonets—just enough to hold Monjuich and the camps by the great dépôts at Pont Mayor and Sarria. The store of ammunition in the park had been used up for the tremendous bombardment poured upon the breaches from the 15th to the 17th of September. A new supply was wanted from Perpignan, yet no troops could be detached to bring it forward, for the miqueletes were again active, and on September 13 had captured or destroyed near Bascara a convoy guarded by so many as 500 men.

St. Cyr, left in sole charge of the siege by Verdier’s departure, came to the conclusion that it was useless to proceed with the attack by means of trenches, batteries, and assaults, and frankly stated that he should starve the town out, but waste no further lives on active operations. He drew in the covering corps closer to Gerona, so that it could take a practical part in the investment, put the wrecks of Lecchi’s troops—of whom less than 1,000 survived—into Pino’s division, and sent the French brigade of Verdier’s old division to guard the line between Bascara and the Frontier. Thus the distinction between the siege-corps and the covering troops ceased to exist, and St. Cyr lay with some 16,000 men in a loose circle round Gerona, intent not on prosecuting advances against the walls, but only on preventing the introduction of further succours. He was aware that acute privations were already being suffered by the Spaniards: Garcia Conde’s convoy had brought in not much more than eight days’ provisions for the 5,000 men of the reinforced garrison and the 10,000 inhabitants who still survived. There was a considerable amount of flour still left in store, but little else: meat, salt and fresh, was all gone save horseflesh, for Alvarez had just begun to butcher his draught horses and those of his single squadron of cavalry. There was some small store of chocolate, tobacco, and coffee, but wine and aguardiente had run out, so had salt, oil, rice, and—what was most serious with autumn and winter approaching—wood and charcoal. All the timbers of the houses destroyed by the bombardment had been promptly used up, either for fortification or for cooking[53]. Medical stores were wholly unobtainable: the chief hospital had been burnt early in the siege, and the sick and wounded, laid in vaults or casemates for safety, died off like flies in the underground air. The seeds of pestilence were spread by the number of dead bodies of men and animals which were lying where they could not be reached, under the ruins of fallen houses. The spirit alike of garrison and troops still ran high: the repulse of the great assault of September 19, and the cessation of the bombardment for many days after had encouraged them. But they were beginning to murmur more and more bitterly against Blake: there was a general, if erroneous, opinion that he ought to have risked a battle, instead of merely throwing in provisions, on September 1. Alvarez himself shared this view, and wrote in vigorous terms to the Junta of Catalonia, to ask if his garrison was to perish slowly by famine.

Blake responded by a second effort, less happily planned than that of September 1. He called together his scattered divisions, now about 12,000 strong, and secretly concentrated them at La Bispal, between Gerona and the sea. He had again got together some 1,200 mules laden with foodstuffs, and a large drove of sheep and oxen. Henry O’Donnell, an officer of the Ultonia regiment, who had been sent out by Alvarez, marched at the head of the convoy with 2,000 picked men; a division of 4,000 men under General Wimpfen followed close behind to cover its rear. Blake, with the rest, remained at La Bispal: he committed the egregious fault of omitting to threaten other parts of the line of investment, so as to draw off St. Cyr’s attention from the crucial point. He trusted to secrecy and sudden action, having succeeded in concentrating his army without being discovered by the French, who thought him still far away beyond Hostalrich. Thus it came to pass that though O’Donnell struck sharply in, defeated an Italian regiment near Castellar, and another three miles further on, and reached the Constable fort with the head of the convoy, yet the rest of Pino’s division and part of Souham’s concentrated upon his flank and rear, because they were not drawn off by alarms in other quarters. They broke in between O’Donnell and his supports, captured all the convoy save 170 mules, and destroyed the leading regiment of Wimpfen’s column, shooting also, according to the Spanish reports, many scores of the unarmed peasants who were driving the beasts of burden[54]. About 700 of Wimpfen’s men were taken prisoners, about 1,300 killed or wounded, for little quarter was given. The remnant recoiled upon Blake, who fell back to Hostalrich next day, September 27, without offering to fight. The amount of food which reached the garrison was trifling, and Alvarez declared that he had no need for the additional mouths of O’Donnell’s four battalions, and refused to admit them into the city. They lay encamped under the Capuchin fort for some days, waiting for an opportunity to escape.

After having thus wrecked Blake’s second attempt to succour Gerona, and driven him from the neighbourhood, St. Cyr betook himself to Perpignan, in order, as he explained to the Minister of War[55], to hurry up provisions to the army at the front, and to compel the officers at the base to send forward some 3,000 or 4,000 convalescents fit to march, whose services had been persistently denied him[56]. Arrived there he heard that Augereau, whose gout had long disappeared, was perfectly fit to take the field, and could have done so long before if he had not preferred to shift on to other shoulders the responsibility for the siege of Gerona. He was, on October 1, at the baths of Molitg, ‘destroying the germs of his malady’ as he gravely wrote to Paris,—amusing himself, as St. Cyr maintains in his memoirs. Convinced that the siege had still a long time to run, and eager to do an ill turn to the officer who had intrigued to get his place, St. Cyr played on the Marshal precisely the same trick that Verdier had played on himself a fortnight before. He announced that he was indisposed, wrote to congratulate Augereau on his convalescence, and to resign the command to his hands, and departed to his home, without waiting for an answer, or obtaining leave from Paris—a daring act, as Napoleon was enraged, and might have treated him hardly. He was indeed put under arrest for a short time.

From the first to the eleventh of October Souham remained in charge of the army, but on the twelfth Augereau appeared and took command, bringing with him the mass of convalescents who had been lingering at Perpignan. Among them was Verdier, whose health became all that could be desired when St. Cyr had disappeared. The night following the Marshal’s arrival was disturbed by an exciting incident. Henry O’Donnell from his refuge on the Capuchin heights, had been watching for a fortnight for a good chance of escape. There was a dense fog on the night of the 12th-13th: taking advantage of it O’Donnell came down with his brigade, made a circuit round the town, crossed the Oña and struck straight away into the plain of Salt, which, being the most open and exposed, was also the least guarded section of the French lines of investment. He broke through the chain of vedettes almost without firing, and came rushing before dawn into Souham’s head-quarters camp on the heights of Aguaviva. The battalion sleeping there was scattered, and the general forced to fly in his shirt. O’Donnell swept off his riding-horses and baggage, as also some prisoners, and was out of reach in half an hour, before the rallying fractions of the French division came up to the rescue of their chief. By six o’clock the escaping column was in safety in the mountains by Santa Coloma, where it joined the miqueletes of Milans. For this daring exploit O’Donnell was made a major-general by the Supreme Junta. His departure was a great relief to Alvarez, who had to husband every mouthful of food, and had already put both the garrison and the townsfolk on half-rations of flour and horseflesh.

Augereau was in every way inferior as an officer to St. Cyr. An old soldier of fortune risen from the ranks, he had little education or military science; his one virtue was headlong courage on the battlefield, yet when placed in supreme command he often hesitated, and showed hopeless indecision. He had been lucky enough to earn a great reputation as Napoleon’s second-in-command in the old campaigns of Italy in 1796-7. Since then he had made his fortune by becoming one of the Emperor’s most zealous tools and flatterers. He was reckoned a blind and reckless Bonapartist, ready to risk anything for his master, but spoilt his reputation for sincerity by deserting him at the first opportunity in 1814. He was inclined to a harsh interpretation of the laws of war, and enjoyed a doubtful reputation for financial integrity. Yet he was prone to ridiculous self-laudatory proclamations and manifestos, written in a bombastic strain which he vainly imagined to resemble his master’s thunders of the Bulletins. Scraps of his address to the citizens of Gerona may serve to display his fatuity—

‘Unhappy inhabitants—wretched victims immolated to the caprice and madness of ambitious men greedy for your blood—return to your senses, open your eyes, consider the ills which surround you! With what tranquillity do your leaders look upon the graves crammed with your corpses! Are you not horror-struck at these cannibals, whose mirth bursts out in the midst of the human hecatomb, and who yet dare to lift their gory hands in prayer towards the throne of a God of Peace? They call themselves the apostles of Jesus Christ! Tremble, cruel and infamous men! The God who judges the actions of mortals is slow to condemn, but his vengeance is terrible.... I warn you for the last time, inhabitants of Gerona, reflect while you still may! If you force me to throw aside my usual mildness, your ruin is inevitable. I shall be the first to groan at it, but the laws of war impose on me the dire necessity.... I am severe but just. Unhappy Gerona! if thy defenders persist in their obstinacy, thou shalt perish in blood and flame.

(Signed) Augereau.’

Stuff of this sort was not likely to have much effect on fanatics like Alvarez and his ‘Crusaders.’ If it is so wrong to cause the deaths of men—they had only to answer—Why has Bonaparte sent his legions into Spain? On the Marshal’s line of argument, that it is wrong to resist overwhelming force, it is apparently a sin before God for any man to attempt to defend his house and family against any bandit. There is much odious and hypocritical nonsense in some of Napoleon’s bulletins, where he grows tender on the miseries of the people he has conquered, but nothing to approach the maunderings of his copyist.

Augereau found the army about Gerona showing not more than 12,000 bayonets fit for the field—gunners and sappers excluded. The men were sick of the siege, and it would seem that the Marshal was forced, after inspecting the regiments and conferring with the generals, to acquiesce in St. Cyr’s decision that any further assaults would probably lead to more repulses. He gave out that he was resolved to change the system on which the operations had hitherto been conducted, but the change amounted to nothing more than that he ordered a slow but steady bombardment to be kept up, and occasionally vexed the Spaniards by demonstrations against the more exposed points of the wall. It does not appear that either of these expedients had the least effect in shaking the morale of the garrison. It is true that during October and November the hearts of the Geronese were commencing to grow sick, but this was solely the result of starvation and dwindling numbers. As to the bombardment, they were now hardened to any amount of dropping fire: on October 28 they celebrated the feast of San Narciso, their patron, by a procession all round the town, which was under fire for the whole time of its progress, and paid no attention to the casualties which it cost them.

Meanwhile, when the second half of October had begun, Blake made the third and last of his attempts to throw succours into Gerona. It was even more feebly carried out than that of September 26, for the army employed was less numerous. Blake’s force had not received any reinforcement to make up for the men lost in the last affair, a fact that seems surprising, since Valencia ought now to have been able to send him the remainder of the regiments which had been reorganized since the disasters of June. But it would seem that José Caro, who was in command in that province, and the local Junta, made excuses for retaining as many men as possible, and cared little for the danger of Gerona, so long as the war was kept far from their own frontier. It was, at any rate, with no more than 10,000 or 12,000 men, the remains of his original force, that Blake once more came forward on October 18, and threatened the blockading army by demonstrations both from the side of La Bispal and that of Santa Coloma. He had again collected a considerable amount of food at Hostalrich, but had not yet formed a convoy: apparently he was waiting to discover the weakest point in the French lines before risking his mules and his stores, both of which were by now very hard to procure. There followed a fortnight of confused skirmishing, without any battle, though Augereau tried with all his might to force on a general engagement. One of his Italian brigades was roughly handled near La Bispal on the twenty-first, and another repulsed near Santa Coloma on the twenty-sixth, but on each occasion, when the French reinforcements came up, Blake gave back and refused to fight. On November 1 the whole of Souham’s division marched on Santa Coloma, and forced Loygorri and Henry O’Donnell to evacuate it and retire to the mountains. Souham reported that he had inflicted a loss of 2,000 men on the Spaniards, at the cost of eleven killed and forty-three wounded on his own side! The real casualty list of the two Spanish divisions seems to have been somewhat over 100 men[57].

Nothing decisive had taken place up to November 7, when Augereau conceived the idea that he might make an end of Blake’s fruitless but vexatious demonstrations, by dealing a sudden blow at his magazines in Hostalrich. If these were destroyed it would cost the Spaniards much time to collect another store of provisions for Gerona. Accordingly Pino marched with three brigades to storm the town, which was protected only by a dilapidated mediaeval wall unfurnished with guns, though the castle which dominated it was a place of considerable strength, and proof against a coup de main. Only one of Blake’s divisions, that of Cuadrado, less than 2,000 strong, was in this quarter, and Augereau found employment for the others by sending some of Souham’s troops against them. The expedition succeeded: while Mazzuchelli’s brigade occupied the attention of Cuadrado, the rest of the Italians stormed Hostalrich, which was defended only by its own inhabitants and the small garrison of the castle. The Spaniards were driven up into that stronghold after a lively fight, and all the magazines fell into Pino’s hands and were burnt. At a cost of only thirty-five killed and sixty-four wounded the food, which Blake had collected with so much difficulty, was destroyed[58]. Thereupon the Spanish general gave up the attempt to succour Gerona, and withdrew to the plain of Vich, to recommence the Sisyphean task of getting together one more convoy. It was not destined to be of any use to Alvarez and his gallant garrison, for by the time that it was collected the siege had arrived at its final stage.

The Geronese were now reaching the end of their strength: for the first time since the investment began in May some of the defenders began to show signs of slackening. The heavy rains of October and the commencement of the cold season were reducing alike troops and inhabitants to a desperate condition. They had long used up all their fuel, and found the chill of winter intolerable in their cellars and casemates. Alvarez, though reduced to a state of physical prostration by dysentery and fever, was still steadfast in heart. But there was discontent brewing among some of his subordinates: it is notable, as showing the spirit of the time, that the malcontents were found among the professional soldiers, not among the citizens. Early in November several officers were found holding secret conferences, and drawing up an address to the local Junta, setting forth the desperate state of the city and the necessity for deposing the governor, who was represented as incapacitated for command by reason of his illness: it was apparently hinted that he was going mad, or was intermittently delirious[59]. Some of the wild sayings attributed to Alvarez during the later days of the siege might be quoted as a support for their representations. To a captain who asked to what point he was expected to retire, if he were driven from his post, it is said that he answered, ‘to the cemetery.’ To another officer, the first who dared to say that capitulation was inevitable because of the exhaustion of the magazines, he replied, ‘When the last food is gone we will start eating the cowards, and we will begin with you.’ Though aware that their conspiracies were known, the malcontents did not desist from their efforts, and Alvarez made preparations for seizing and shooting the chiefs. But on the night of November 19 eight of them, including three lieutenant-colonels[60], warned by a traitor of their approaching fate, fled to Augereau’s camp. Their arrival was the most encouraging event for the French that had occurred since the commencement of the siege. They spoke freely of the exhaustion of the garrison, and said that Alvarez was mad and moribund.

It was apparently this information concerning the desperate state of the garrison which induced Augereau to recommence active siege operations. He ordered up ammunition from Perpignan to fill the empty magazines, and when it arrived began to batter a new breach in the curtain of Santa Lucia. On December 2 Pino’s Italians stormed the suburb of La Marina, outside the southern end of the town, a quarter hitherto unassailed, and made a lodgement therein, as if to open a new point of attack. But this was only done to distract the enemy from the real design of the Marshal, which was nothing less than to cut off the forts on the Capuchin heights from Gerona by seizing the redoubts, those of the ‘Chapter’ and the ‘City,’ which covered the steep upward path from the walls to the group of works on the hilltop. At midnight on December 6 the voltigeur and grenadier companies of Pino’s division climbed the rough southern face of the Capuchin heights, and surprised and escaladed the ‘Redoubt of the City,’ putting the garrison to the sword. Next morning the batteries of the forts above and the city below opened a furious fire upon the lost redoubt, and Alvarez directed his last sally, sending out every man that he could collect to recover the work. This led to a long and bloody fight on the slopes, which ended most disastrously for the garrison. Not only was the sortie repulsed, but in the confusion the French carried the Calvary and Chapter redoubts, the other works which guarded the access from Gerona to the upper forts. On the afternoon of December 7 the communication with them was completely cut off, and as their garrisons possessed no separate magazines, and had been wont to receive their daily dole from the city, it was clear that they must be starved out. They had only food for forty-eight hours at the moment[61].

The excitement of the sally had drained away the governor’s last strength: he took to his bed that evening, was in delirium next day, and on the morning of the ninth received the last sacraments of the Church, the doctors having declared that his hours were numbered. His last conscious act was to protest against any proposal to surrender, before he handed over the command to the senior officer present, General Juliano Bolivar. Had Alvarez retained his senses, it is certain that an attempt would have been made to hold the town, even when the starving garrisons of the forts should have surrendered. But the moment that his stern hand was removed, his successor, Bolivar, called together a council of war, to which the members of the Junta, no less than the officers commanding corps, were invited. They voted that further resistance was impossible, and sent out Brigadier-General Fournas, the man who had so well defended Monjuich, to obtain terms from Augereau. On the morning of the tenth the Marshal received him, and dictated a simple surrender, without any of the favourable conditions which Fournas at first demanded. His only concession was that he offered to exchange the garrison for an equal number of the unhappy prisoners from Dupont’s army, now lying in misery on the pontoons at Cadiz, if the Supreme Junta concurred. But the bargain was never ratified, as the authorities at Seville were obdurate.

On the morning of December 11 the survivors of the garrison marched out, and laid down their arms on the glacis of the Mercadal. Only 3,000 men came forth; these looked like living spectres, so pale, weak, and tattered that ‘the besiegers,’ as eye-witnesses observed, ‘felt ashamed to have been held at bay so long by dying men.’ There were 1,200 more lying in the hospitals. The rest of the 9,000 who had defended the place from May, or had entered with Garcia Conde in September, were dead. A detailed inspection of figures shows that of the 5,723 men of Alvarez’s original command only 2,008 survived, while of the 3,648 who had come later there were still 2,240 left: i. e. two-thirds of the old garrison and one-third of the succours had perished. The mortality by famine and disease far exceeded that by the sword: 800 men had died in the hospitals in October, and 1,300 in November, from mere exhaustion. The town was in a dreadful state: about 6,000 of the 14,000 inhabitants had perished, including nearly all the very young and the very old. 12,000 bombs and 8,000 shells had been thrown into the unhappy city: it presented a melancholy vista of houses roofless, or with one or two of the side-walls knocked in, of streets blocked by the fallen masonry of churches or towers, under which half-decayed corpses were partially buried. The open spaces were strewn with broken muskets, bloody rags, wheels of disabled guns and carts, fragments of shells, and the bones of horses and mules whose flesh had been eaten. The stench was so dreadful that Augereau had to keep his troops out of the place, lest infection should be bred among them. In the magazines nothing was found save a little unground corn; all the other provisions had been exhausted. There were also 168 cannon, mostly disabled; about 10,000 lb. of powder, and a million musket cartridges. The military chest handed over contained 562 reals—about 6l. sterling.

Augereau behaved very harshly to the garrison: many feeble or diseased men were made to march to Perpignan and perished by the way. The priests and monks of the ‘Crusade’ were informed that they were combatants, and sent off with the soldiery. But the fate of the gallant Governor provokes especial indignation. Alvarez did not die of his fever: when he was somewhat recovered he was forwarded to Perpignan, and from thence to Narbonne, where he was kept for some time and seemed convalescent. Orders then came from Paris that he was to be sent back to Spain—apparently to be tried as a traitor, for it was alleged that in the spring of 1808 he had accepted the provisional government installed by Murat. He was separated from his aide-de-camp and servants, and passed on from dungeon to dungeon till he reached Figueras. The day after his arrival at that place he was found dead, on a barrow—the only bed granted him—in the dirty cellar where he had been placed. It is probable that he perished from natural causes, but many Spaniards believed that he had been murdered[62].

Great as the losses of the garrison of Gerona had been, they were far exceeded, both positively and proportionately, by those of the besieging army. The French official returns show that on June 15 the three divisions charged with the attack, those of Verdier, Morio, and Lecchi, had 14,456 bayonets, and the two divisions of the covering army, those of Souham and Pino, 15,732: there were 2,637 artillerymen and engineers over and above these figures. On December 31, twenty days after the surrender, and when the regiments had been joined by most of their convalescents, the three siege-divisions counted 6,343 men, the covering divisions 11,666, and the artillery and engineers, 2,390.

This shows a loss of over 13,000 men; but on examination the deficit is seen to be even larger, for two new battalions from France had just joined Verdier’s division in December, and their 1,000 bayonets should be deducted from his total. It would seem, then, that the capture of Gerona cost the 7th Corps about 14,000 men, as well as a whole campaigning season, from April to December. The attack on Catalonia had been brought to a complete standstill, and when Gerona fell the French occupied nothing but the ruined city, the fortresses of Rosas and Figueras hard by the frontier, and the isolated Barcelona, where Duhesme, with the 6,000 men of his division, had been lying quiescent all the summer and autumn. Such a force was too weak to make detachments to aid St. Cyr or Augereau, since 4,000 men at least were needed for the garrison of the citadel and the outlying forts, and it would have been hopeless for the small remainder to take the field. Duhesme only conducted one short incursion to Villafranca during the siege of Gerona. In the last months of the year Barcelona was again in a state of partial starvation: the food brought in by Cosmao’s convoy in the spring had been exhausted, while a second provision-fleet from Toulon, escorted by five men-of-war, had been completely destroyed in October. Admiral Martin surprised it off Cape Creus, drove ashore and burnt two line-of-battle ships and a frigate, and captured most of the convoy. The rest took refuge in the harbour of Rosas, where Captain Halliwell attacked them with the boats of the squadron and burnt them all[63].

While Gerona was enduring its last month of starvation, those whose care it should have been to succour the place at all costs were indulging in a fruitless exchange of recriminations, and making preparations when it was all too late. Blake, after retiring to Vich on November 10, informed the Junta of Catalonia that he was helpless, unless more men could be found, and that they must find them. Why he did not rather insist that the Valencian reserves should be brought up, and risk stripping Tarragona and Lerida of their regular garrisons, it is hard to say. This at any rate would have been in his power. The Catalan Junta replied by summoning a congress at Manresa on November 20, to which representatives of every district of the principality were invited. The congress voted that a levy en masse of all the able-bodied men from seventeen to forty-five years of age should be called out[64], and authorized a loan of 10,000,000 reals for equipping them. They also wrote to Seville, not for the first time, to demand reinforcements from the Central Junta. But the battle of Ocaña had just been fought and lost, and Andalusia could not have spared a man, even if there had been time to transport troops to Tarragona. All that the Catalans received was honorary votes of approval for the gallant behaviour of the Geronese. The levy en masse was actually begun, but there was an insuperable difficulty in collecting and equipping the men in winter time, when days were short and roads were bad. The weeks passed by, and Gerona fell long before enough men had been got together to induce Blake to try a new offensive movement. Why was the congress not called in September rather than in November? Blake had always declared that he was too weak to risk a battle with the French for the raising of the siege, but till the last moment the Catalans contented themselves with arguing with him, and writing remonstrances to the Central Junta, instead of lending him the aid of their last levies.

One or two points connected with this famous siege require a word of comment. It is quite clear that St. Cyr during its early stages did not try his honest best to help Verdier. During June and July his covering army was doing no good whatever at Vich: he pretended that he had placed it there in order to ward off possible attacks by Blake. But it was matter of public knowledge that Blake was far away in Aragon, engaged in his unhappy campaign against Suchet, and that Coupigny, left at Tarragona with a few thousand men, was not a serious danger. St. Cyr could have spared a whole division more for the siege operations, without risking anything. If he had done so, Gerona could have been approached on two sides instead of one, the Mercadal front might have been attacked, and the loose blockade, which was all that Verdier could keep up, for want of more men, might have been made effective. But St. Cyr all through his military career earned a reputation for callous selfishness and habitual leaving of his colleagues in the lurch. On this occasion he was bitterly offended with Verdier, for giving himself the airs of an equal, and corresponding directly with the Emperor. There can be no doubt that he took a malicious pleasure in seeing his failures. It is hardly disguised in his clever and plausible Journal des Opérations de l’Armée de Catalogne en 1808-1809[65].

Verdier, on the other hand, seems to have felt all through that he was being asked to perform a task almost impossible, when he was set to take Gerona with his own 14,000 men, unaided by the covering army. His only receipt for success was to try to hurry on the matter by delivering desperate blows. Both the assault on Monjuich on July 8 and that on the city on September 19 were premature; there was some excuse for the former: Verdier had not yet realized how well Alvarez could fight. But the second seems unpardonable, after the warning received at Monjuich. If the general, as he declared before delivering his assault, mistrusted his own troops, he had no right to order a storm at all, considering his experience of the way in which the Spaniards had behaved in July. He acted on the fallacious theory that a practicable breach implies a town that can be taken, which is far from being the case if the garrison are both desperate and ingenious in defending themselves. The only way to deal with such a resolute and capable adversary was to proceed by the slow and regular methods of siegecraft, to sap right up to the ditch before delivering an assault, and batter everything to pieces before risking a man. This was how Monjuich was actually taken, after the storm had failed. Having neither established himself close under the walls, nor subdued the flanking fires from the Calvary and Chapter redoubts, nor ascertained how far the Spaniards had prepared inner defences for themselves, he had no right to attack at all.

As to Blake, even after making all possible allowances for the fact that he could not trust his troops—the half-rallied wrecks of Maria and Belchite—for a battle in the field, he must yet be pronounced guilty of feebleness and want of ingenuity. If he could never bring up enough regulars to give him a chance of facing St. Cyr, the fault was largely his own: a more forcible general would have insisted that the Valencian reserves should march[66], and would have stripped Lerida and Tarragona of men: it could safely have been done, for neither Suchet nor Duhesme was showing any signs of threatening those points. He might have insisted that the Catalan Junta should call out the full levy of somatenes in September instead of in November. He might also have made a better use of the irregulars already in the field, the bands of Rovira, Milans, and Claros. These miqueletes did admirable service all through the siege, by harassing Verdier’s rear and cutting off his convoys, but they were not employed (as they should have been) in combination with the regulars, but allowed, as a rule, to go off on excursions of their own, which had no relation to the main objects of Blake’s strategy. The only occasion on which proper use was made of them was when, on September 1, they were set to threaten Verdier’s lines, while Garcia Conde’s convoy was approaching Gerona. It may be pleaded in the Spanish general’s defence that it was difficult to exact obedience from the chiefs: there was a distinct coolness between the regulars and the irregulars, which sometimes led to actual quarrels and conflicts when they met. But here again the reply is that more forcible captain-generals were able to control the miqueletes, and if Blake failed to do so, it was only one more sign of his inadequacy. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he mismanaged matters, and that if in his second and third attempts to relieve Gerona he had repeated the tactics of his first, he would have had a far better chance of success. On September 1 only did he make any scientific attempt to distract the enemy’s attention and forces, and on that occasion he was successful. Summing things up, it may be said that he was not wrong to refuse battle with the troops that he had actually brought up to Gerona: they would undoubtedly have been routed if he had risked a general engagement. His fault was that he did not bring up larger forces, when it was in his power to do so, by the exercise of compulsion on the Catalan and Valencian Juntas. But these bodies must share Blake’s responsibilities: they undoubtedly behaved in a slack and selfish fashion, and let Gerona perish, though it was keeping the war from their doors for a long eight months.

All the more credit is due to Alvarez, considering the way in which he was left unsuccoured, and fed with vain promises. A less constant soul would have abandoned the defence long before: the last two months of resistance were his sole work: if he had fallen sick in October instead of December, his subordinates would have yielded long before. But it is not merely for heroic obstinacy that he must be praised. Every detail of the defence shows that he was a most ingenious and provident general: nothing was left undone to make the work of the besiegers hard. Moreover, as Napier has observed, it is not the least of his titles to merit that he preserved a strict discipline, and exacted the possible maximum of work from soldier and civilian alike, without the use of any of those wholesale executions which disgraced the defence of Saragossa. His words were sometimes truculent, but his acts were just and moderate. He never countenanced mob-law, as did Palafox, yet he was far better obeyed by the citizens, and got as good service from them as did the Aragonese commander. He showed that good organization is not incompatible with patriotic enthusiasm, and is far more effective in the hour of danger than reckless courage and blind self-sacrifice.

SECTION XVII: CHAPTER IV

THE AUTUMN CAMPAIGN OF 1809: TAMAMES, OCAÑA, AND ALBA DE TORMES

As early as August 30, when Wellington had not fully completed his retreat from Almaraz and Jaraicejo to Badajoz and Merida, the central Junta had already begun to pester him and his brother, the Ambassador at Seville, with plans for a resumption of the offensive in the valley of the Tagus. On that day Martin de Garay, the Secretary of State, wrote to represent to Wellesley that he had good reason to believe that the troops of Victor, Mortier, and Soult were making a general movement to the rear, and that the moment had arrived when the allied armies in Estremadura and La Mancha should ‘move forward with the greatest activity, either to observe more closely the movements of the enemy, or to attack him when circumstances may render it expedient[67].’ The French movement of retreat was wholly imaginary, and it is astonishing that the Spanish Government should have been so mad as to believe it possible that ‘their retrograde movement may have originated in accounts received from the North, which compel the enemy either to retire into the interior of France, or to take up a position nearer to the Pyrenees.’ On a groundless rumour, of the highest intrinsic improbability, they were ready to hurl the newly-rallied troops of Eguia and Venegas upon the French, and to invite Wellington to join in the advance. Irresponsible frivolity could go no further. But the Junta, as has been already said, were eager for a military success, which should cause their unpopularity to be forgotten, and were ready to seize on any excuse for ordering their troops forward. This particular rumour died away—the French were still in force on the Tagus, and, as a matter of fact, the only movement northwards on their part had been the return of Ney’s corps to Salamanca. But though the truth was soon discovered, the Junta only began to look out for new excuses for recommencing active operations.

Wellington, when these schemes were laid before him, reiterated his refusal to join in any offensive campaign, pointed out that the allied forces were not strong enough to embark on any such hazardous undertaking, and bluntly expressed his opinion that ‘he was much afraid, from what he had seen of the proceedings of the Central Junta, that in the distribution of their forces they do not consider military defence and military operations so much as political intrigue, and the attainment of petty political objects.’ He then proceeded to make an estimate of the French armies, to show their numerical superiority to the allies; in this he very much under-estimated the enemy’s resources, calculating the whole force of the eight corps in Spain at 125,000 men, exclusive of sick and garrisons not available for active service. As a matter of fact there were 180,000 men, not 125,000, with the Eagles at that moment, after all deductions had been made, so that his reasoning was far more cogent than he supposed[68]. But this only makes more culpable the obstinate determination of the Junta to resume operations with the much inferior force which they had at their disposal.

Undismayed by their first repulse, the Spanish ministers were soon making new representations to Wellesley and Wellington, in order to induce them to commit the English army to a forward policy. They sent in repeated schemes for supplying Wellington with food and transport on a lavish scale[69]; but he merely expressed his doubts as to whether orders that looked admirable on paper would ever be carried out in practice. He consented for the present to remain at Badajoz, as long as he could subsist his army in its environs, but warned the Junta that it was more probable that he would retire within the Portuguese border, for reasons of supply, than that he would join in another campaign on the Tagus.

Despite of all, the government at Seville went on with its plans for a general advance, even after they recognized that Wellington was not to be moved. A grand plan of operations was gradually devised by the War-Minister Cornel and his advisers. Stated shortly it was as follows. The army in La Mancha, which Venegas had rallied after the disaster of Almonacid, was to be raised to a strength of over 50,000 men by the drafting into it of a full two-thirds of Cuesta’s old army of Estremadura. On September 21 Eguia marched eastwards up the Guadiana, with three divisions of infantry and twelve or thirteen regiments of cavalry, to join Venegas[70]. The remaining force, amounting to two divisions of infantry and 2,500 cavalry, was left in Estremadura under the Duke of Albuquerque, the officer to whom the government was obliged to assign this army, because the Junta of Badajoz pressed for his appointment and would not hear of any other commander. He was considered an Anglophil, and a friend of some of the Andalusian malcontents, so the force left with him was cut down to the minimum. All the old regular regiments were withdrawn from him, save one single battalion, and he was left with nothing save the newly-raised volunteer units, some of which had behaved so badly at Talavera[71]. His cavalry was soon after reduced by the order to send a brigade to join the Army of the North, so that he was finally left with only five regiments of that arm or about 1,500 sabres. Of his infantry, about 12,000 strong, over 4,000 were absorbed by the garrison of Badajoz, so that he had only 8,000 men available for service in the field.

Eguia, on the other hand, carried with him to La Mancha some 25,000 men, the picked corps of the Estremaduran army; and, as the remains of Venegas’s divisions rallied and recruited after Almonacid, amounted to rather more than that number, the united force exceeded 50,000 sabres and bayonets. With this army the Junta intended to make a direct stroke at Madrid, while Albuquerque was directed to show himself on the Tagus, in front of Almaraz and Talavera, with the object of detaining at least one of the French corps in that direction. It was hoped, even yet, that Wellington might be induced to join in this demonstration. If once the redcoats reappeared at the front, neither Soult nor Mortier could be moved to oppose the army of La Mancha. Meanwhile Ney and the French corps in Leon and Old Castile were to be distracted by the use of a new force from the north, whose composition must be explained. The Junta held that the last campaign had failed only because the allies had possessed no force ready to detain Soult and Ney. If they had not appeared at Plasencia, Wellington, Cuesta, and Venegas would have been able to drive King Joseph out of his capital. Two months later the whole position was changed, in their estimation, by the fact that Spain once more possessed a large ‘Army of the Left,’ which would be able to occupy at least two French corps, while the rest of the allies marched again on Madrid. That such a force existed did indeed modify the aspect of affairs. La Romana had been moved to Seville to become a member of the Junta, but his successor, the Duke Del Parque, was collecting a host very formidable as far as numbers went. The old army of Galicia had been reformed into four divisions under Martin de la Carrera, Losada, Mahy, and the Conde de Belveder—the general whose name was so unfortunately connected with the ill-fought combat of Gamonal. These four divisions now comprised 27,000 men, of whom more than half were newly-raised Galician recruits, whom La Romana had embodied in the depleted cadres of his original battalions, after Ney and Soult had evacuated the province in July. A few of the ancient regiments that had made the campaign of Espinosa had died out completely—their small remnants having been drafted into other corps[72]. On the other hand there were a few new regiments of Galician volunteers—but La Romana had set his face against the creation of such units, wisely preferring to place his new levies in the ranks of the old battalions of the regular army[73]. In the main, therefore, the new ‘Army of the Left’ represented, as far as names and cadres went, Blake’s original ‘Army of Galicia[74].’ It had the same cardinal fault as that army, in that it had practically no cavalry whatever: the single dragoon regiment that Blake had owned (La Reina) having been almost completely destroyed in 1808[75]. Each division had a battery; the guns, of which La Romana’s army had been almost destitute in the spring, had been supplied from England, and landed at Corunna during the summer.

But the Galician divisions, though the most numerous, were not the only units which were told off to the new ‘Army of the Left.’ Asturias had been free of invaders since Ney and Bonnet retired from its borders in June 1809. The Central Junta ordered Ballasteros to join the main army with the few regular troops in the principality, and ten battalions of the local volunteers, a force of over 9,000 men. The Asturian Junta, always very selfish and particularist in its aims, made some protests but obeyed. Nine of its less efficient regiments were left behind to watch Bonnet.

Finally the Duke Del Parque himself had been collecting fresh levies about Ciudad Rodrigo, while the plains of Leon lay abandoned by the French during the absence of Ney’s corps in the valley of the Tagus. Including the garrison of Rodrigo he had 9,000 men, all in new units save one old line battalion and one old militia regiment[76]. Deducting the 3,500 men which held the fortress, there were seven battalions—nearly 6,000 bayonets—and a squadron or two of horse available for the strengthening of the field army. These were now told off as the ‘5th Division of the Army of the Left’; that of Ballasteros was numbered the 3rd Division.

The Galician, Asturian, and Leonese divisions had between them less than 500 horsemen. To make up for this destitution the Central Junta directed the Duke of Albuquerque to send off to Ciudad Rodrigo, via the Portuguese frontier, a brigade of his cavalry. Accordingly the Prince of Anglona marched north with three regiments[77], only 1,000 sabres in all, and joined Del Parque on September 25. Thus at the end of that month the ‘Army of the Left’ numbered nearly 50,000 men—all infantry save 1,500 horse and 1,200 gunners. But they were scattered all over North-Western Spain, from Oviedo to Astorga, and from Astorga to Ciudad Rodrigo, and had to be concentrated before they could act. Nor was the concentration devoid of danger, for the French might fall upon the Asturians or the Leonese before they had joined the Galician main body. As a matter of fact the 50,000 never took the field in one mass, for Del Parque left a division under Mahy to protect Galicia, and, when these regiments and the garrison of Rodrigo were deducted, he had but 40,000 in all, including sick and men on detachment. This, nevertheless, constituted a formidable force—if it had been in existence in July, Soult and Ney could never have marched against Wellington with their whole strength, and the Talavera campaign might have had another end. But the troops were of varying quality—the Leonese division was absolutely raw: the Galicians had far too many recruits with only two months’ training in their ranks, the Estremaduran cavalry had a bad record of disasters. A general of genius might have accomplished something with the Army of the Left—but Del Parque, though more cautious than many of his compeers, was no genius.

The Junta had a deeply-rooted notion that if sufficient pressure were applied to Wellesley and Wellington, they would permit Beresford’s Portuguese army, now some 20,000 strong, to join Del Parque for the advance into the plains of Leon. They had mistaken their men: Wellington returned as peremptory a refusal to their request for the aid of the Portuguese troops as to their demand that his own British army should advance with Albuquerque to the Tagus[78].

Nothing could be more hazardous than the plan finally formulated at the Seville War Office for the simultaneous advance of the armies of La Mancha, the North, and Estremadura. Even if it had been energetically supported by Wellington and Beresford, it would have been rash: converging operations by several armies starting from distant bases against an enemy concentrated in their midst are proverbially disastrous. In this particular plan three forces—numbering in all about 110,000 men, and starting from points so far apart as Ciudad Rodrigo, Truxillo, and the Passes by La Carolina, were to fall upon some 120,000 men, placed in a comparatively compact body in their centre. A single mistake in the timing of operations, the chance that one Spanish army might outmarch another, or that one of the three might fail to detain any hostile force in its front (as had happened with Venegas during the Talavera Campaign) was bound to be ruinous. The French had it in their power to deal with their enemies in detail, if the least mischance should occur: and with Spanish generals and Spanish armies it was almost certain that some error would be made.

Meanwhile the Junta made their last preparation for the grand stroke, by deposing Venegas from the command of the united army in La Mancha. Eguia held the interim command for a few days, but was to be replaced by Areizaga, an elderly general who had never commanded more than a single division, and had to his credit only courage shown in a subordinate position at the battle of Alcañiz. He was summoned from Lerida, and came hastily to take up his charge.

The sole advantage which the Spaniards possessed in October 1809 was that their enemy did not expect to be attacked. A month after Talavera matters had apparently settled down for the whole autumn, as far as the French generals could calculate. With the knowledge that the Austrian War was over, and that unlimited reinforcements could now be poured into Spain by his brother, King Joseph was content to wait. He had refused to allow Soult to make his favourite move of invading Portugal in the end of August, because he wished the Emperor to take up the responsibility of settling the next plan of campaign, and of determining the number of new troops that would be required to carry it out. The French corps, therefore, were in a semicircle round Madrid: Soult and Mortier in the central Tagus Valley at Plasencia and Talavera, Victor in La Mancha, with Sebastiani supporting him at Toledo and Aranjuez, Ney at Salamanca, Dessolles and the Royal Guard as a central reserve in the capital. This was a purely defensive position, and Joseph intended to retain it, till the masses of troops from Germany, with the Emperor himself perchance at their head, should come up to his aid. It does not seem to have entered into his head that the enemy would again take the offensive, after the fiasco of the Talavera campaign, and the bloody lesson of Almonacid.

In September and the early days of October the French hardly moved at all. Ney left his corps at Salamanca, and went on a short leave to Paris on September 25, so little was any danger expected in the plains of Leon. The charge of the 6th corps was handed over to Marchand, his senior divisional general. There was an even more important change of command pending—Jourdan had been soliciting permission to return to France ever since July. He had been on excellent terms with King Joseph, but found it hard to exact obedience from the marshals—indeed he was generally engaged in a controversy either with Victor or with Soult. The Emperor was not inclined to allow him to quit Spain, but Jourdan kept sending in applications to be superseded, backed by medical certificates as to his dangerous state of health. Finally he was granted leave to return, by a letter which reached him on October 25, just as the new campaign was beginning to develop into an acute phase. But he gladly handed over his duties to Soult, who thus became ‘major-general’ or chief of the Staff to King Joseph, and departed without lingering or reluctance for France, glad to be quit of a most invidious office[79].

Before Jourdan’s departure there had been some small movements of the French troops: hearing vague rumours of the passage eastward of Eguia’s army, King Joseph ordered a corresponding shift of his own troops towards that quarter. Soult and the 2nd Corps were ordered from Plasencia to Oropesa and Talavera, there relieving Mortier and the 5th Corps, who were to push up the Tagus toward Toledo. This would enable Victor to call up Sebastiani’s cavalry and two of his infantry divisions from Toledo into La Mancha. Having thus got together some 25,000 men, Victor advanced to Daimiel, and pressed in the advanced posts of the main Spanish army on October 15. Eguia, who was still in temporary command, since Areizaga had not yet arrived, made no attempt to stand, but retired into the passes of the Sierra Morena. This apparent timidity of the enemy convinced the Marshal that nothing dangerous was on hand in this quarter. He drew back his army into cantonments, in a semicircle from Toledo to Tarancon, leaving the cavalry of Milhaud and Paris out in his front.

Nothing more happened in La Mancha for a fortnight: but on the other wing, in the kingdom of Leon, matters came to a head sooner. About the middle of September the bulk of the Galician army, the divisions of Losada, Belveder and La Carrera, had moved down the Portuguese frontier via Alcanizas, and joined Del Parque at Ciudad Rodrigo. On the twenty-fifth of the same month the Prince of Anglona, with the cavalry brigade from Estremadura, also came in to unite himself to the Army of the Left. Del Parque had thus 25,000 infantry and 1,500 horse concentrated. He had still to be joined by Ballasteros and the Asturians, who had to pick their way with caution through the plains of Leon. Mahy and the 4th division of the Galicians had been left in the passes above Astorga, to cover the high-road into Galicia. He had a vanguard in Astorga, under Santocildes, and the town, whose walls had been repaired by the order of La Romana, was now capable of making some defence.

Facing Del Parque and his lieutenants there were two distinct forces. The 6th Corps, now under Marchand, was concentrated at Salamanca. Having received few or no drafts since its return from Galicia it was rather weak—its twenty-one battalions and four cavalry regiments only counted at the end of September some 13,000 bayonets and 1,200 sabres[80] effective—the sick being numerous. In the north of Leon and in Old Castile Kellermann was in charge, with an independent force of no great strength: his own division of dragoons, nearly 3,000 sabres, was its only formidable unit. The infantry was composed of three Swiss battalions, and four or five French battalions, which had been left in garrisons in Old Castile when the regiments to which they belonged went southward in the preceding winter[81]. The whole did not amount to more than 3,500 bayonets. The dragoons were very serviceable in the vast plains of Leon, but it was with difficulty, and only by cutting down garrisons to a dangerous extent, that Kellermann could assemble a weak infantry brigade of 2,000 men to back the horsemen.

It was nevertheless on Kellermann’s side, and by the initiative of the French, that the first clash took place in north-western Spain. Hearing vague reports of the movement of the Galician divisions towards Ciudad Rodrigo, Kellermann sent General Carrié, with two regiments of dragoons and 1,200 infantry, to occupy Astorga, being ignorant apparently that it was now garrisoned and more or less fortified. Carrié found the place occupied, made a weak attack upon it on October 9, and was beaten off. He was able to report to his chief that the Spaniards (i. e. Mahy’s division) were in some force in the passes beyond.

At much the same moment that this fact was ascertained Del Parque began to move: he had been lying since September 24 at Fuente Guinaldo in the highland above Ciudad Rodrigo. On October 5 he made an advance as far as Tamames, on the by-road from Rodrigo to Salamanca which skirts the mountains, wisely avoiding the high-road in the more level ground by San Martin del Rio and Castrejon. He had with him his three Galician divisions and his 1,500 horse, but he had not brought forward his raw Leonese division under Castrofuerte, which still lay by Rodrigo. On hearing of the duke’s advance Marchand sent out reconnaissances, and having discovered the position of the Spaniards, resolved at once to attack them. On October 17 he started out from Salamanca, taking with him his whole corps, except the two battalions of the 50th regiment, which were left to garrison the town.

On the afternoon of the next day Marchand came in sight of the enemy, who was drawn up ready to receive him on the heights above Tamames. The French general had with him nineteen battalions, some 12,000 bayonets—his 1,200 horse, and fourteen guns. Del Parque had 20,000 Galician infantry, Anglona’s cavalry, and eighteen guns: his position was so strong, and his superiority in infantry so marked, that he was probably justified in risking a battle on the defensive.

Tamames, an unwalled village of moderate size, lies at the foot of a range of swelling hills. Its strategical importance lies in the fact that it is the meeting-place of the two country roads from Ciudad Rodrigo to Salamanca via Matilla, and from Ciudad Rodrigo to Bejar and the Pass of Baños via Nava Redonda. Placed there, Del Parque’s army threatened Salamanca, and had a choice of lines of retreat, the roads to Rodrigo and to the passes into Estremadura being both open. But retreat was not the duke’s intention. He had drawn up his army on the heights above Tamames, occupying the village below with a battalion or two. On the right, where the hillside was steeper, he had placed Losada and the 2nd Division: on the left, where the ridge sinks down gently into the plain, was Martin de la Carrera with the Vanguard Division. The Conde de Belveder’s division—the third—formed the reserve, and was drawn up on the reverse slope, behind La Carrera. The Prince of Anglona’s cavalry brigade was out on the extreme left, partly hidden by woods, in the low ground beyond the flank of the Vanguard.

Marchand, arriving on the ground in the afternoon after a march of fourteen miles from Matilla, was overjoyed to see the enemy offering battle, and attacked without a moment’s hesitation. His arrangements much resembled those of Victor at Ucles—though his luck was to be very different. It was clear that the Spanish left was the weak point, and that the heights could be turned and ascended on that side with ease. Accordingly Maucune’s brigade (six battalions in all)[82] and the light cavalry, strengthened by one regiment of dragoons, were ordered to march off to the right, to form in a line perpendicular to that of Del Parque, and break down his flank. When this movement was well developed, Marcognet’s brigade (six battalions)[83] was to attack the Spanish centre, to the east of the village of Tamames, while the 25th Léger (two battalions) was to contain the hostile right by a demonstration against the high and difficult ground in that direction. Marchand kept in reserve, behind his centre, the 27th and 59th of the Line (six battalions) and his remaining regiment of dragoons. The vice of this formation was that the striking force—Maucune’s column—was too weak: it would have been wise to have strengthened it at the expense of the centre, and to have made a mere demonstration against the heights above the village of Tamames, as well as on the extreme French left.

Maucune accomplished his flank march undisturbed, deployed in front of La Carrera’s left and advanced against it. The Spanish general threw back his wing to protect himself, and ordered his cavalry to threaten the flank of the advancing force. But he was nearly swept away: when the skirmishing lines were in contact, the French brigadier ordered his cavalry to charge the centre of the Spanish division: striking in diagonally, Lorcet’s Hussars and Chasseurs broke La Carrera’s line, and captured the six guns of his divisional artillery. Almost at the same moment Anglona’s cavalry came in upon Maucune’s flank; but being opposed by two battalions of the 69th in square, they received but one fire and fled hastily to the rear. Maucune then resumed his march up the hill, covering his flank with his horsemen, and pushing La Carrera’s broken line before him. But at the head of the slope he met Belveder’s reserve, which let the broken troops pass through their intervals, and took up the fight steadily enough. The French were now opposed by triple numbers, and the combat came to a standstill: Maucune’s offensive power was exhausted, and he could no longer use his cavalry on the steep ground which he had reached.

Meanwhile, on seeing their right brigade opening the combat with such success, the two other French columns went forward, Marcognet against the Spanish centre, Anselme of the 25th Léger against the extreme right. But the ground was here much steeper: Losada’s Galician division stood its ground very steadily, and Marcognet’s two regiments made an involuntary halt three-quarters of the way up the heights, under the full fire of the two Spanish batteries there placed and the long line of infantry. The officers made several desperate attempts to induce the columns to resume their advance, but to no effect. They fell in great numbers, and at last the regiments recoiled and descended the hill in disorder. Losada’s battalions pursued them to the foot of the slope, and the Spanish light troops in the village sallied out upon their flank, and completed their rout. Marcognet’s brigade poured down into the plain as a disordered mass of fugitives, and were only stayed when Marchand brought up the 27th and 59th to their rescue. Del Parque wisely halted the pursuing force before it came into contact with the French reserves, and took up again his post on the heights.

Meanwhile the 25th Léger, on the extreme French right, had not pressed its attack home, and retreated when the central advance was repulsed. Maucune, too, seeing the rout to his left, withdrew from the heights under cover of his cavalry, carrying off only one of the Spanish guns that he had taken early in the fight, and leaving in return a disabled piece of his own on the hill.

The battle was fairly lost, and Marchand retired, under cover of his cavalry along the Salamanca road. The enemy made no serious attempt to pursue him in the plain, where his horsemen would have been able to act with advantage. The French had lost 1,300 or 1,400 men, including 18 officers killed, and a general (Lorcet) and 54 officers wounded[84]. Marcognet’s brigade supplied the greater part of the casualties; the 76th lost its eagle, seven officers killed and fifteen wounded: the 39th almost as many. The cavalry and Maucune’s brigade suffered little. The very moderate Spanish loss was 713 killed and wounded, mostly in La Carrera’s division.

This was the first general action since Baylen in which the Spaniards gained a complete victory. They had a superiority of about seven to four in numbers, and a good position; nevertheless the troops were so raw, and the past record of the Army of the Left was so disheartening, that the victory reflects considerable credit on the Galicians. The 6th Corps was reckoned the best of all the French units in Spain, being entirely composed of old regiments from the army of Germany. It is not too much to say that Ney’s absence was responsible for the defeat of his men. Marchand attacked at three points, and was weak at each. The Marshal would certainly have massed a whole division against the Spanish left, and would not have been stopped by the stout resistance made by Belveder’s reserve. A demonstration by a few battalions would have ‘contained’ Losada’s troops on the left, where the ground was too unfavourable for a serious attack[85].

On the 19th of October the beaten army reached Salamanca by a forced march. Marchand feared that the enemy would now manœuvre either by Ledesma, so as to cut him off from Kellermann and the troops in the north, or by Alba de Tormes, so as to intercept his communication with Madrid. In either case he would have to retreat, for there was no good defensive ground on the Tormes to resist an army coming from the west. As a matter of fact Del Parque moved by Ledesma, for two reasons: the first was that he wished to avoid the plains, fearing that Kellermann might have joined the 6th Corps with his cavalry division. The second was that, by moving in this direction, he hoped to make his junction with Ballasteros, who had started from the Asturias to join him, and had been reported to have moved from Astorga to Miranda del Duero, and to be feeling his way south-eastward. The juncture took place: the Asturian division, after an unsuccessful attempt to cut off the garrison of Zamora on the seventeenth, had marched to Ledesma, and met the main army there. Del Parque had now 28,000 men, and though still very weak in cavalry, thought himself strong enough to march on Salamanca. He reached it on October 25 and found it evacuated. Marchand, learning that Kellermann was too far off to help him, and knowing that no reinforcements from Madrid could reach him for many days, had evacuated the town on the previous evening. He retired towards Toro, thus throwing up his communications with Madrid in order to make sure of joining Kellermann. This seems doubtful policy, for that general could only aid him with 4,000 or 5,000 men, and their joint force would be under 20,000 strong. On the other hand, by retiring on Peñaranda or Medina de Campo, and so approaching the King’s army, he could have counted on picking up much larger reinforcements, and on resuming the struggle with a good prospect of success.

As a matter of fact Jourdan, on hearing of the disaster of Tamames, had dispatched, to aid the 6th Corps, Godinot’s brigade of Dessolles’ division, some 3,500 bayonets, from Madrid, and Heudelet’s division of the 2nd Corps, about 4,000 strong, from Oropesa, as well as a couple of regiments of cavalry. He made these detachments without scruple, because there was as yet no sign of any activity on the part of the Spanish armies of La Mancha and Estremadura. A week later he would have found it much more hazardous to weaken his front in the valley of the Tagus. These were the last orders issued by Jourdan, who resigned his post on October 31, while Soult on November 5 arrived at Madrid and replaced him as chief of the staff to King Joseph.

Del Parque, not unnaturally elated by his victory, now nourished ambitious ideas of clearing the whole of Leon and Old Castile of the enemy, being aware that the armies of La Mancha and Estremadura ought now to be on the move, and that full occupation would be found ere long for the French corps in the valley of the Tagus. He ordered up his 5th Division, the raw Leonese battalions of Castrofuerte, from Ciudad Rodrigo, and made vehement appeals to the Portuguese Government to lend him the whole of Beresford’s army for a great advance up the Douro. The Regency, though much pressed by the Spanish ambassador at Lisbon, gave a blank refusal, following Wellington’s advice to have nothing to do with offensive operations in Spanish company[86]. But part of Beresford’s troops were ordered up to the frontier, not so much to lend a moral support to Del Parque’s advance[87] as to be ready to defend their own borders in the event of his defeat. Showing more prudence than Wellington had expected, Del Parque did not push forward from Salamanca, when he became certain that he would have to depend on his own forces alone. Even after the arrival of his reserves from Rodrigo he remained quiet, only pushing out reconnaissances to discover which way the enemy had gone. He had, in fact, carried out his part in the Central Junta’s plan of campaign, by calling the attention of the French to the north, and distracting troops thither from the King’s army. It was now the time for Albuquerque and Areizaga to take up the game, and relieve him. Marchand meanwhile had retired across the Douro, and taken up an extended line behind it from Zamora to Tordesillas—a front of over forty miles—which it would have been impossible to hold with his 13,000 men against a heavy attack delivered at one point. But he was hardly in position when Kellermann arrived, took over the command, and changed the whole plan of campaign (November 1). He had left two battalions to guard Benavente, two to hold Valladolid, and had only brought up his 3,000 dragoons and 1,500 infantry. Seeing that it was absolutely necessary to recover the line of communication with Madrid, he ordered the 6th Corps to leave Zamora and Toro, mass at Tordesillas, and then cross the Douro to Medina del Campo, the junction point of the roads from Madrid, Segovia, Valladolid, and Toro. To this same place he brought up his own small force, and having received Godinot’s brigade from Madrid, had thirty-four battalions and eighteen squadrons concentrated—about 23,000 men. Though not yet joined by the other troops from the south—Heudelet’s division—he now marched straight upon Salamanca in two columns, one by Cantalapiedra, the other by Fuente Sauco, intending to offer battle to Del Parque.

But the duke, much to the surprise of every one, utterly refused to fight, holding the plain too dangerous for an army so weak in cavalry as his own, and over-estimating the enemy’s force at 36,000 men[88]. He retired from Salamanca, after having held it less than a fortnight, on November 5, and took not the road to Ciudad Rodrigo but that to Bejar and the Pass of Baños, as if he were about to pass the mountains into Estremadura[89]. This was an excellent move: the French could not pursue him in force without evacuating Old Castile and Leon, which it would have been impossible for them to contemplate. For when Kellermann had concentrated his troops to strike at Salamanca, there was nothing left behind him in the vast upland save a battalion or two at Benavente, Valladolid, and Burgos. Mahy, from Galicia, and the Asturians might have overrun the whole region unopposed. As it was, the whole of the provinces behind the Douro showed signs of bursting out into insurrection. Julian Sanchez, the Empecinado, and other guerrillero chiefs, whose names were soon to be famous, raised large bands during the absence of the normal garrisons, and swept the country-side, capturing convoys and cutting the lines of communication between Vittoria, Burgos, and Valladolid. Porlier came down with a flying column from the Asturias, assaulted Palencia, and threatened Burgos. The French governors on every side kept reporting their perilous position, when they could get a message through to Madrid[90].

Realizing that he must cover his rear, or the whole of Old Castile would be lost to the insurgents, Kellermann, after occupying Salamanca on November 6, left the 6th Corps and Godinot’s brigade distributed between Ledesma, Salamanca, and Alba de Tormes, watching Del Parque, and returned in haste with his own troops to the Douro. He commenced to send out flying columns from Valladolid to deal with the guerrilleros, but did not work too far afield, lest he might be called back by a new forward movement on the part of the Army of the Left. But in a few days he had to recast all his arrangements, for—as Del Parque had calculated—the campaign in La Mancha had just opened, and the position of the French in Leon and Old Castile was profoundly affected by the new developments.

In the south, as we have already explained, the Junta designed Albuquerque’s army of Estremadura to be a mere demonstrating force, while Areizaga’s 55,000 men were to strike the real blow. The Estremaduran troops, as was proper, moved early to draw the attention of the enemy. Albuquerque’s first division under Bassecourt—6,000 infantry and 600 horse—was on the Tagus from Almaraz to Meza de Ibor: his second division under St. Juan and the rest of his cavalry—some 4,000 in all—were moving up from Truxillo. Bassecourt began by sending a small force of all arms across the river at Almaraz, to drive in Soult’s outposts and spread reports abroad in all directions that he was acting as the vanguard to Wellington’s army, which was marching up from Badajoz. Unfortunately the full effect that he desired was not produced, because deserters informed Soult that the British Army was still quiescent on the Guadiana[91]. The French made no movement, and left the 2nd Corps alone to watch Albuquerque.

Meanwhile Areizaga, within a few days of assuming the command of the army of La Mancha, commenced his forward movement. On November 3, having concentrated his eight divisions of infantry and his 5,700 horse at Santa Cruz de Mudela, at the foot of the passes, he gave the order to advance into the plains. The head quarters followed the high-road, with the train and three divisions: the rest, to avoid encumbering the chaussée, marched by parallel side-roads, but were never more than ten miles from their Commander-in-Chief: at any rate Areizaga avoided the sin of dispersion. His army was the best which had been seen under the Spanish banners since Tudela. The men had all been furnished with new clothes and equipment since August, mainly from English stores landed at Cadiz. There were sixty guns, and such a body of cavalry as had never yet been collected during the war. The value of the troops was very unequal; if there were many old battalions of the regular army, there were also many new units composed of half-trained Andalusian levies. The cavalry included the old runaways of Medellin, and many other regiments of doubtful value. The morale was on the whole not satisfactory. ‘I wish I had anything agreeable to communicate to you from this army’ wrote Colonel Roche, a British officer attached to Areizaga’s staff, to Wellington. ‘The corps which belonged to the original army of La Mancha are certainly in every respect superior to those from Estremadura, and from everything that I can learn none of those abuses which were to be lamented in the army of Estremadura existed here—or, at least, in a much less degree. But nothing can exceed the general discontent, dissatisfaction, and demoralization of the mass of the people and of the army. How can anybody who has the faculty of reason separate the inefficiency, intrigue, bad organization, and consequent disasters of the army from the source of all those evils in the Junta? There is not a man of the least reflection who, as things now stand, has a hope of success; and this is the more melancholy, because the mass of the people are just as inveterate in their resentment and abhorrence of the French as at the first hour of the revolution[92].’ The fact seems to have been that the superior officers doubted the wisdom of taking the offensive according to the Junta’s orders, and had no confidence in Areizaga, who was only known as a fighting general, and had no reputation for skill. The rank and file, as Arteche remarks, were disposed to do their duty, but had no confidence in their luck[93]. Their government and not their generals must take the major part of the blame for the disaster that followed.

Areizaga was well aware that his best chance was to strike with extreme boldness and vigour, and to dash into the midst of the French before they could concentrate. Hence his march was at first conducted with great rapidity and decision; between the 3rd and the 8th of November he made nearly fifteen miles a day, though the roads were somewhat broken up by the autumn rains. On the eighth he reached La Guardia, eighty miles from his starting-point, and his advanced cavalry under General Freire had its first skirmish with a brigade of Milhaud’s dragoons at Costa de Madera, near Dos Barrios. The Spanish horse deployed in such numbers that the French were compelled to move off in haste and with some loss, though they had beaten off with ease the first two or three regiments which had gone forward against them.

The Spanish advance had been so rapid and so unexpected that Soult and King Joseph had been taken completely by surprise. On November 6 the Marshal had reported to Paris that ‘the troops on the Tagus and in La Mancha are up to the present unmolested, and as, from all I can learn, there is no prospect of the enemy making any offensive movement on that side, I intend to form from them a strong flying column to hunt the brigands in the direction of Burgos[94].’ Only four days later he had to announce that an army of at least 40,000 men was close in front of Aranjuez, and not more than thirty-five miles from Madrid, and that he was hurrying together troops from all quarters to make head against them. At the moment indeed, there was nothing directly between Areizaga’s vanguard at La Guardia and the Spanish capital, save the Polish division of the 4th Corps stationed at Aranjuez, and Milhaud’s five regiments of dragoons at Ocaña. If the Spaniard had pushed on for three days more at his starting pace, he might have crossed the Tagus, and have forced King Joseph to fight, close in front of Madrid, with an imperfectly assembled army. On the ninth and tenth Leval’s Germans were in march from Toledo to Aranjuez to join Sebastiani’s Poles: Mortier’s first division was hurrying from Talavera to Toledo, and his second division was making ready to follow. The 2nd Corps, despite Albuquerque’s demonstration in front of Almaraz, was preparing to quit Oropesa, in order to replace Mortier’s men at Talavera. Victor, in the meanwhile, with the First Corps, was lying in front of Toledo at Ajofrin, with his cavalry at Mora and Yebenes: he reported that no hostile force had come his way, but that he had ascertained that a large army had marched past his front along the great chaussée from Madridejos to Aranjuez. He was in a position to attack it in rear and flank, if there was a sufficient force gathered in its front to justify him in closing[95].

But on reaching La Guardia, Areizaga seemed suddenly to realize the dangers of his movement. No doubt it was the news that Victor was almost in his rear that paralysed him, but he halted on the ninth, when a bold advance would certainly have enabled him to seize Aranjuez, by evicting the small force under Milhaud and Sebastiani. For three fatal days, the 9th, 10th, and 11th of November, the Spanish main body remained halted in a mass at La Guardia, as if for the special purpose of allowing the enemy to concentrate. On the eleventh Areizaga at last began to move again: he sent forward the whole of his cavalry, supported by Zayas and his Vanguard division, to press back the force in his front. They found Milhaud’s five regiments of dragoons ranged in line of battle before the small town of Ocaña, and supported by Sebastiani’s Polish infantry. Freire advanced, using his triple superiority of numbers to turn both flanks of the French cavalry; Milhaud, after some partial charges, retired behind the Poles, who formed a line of six battalion squares. The Spanish horse made a half-hearted attempt to attack them, but were repelled by their rolling fire before they came to close quarters, and drew back. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon, and the Spanish infantry was only just beginning to come up. Zayas and Freire agreed that it was too late to begin a second attack, and put off fighting till the next morning. But during the night the French evacuated Ocaña and retired to Aranjuez, wisely judging that it would be insane to wait for the arrival of the Spanish main body. They had lost about fifty men, Freire’s cavalry just over two hundred.

Next day [November 12], Areizaga brought up the whole of his army to Ocaña, and his cavalry reconnoitred up to the gates of Aranjuez and the bridge of Puente La Reyna. Sebastiani made ready to defend them, and having been joined by the German division from Toledo, wrote to Soult to say that he would resist to the last extremity, in order to gain time for the arrival of Victor’s corps and the other troops which were marching up from the west and north[96]. The attack which he expected was never delivered. Areizaga, nervous about the presence of the 1st Corps on his flank, had resolved to shift his army eastward to get further away from it. Abandoning his line of communication by La Guardia and Madridejos, he marched his whole force by cross-roads parallel to the Tagus up to La Zarza, and seized the fords of Villamanrique, twenty-five miles above Aranjuez, on the Madrid-Albacete road. If Victor, as he supposed, had been manœuvring on his flank, this movement would have cut him off from his base in Andalusia, and have left him only the mountains of Murcia as a line of retreat. But, as a matter of fact, the 1st Corps was no longer at Ajofrin or Mora, but had been called behind the Tagus, so that his retreat was safer than he supposed.

Soult and King Joseph, meanwhile, had been completing their concentration. They had written to Kellermann, ordering him to send back to Madrid without delay the brigade of Dessolles’ division under Godinot which had been lent him, and to spare them as well one infantry brigade of the 6th Corps. These troops were too far off to be available at once; but of the remainder of their units the Royal Guard and Spanish battalions of King Joseph, with Dessolles’ remaining brigade, were moved out to support Sebastiani. Victor had been brought back across the Tagus, and was also marching on Aranjuez. Mortier’s corps was concentrated at Toledo, while the 2nd Corps was in motion from Oropesa to Talavera, having discovered no signs of a serious advance on the part of Albuquerque. The care of Madrid was handed over to the incomplete French division of the 4th Corps[97], some of whose battalions were dispersed at Guadalajara, Alcala, Segovia, and other garrisons. Paris’s light cavalry of the same corps was also at this moment watching the roads to the east of Madrid.

On the twelfth Areizaga threw Lacy’s division across the Tagus, and laid down two pontoon bridges near Villamanrique, so as to be able to bring over his whole army in the shortest possible time. But the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth were days of storm, the river rose high, and the artillery and train stuck fast on the vile cross-roads from Ocaña over which they were being brought. In consequence less than half the Spanish army was north of the Tagus on November 15, though the advance cavalry pushed on to the line of the Tajuna, and skirmished with Paris’s chasseurs about Arganda. It seemed nevertheless that Areizaga was committed to an advance upon Madrid by the high-road from Albacete, wherefore Soult blew up the bridges of Aranjuez and Puente la Reyna, and ordered Victor to march from Aranjuez on Arganda with the 1st Corps, nearly 20,000 men, purposing to join him with the King’s reserves and to offer battle on the Tajuna, while Mortier and Sebastiani’s Poles and Germans should fall upon the enemy’s flank. But this plan was foiled by a new move upon Areizaga’s part; he now commenced a retreat as objectless as his late advance. Just as Victor’s cavalry came in touch with his front, he withdrew his whole army across the Tagus, destroyed his bridges, and retired to La Zarza on the seventeenth, evidently with the intention of recovering his old line of communication with Andalusia, via Ocaña and Madridejos.

The moment that this new departure became evident, Soult reversed the marching orders of all his columns save Victor’s, and bade them return hastily to Aranjuez, where the bridge was repaired in haste, and to cross the Tagus there, with the intention of intercepting Areizaga’s line of retreat and forcing a battle on him near Ocaña. Victor, however, had got so far to the east that it would have wasted time to bring him back to Aranjuez, wherefore he was directed to cross the river at Villamanrique and follow hard in Areizaga’s rear.

On the morning of the eighteenth Milhaud’s and Paris’s cavalry, riding at the head of the French army, crossed the Tagus at Aranjuez, and pressing forward met, between Ontigola and Ocaña, Freire’s horsemen moving at the head of Areizaga’s column, which on this day was strung out between La Zarza and Noblejas, marching hastily westward towards the high-road. The collision of Milhaud and Freire brought about the largest cavalry fight which took place during the whole Peninsular War. For Milhaud and Paris had eight regiments, nearly 3,000 men, while three of Freire’s four divisions were present, to the number of over 4,000 sabres. On neither side was any infantry in hand.

Sebastiani, who had come up with the light cavalry of his corps, was eager for a fight, and engaged at once. Charging the Spanish front line with Paris’s light horse, he broke it with ease: but Freire came on with his reserves, forming the greater part of them into a solid column—an odd formation for cavalry. Into this mass Milhaud charged with four regiments of dragoons. The heaviness of their formation did not suffice to enable the Spaniards to stand. They broke when attacked, and went to the rear in disorder, leaving behind them eighty prisoners and some hundreds of killed and wounded. The French lost only a few scores, but among them was Paris, the not unworthy successor of the adventurous Lasalle in command of the light cavalry division attached to the 4th Corps.

Moving forward in pursuit of the routed squadrons, Sebastiani approached Ocaña, but halted on discovering that there was already Spanish infantry in the town. The head of Areizaga’s long column had reached it, while the cavalry combat was in progress: the rest was visible slowly moving up by cross-roads from the east. Soult was at once apprised that the enemy’s army was close in his front—so close that it could not get away without fighting, for its train and rearguard were still far behind, and would be cut off if the main body moved on without making a stand.

Areizaga, though he had shown such timidity when faced by Sebastiani’s 9,000 men at Aranjuez, and by Victor’s 20,000 on the Tajuna, now offered battle to the much more formidable force which Soult was bringing up. He was indeed compelled to fight, partly because his men were too weary to move forward that night, partly because he wished to give time for his train to arrive and get on to the chaussée.

On the morning of the nineteenth his army was discovered drawn up in two lines on each side of the town of Ocaña. There were still some 46,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry under arms despite of the losses of the late week[98]. The oncoming French army was smaller; though it mustered 5,000 horse it had only 27,000 foot—the Germans and Poles of Sebastiani, Mortier with nearly the whole of the 5th Corps, a brigade of Dessolles’ division, the King’s guards, and the cavalry of Milhaud, Paris, and Beauregard[99]. Victor was too far off to be available; having found the flooded Tagus hard to cross, he was on this day barely in touch with the extreme rearguard of Areizaga’s army which was escorting the train. Being nearly twenty miles from Ocaña, he could not hope to arrive in time for the general action, if it was to be delivered next morn. If Areizaga stood firm for another day, Victor would be pressing him from the flank and rear while the main army was in his front: but it was highly probable that Areizaga would not stand, but would retreat at night; all his previous conduct argued a great disinclination to risk a battle. Wherefore Soult and the King, after a short discussion[100], agreed to attack at once, despite their great numerical inferiority. In the open plain of La Mancha a difference of 16,000 or 17,000 infantry was not enough to outweigh the superior quality and training of the French army.

There is, so to speak, no position whatever at Ocaña: the little unwalled town lies in a level upland, where the only natural feature is a ravine which passes in front of the place; it is sufficiently deep and broad at its western end to constitute a military obstacle, but east of the town gradually grows slighter and becomes a mere dip in the ground. Areizaga had chosen this ravine to indicate the line of his left and centre; but on his right, where it had become so shallow as to afford no cover, he extended his troops across and beyond it. The town was barricaded and occupied, to form a central support to the line. There were olive-groves in the rear of Ocaña which might have served to hide a reserve, or to mark a position for a rally in case a retreat should become necessary. But Areizaga had made no preparation of this sort. His trains, with a small escort, had not arrived even on the morning of the nineteenth, but were still belated on the cross-roads from Noblejas and La Zarza.

The order of the Spanish army in line of battle is difficult to reconstruct, for Areizaga uses very vague language in the dispatch in which he explained his defeat, and the other documents available, though they give detailed accounts of some of the corps, say little or nothing of others. It seems, however, that Zayas, with the vanguard division, formed the extreme left, behind the deepest part of the ravine, with a cavalry brigade under Rivas on its flank and rear. He had the town of Ocaña on his right. Then followed in the line, going from left to right, the divisions of Vigodet, Giron, Castejon, and Lacy. Those of Copons, Jacomé, and Zerain appear to have formed a second line in support of the other four[101]. Vigodet’s left was in the town of Ocaña and strongly posted, but the other flank, where Lacy lay, was absolutely in the air, with no natural feature to cover it. For this reason Areizaga placed beyond it Freire, with the whole of the cavalry except the brigade on the extreme left under Rivas. Unfortunately the Spanish horse, much shaken by the combat of the preceding day, was a weak protection for the flank, despite its formidable numbers. The sixty guns of the artillery were drawn out in the intervals of the infantry divisions of the first and second line.

Soult’s plan of attack was soon formed. The ravine made the Spanish left—beyond Ocaña—inaccessible, but also prevented it from taking any offensive action. The Marshal therefore resolved to ignore it completely, and to concentrate all his efforts against the hostile centre and right, in the open ground. The scheme adopted was a simple one: Sebastiani’s Polish and German divisions were to attack the Spanish right wing, and when they were at close quarters with the enemy the main mass of the French cavalry was to fall upon Freire’s horse, drive it out of the field, and attack on the flank the divisions already engaged with the infantry. For this purpose Milhaud’s, Paris’s, and Beauregard’s regiments, more than 3,500 sabres, were massed behind the Poles and Germans. For a time their march would be masked by olive-groves and undulations of the ground, so that they might come in quite suddenly upon the enemy. Mortier with his first division—that of Girard—and a regiment of Gazan’s, followed in the rear of the Polish and German infantry, to support their frontal attack. Dessolles, with his own brigade and Gazan’s remaining one, took post opposite Ocaña, ready to fall upon the Spanish centre, when the attack to his left should have begun to make way. He had in his front the massed artillery of the 4th and 5th Corps, thirty guns under Senarmont, which took ground on a low knoll above the great ravine, from which they could both play upon the town of Ocaña and also enfilade part of the Spanish line to its immediate right—Vigodet’s division and half of Giron’s. Finally the King, with his guards and other troops, horse and foot, were placed to the right rear of Dessolles, to act as a general reserve, or to move against Zayas if he should attempt to cross the ravine and turn the French right.

The plan, despite of some checks at the commencement, worked in a satisfactory fashion. The German and Polish divisions of Leval and Werlé attacked Lacy’s and Castejon’s divisions, which gave back some little way, in order to align themselves with Vigodet who was sheltered by the slight eastern end of the ravine. The enemy followed and brought up six guns to the point to play upon the new position which the Spaniards had taken up. The forward movement was continuing, when suddenly to the surprise of the French, Lacy’s, Castejon’s, and Giron’s men, leaving their places in the line, made a furious counter-charge upon the Poles and Germans, drove them back for some distance, and threw them into disorder. This movement was no result of Areizaga’s generalship: he had betaken himself to the summit of the church-tower of Ocaña, an inconvenient place from which to issue orders, and practically left his subordinates to fight their own battle. Mortier was forced to bring forward Girard’s division to support his broken first line. It was hotly engaged with Lacy and Giron, when suddenly it felt the Spaniards slacken in their fire, waver, and break. This was the result of the intervention of a new force in the field. The great mass of French squadrons, which had been sent under Sebastiani to turn the Spanish right, had now come into action. Arriving close to Freire’s cavalry before it was discovered, it fell on that untrustworthy corps, and scattered it to the winds in a few minutes. Then, while three or four regiments followed the routed horsemen, the rest turned inwards upon the hostile infantry. The flanks of the first and second lines of Areizaga’s right were charged simultaneously, and hardly a regiment had time to get into square. Brigade after brigade was rolled up and dispersed or captured; the mass of fugitives, running in upon the troops that were frontally engaged with Girard, wrecked them completely. Of the five divisions of the Spanish left, a certain number of steady regiments got away, by closing their ranks and pushing ahead through the confusion, firing on friend and foe alike when they were hustled. But many corps were annihilated, and others captured wholesale. The last seems to have been the fate of nearly the whole of Jacomé’s division of the second line, as hardly a single unit from it is reported as rallied a month later, and the French accounts speak of a whole column of 6,000 men which laid down its arms in a mass before the light cavalry of the 4th Corps. Just as the Spanish right broke up, Dessolles with his two brigades, followed by the King’s reserve, crossed the ravine and attacked the town of Ocaña, and the two divisions—Vigodet and Copons—which lay in first and second line immediately to the east of it. These retired, and got away in better order than their comrades to the right. Of all the Spanish army only Zayas’s vanguard division, on the extreme left, now remained intact. Areizaga had sent it an order to cross the ravine and attack the French right, when he saw his army beginning to break up. Then, a few minutes later, he sent another order bidding it close to the right and cover the retreat. After this the Commander-in-Chief descended from his tower, mounted his horse, and fled. Zayas carried out the second order, moved to the right, and found himself encompassed by masses of fugitives from Giron’s, Castejon’s, and Lacy’s broken divisions, mixed with French cavalry. He sustained, with great credit to himself and his troops, a rearguard action for some miles, till near the village of Dos Barrios, where his line was broken and his men at last mixed with the rest of the fugitives[102].

The whole routed multitude now streamed wildly over the plain, with the French cavalry in hot pursuit. Thousands of prisoners were taken, and the chase only ended with nightfall. The fugitives headed straight for the Sierra Morena, and reached it with a rapidity even greater than that which they had used in their outward march a fortnight before. Victor’s cavalry arrived in time to take up the pursuit next morning: they had on their way to the field captured the whole of the trains of the Spanish army, on the road from Noblejas to Ocaña. The losses of Areizaga’s army were appalling; about 4,000 killed and wounded and 14,000 prisoners. Thirty flags and fifty out of the sixty guns had been captured. When the wrecks of the army had been rallied in the passes, three weeks after the battle, only some 21,000 infantry[103] and 3,000 horse were reported as present. The divisions of Lacy, Jacomé, and Zerain had practically disappeared, and the others had lost from a third to a half of their numbers. The condition of the cavalry was peculiarly disgraceful; as it had never stood to fight, its losses represent not prisoners, for the most part, but mere runaways who never returned to their standards. The French had lost about 90 officers and 1,900 men, nearly all in the divisions of Leval, Werlé, and Girard[104]. The cavalry, which had delivered the great stroke and won the battle, suffered very little. Mortier had been slightly wounded, Leval and Girard severely.

Even allowing for the fact that Areizaga had been the victim of the Junta’s insensate resolve to make an offensive movement on Madrid, it is impossible to speak with patience of his generalship. For a combination of rashness and vacillation it excels that of any other Spanish general during the whole war. His only chance was to catch the enemy before they could concentrate: he succeeded in doing this by his rapid march from the passes to La Guardia. Then he waited three days in deplorable indecision, though there were only 10,000 men between him and Madrid. Next he resumed his advance, but by the circuitous route of Villamanrique, by taking which he lost three days more. Then he halted again, the moment that he found Victor with 20,000 men in his front, though he might still have fought at great advantage. Lastly he retreated, yet so slowly and unskilfully that he was finally brought to action at Ocaña by the 34,000 men of Mortier and Sebastiani. He was sent out to win a battle, since Madrid could not be delivered without one, and knew that he must fight sooner or later, but threw away his favourable opportunities, and then accepted an action when all the chances were against him. For he must have known by this time the miserable quality of his cavalry, yet gave battle in a vast plain, where everything depended on the mounted arm. In the actual moment of conflict he seems to have remained in a hypnotized condition on his church-tower, issuing hardly an order, and allowing the fight to go as it pleased. Yet he was, by all accounts, possessed of personal courage, as he had proved at Alcañiz and elsewhere. Apparently responsibility reduced him to a condition of vacillating idiocy. Perhaps the most surprising fact of the whole business is that the Junta retained him in command after his fiasco, thanked him for his services, and sent him an honorary present—as it had done to Cuesta after Medellin with somewhat better excuse. He was its own man, and it did not throw him over, even when he had proved his perfect incompetence.

To complete the narrative of the deplorable autumn campaign of 1809, it only remains to tell of the doings of Albuquerque and Del Parque. The former played his part with reasonable success; he was ordered to distract the attention of the enemy from the army of La Mancha, and did what he could. Having got some 10,000 men concentrated at Almaraz, he sent one column over the Tagus to demonstrate against the 2nd Corps from beyond the river, and with another threatened the bridge of Talavera from the near side. But Heudelet, now in command of the 2nd Corps, soon found that there was no reality in his demonstration, and that he was not supported by the English, though he had given out that Wellington was close in his rear. After skirmishing around Talavera from the 17th to the 22nd of November, the Duke hastily recrossed the river on hearing the news of Ocaña, and resumed his old positions.

Del Parque’s campaign was more vigorous and more unfortunate. While he lay in the passes above Bejar and Baños, he got early news of the withdrawal of Godinot’s and Marcognet’s troops toward Madrid, when Soult summoned them off to reinforce the main army. He reasoned that since he had now only the 6th Corps, shorn of one of its brigades, in his front, he might repeat the success of Tamames, for Marchand was weaker than he had been in October, while he himself was far stronger. Accordingly he disregarded an order from the Junta to extend his operations southward, and to join Albuquerque in the valley of the Tagus. Instead, he marched once more upon Salamanca on November 18, the day before the disaster of Ocaña. He drove in an outlying brigade of Marchand’s force from Alba de Tormes, and pressed it vigorously back towards the main body. Conscious that with his 10,000 men he could not hope to face 30,000, Marchand promptly evacuated Salamanca on December 19, and retired, just as he had done in October, behind the Douro, concentrating his whole corps at Toro. He sent urgent demands for help both to Kellermann at Valladolid, and to Soult at Madrid. By the time that they arrived Areizaga had been dealt with, and the army in New Castile could spare as many reinforcements as were required. Marcognet’s brigade, the one which had been borrowed from the 6th Corps, was first sent back from Segovia, the point which it had reached in its southward march, and Gazan’s division of the 5th Corps was ordered by Soult to follow.

Meanwhile Del Parque, still ignorant of the disaster in the south, had occupied Salamanca on November 20, and on the following day moved out towards Cantalapiedra and Medina del Campo, with the object of throwing himself between Marchand and Kellermann and the capital. This was an excellent move, and, but for what had happened at Ocaña, might have had considerable results, since the Army of the Left ought to have made an end of the small French force in Old Castile.

Kellermann, however, had seen the danger of Marchand’s retreat to Toro, and had directed him to close in towards the east, and to occupy Medina del Campo, as the strategical point that must be held in order to maintain touch with Madrid. Thus it chanced that on November 23 Labassée’s brigade and four regiments of cavalry, coming from Tordesillas, reached Medina del Campo just as Marcognet’s brigade, returning from Segovia, came into the town from the other side. They had hardly met when the approach of Del Parque’s army along the Salamanca road was reported. The two French brigadiers thought for a moment of fighting, and the cavalry was ordered to press back the Spanish advanced guard. They drove off with ease Anglona’s horsemen, who rode at the head of the long column, but were repulsed by Ballasteros’s infantry, which formed square in good style, and drove them off with a rolling fire of musketry. Seeing that the whole Spanish army was coming up, Marcognet and Labassée then evacuated Medina del Campo, and retired to Valdestillas. With one push more the Spaniards could have cut the line between Valladolid and Madrid.

On November 24 the whole 6th Corps and Kellermann’s dragoons, with a battalion or two from the garrisons of Old Castile, were concentrated at Puente de Duero, with their van at Valdestillas. If attacked, they must have gone behind the Douro and abandoned all touch with Madrid; for there were not more than 16,000 men in line, and they were forced to take the defensive. But, to their surprise, Del Parque made no advance. He had heard on that morning of the disaster of Ocaña, and guessed that reinforcements for Kellermann must already be on the march. Wherefore he resolved to regain the mountains without delay, and to give up Salamanca and his other conquests. With this prudent resolve he broke up from Medina del Campo, and marched hastily away in retreat, making, not for Salamanca, which was too much in the plains to please him, but for Alba de Tormes. He had gained a day’s start by his prompt action, but on the twenty-sixth Kellermann set off in pursuit, leaving orders for the troops that were expected from Madrid to follow him.

On the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh the French cavalry failed even to get in touch with Del Parque’s rearguard, and found nothing but a few stragglers on the road. But on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth the leading squadrons reported that they had come upon the whole Spanish army encamped in a mass around the town of Alba de Tormes. The duke had flattered himself that he had shaken off his pursuers, and was surprised in a most unfortunate position. Two of his divisions (Ballasteros and Castrofuerte) were beyond the Tormes, preparing to bivouac on the upland above it. The other three were quartered in and about the town, while the cavalry was watching the road, but had fallen in so close to the main body that its vedettes gave very short notice of the approach of the enemy. Kellermann was riding with the leading brigade of his cavalry—Lorcet’s chasseurs and hussars; the six regiments of dragoons were close behind him, so that he had over 3,000 sabres in hand; but the infantry was ten miles to the rear. If he waited for it, Del Parque would have time to cross the river and take up a defensive position behind it. The French general, therefore, resolved to risk a most hazardous experiment, an attack with unsupported cavalry upon a force of all arms, in the hope of detaining it till the infantry should come up. The Spaniards were getting into line of battle in a hurry, Losada’s division on the right, Belveder’s and La Carrera’s on the left, the cavalry—1,200 sabres at most—in their front. The divisions beyond the river were only beginning to assemble, and would take some time to recross the narrow bridge: but 18,000 men were on the right bank prepared to fight.

Without a moment’s delay Kellermann ordered Lorcet’s brigade to charge the Spanish right and centre: it was followed by the six regiments of dragoons in three successive lines, and the whole mass came down like a whirlwind upon Del Parque’s front, scattering his cavalry to the winds, and breaking the whole of Losada’s and the right of Belveder’s divisions. A battery of artillery, and nearly 2,000 prisoners were taken. The wrecks of the broken divisions fell back into Alba de Tormes, and jammed the bridge, thus preventing the divisions on the further side from recrossing it. Kellermann then rallied his squadrons, and led them against La Carrera’s division and the remaining battalions of that of Belveder. These troops, formed in brigade-squares upon a rising ground, held out gallantly and repulsed the charge. But they were cut off from the bridge, which they could only reach by a dangerous flank movement over rough ground. By continually threatening to repeat his attacks, Kellermann kept them from moving off, till, two hours and a half after the action had begun, the French infantry and guns commenced to come up. La Carrera saw that it would be fatal to await them, and bade his division retreat and reach the bridge as best it could. This was naturally done in disorder, and with some loss; but it was already growing dusk, and the bulk of the Spanish left got away.

While the Spaniards were defiling over the bridge, Marchand’s leading brigade attacked Alba, out of which it drove some rallied troops of Losada’s division, who held the town to cover La Carrera’s retreat. This was done with ease, for Del Parque had not brought over his two intact divisions, preferring to use them as a second line behind which the others could retire. Alba was stormed, and two guns, which had been placed behind a barricade at its main exit, were taken by the French.

Here the fighting stopped: the Spaniards had lost five flags, nine guns, most of their baggage, and about 3,000 killed or taken—no very ruinous deductions from an army of 32,000 men. The French casualties were less than 300 in all[105]. Del Parque was determined not to fight again next morning, and bade his army make off under cover of the night. The disorder that followed was frightful: the three divisions that had been in the battle dispersed, and went off in all directions, some towards Ciudad Rodrigo, others towards Tamames, others by the hill-road that leads towards Tala and the Pass of Baños. Many of the raw Leonese troops, though they had not been engaged, also left their colours in the dark[106]. It was a full month before Del Parque could collect his whole army, which, when it had been reorganized, was found to number 26,000 men, despite all its misfortunes. It would seem, therefore, that beside the losses in the battle some 3,000 men must have gone off to their homes. The duke fixed his head quarters at San Martin de Trebejos in the Sierra de Gata, and dispersed his infantry in cantonments about Bejar, Fuenteguinaldo, and Miranda de Castanar. Having only the ruined region around Coria and Plasencia, and the small district about Ciudad Rodrigo, to feed them, these troops suffered dreadful privations during the winter, living on half-rations eked out with edible acorns. By the middle of January they had lost 9,000 men from fever, dysentery, and starvation.

Despite all this, it is fair to say that Del Parque’s campaign contrasts most favourably with that of Areizaga. He showed a laudable prudence when he twice evacuated Salamanca rather than fight a battle in the plain. His victory of Tamames was most creditable, showing that when prudently conducted, and ranged in a well-chosen hill-position, his army could give a good account of itself. But for the disaster of Alba de Tormes his record might be considered excellent. There, it is true, he committed a grave mistake, by separating his army into two halves by the river when his enemy was in pursuit. But in his defence it may be urged that his cavalry ought to have had vedettes out for ten or fifteen miles to the rear, and to have given him long warning of the approach of the French. And when the enemy’s horse did make its sudden appearance, it was contrary to the laws of probability that it would attack at once, without waiting for its infantry and guns. Kellermann’s headlong charge was a violation of all rules, a stroke of inspiration which could not have been foreseen. If the Spanish cavalry had been of any use whatever, and if Losada’s division had only known how to form square in a hurry, it ought to have been beaten off. But the resisting-power of a Spanish army was always a doubtful quantity. Kellermann resolved to take the risk of attacking, and was rewarded by a victory on which he was not entitled to reckon. He would probably have justified his tactics by urging that failure could have no severe penalty, for the Spaniards could not pursue him if he were repulsed, while success would bring splendid results. This was true: and if his infantry had been five miles more to the front, he might have captured the whole of La Carrera’s division.

SECTION XVIII

THE CONQUEST OF ANDALUSIA

CHAPTER I

THE CONSEQUENCES OF OCAÑA. DECEMBER 1809–JANUARY 1810

The news of the disaster of Ocaña gave a death-blow to the Central Junta. Its attempt to win back its lost credit by an offensive campaign against Madrid having ended in such a lamentable fashion, there was nothing left for it but to acquiesce in its own supersession by the oft-discussed national Cortes. But that assembly was not to meet till March 1, 1810—a date still four months in the future,—and even its form and constitution had not yet been settled. For it would have been absurd to have called it together in the ancient and unrepresentative shape,—a legacy from the time of Charles V,—in which it had been wont to meet under the Bourbon kings. Many regions had few or no members; decayed mediaeval towns of Old Castile had more deputies than the most populous provinces. Moreover, it had yet to be settled how that larger half of the realm which was now occupied by the French was to elect its representatives. The commission was still sitting to determine these vital points, and in this moment of dismay the day of the assembly of the Cortes seemed very far distant. The French might be following hard on the heels of Areizaga’s broken host, and might enter Seville, long before it had been decided what sort of a Cortes was to take over the power from the hands of the discredited Central Junta.

That most unhappy government, therefore, had to face both an acute constitutional crisis and an acute military crisis. Something had to be done without delay to satisfy public opinion concerning the convocation of the Cortes, or the revolution which had been checked by Wellesley’s aid in September would certainly burst forth again. But even more pressing was the necessity for rallying and reinforcing the army which had been crushed at Ocaña, before the French should resume their advance. The actual administrative power was for the moment in the hand of the first of those temporary executive committees to which the Junta had agreed to delegate its authority by the decree of September 19. This body, composed of six members, among whom La Romana was numbered, had come into office on November 1. The rest of the Junta were only too eager to throw on their comrades the weight of the responsibility which should have fallen upon them all. The executive committee was accused on all sides of slow and feeble action. It published, as soon as possible, the details concerning the constitution of the forthcoming Cortes, which (in pursuance of the recommendation of the commission of inquiry) was to consist of two classes of members, elected representatives who were to be allotted in due proportion to all the provinces of the realm, and ‘privilegiados’ or chosen individuals from the nobility and the higher clergy. The American colonies were to be given members no less than the mother country, but their numbers were to be small. Such an arrangement seemed to foreshadow a double-chambered legislature, resembling that of Great Britain, and British precedents had no doubt been running in the minds of the framers of the constitution. But—as we shall see—the Cortes, when it actually met, took no such shape. The mandate for the election of the assembly was duly published; and so far public opinion was to a certain extent satisfied, for it was clear that the Central Junta was at last about to abdicate. But though the majority of the Spanish people were contented to wait, provided that the executive committee should show signs of rising to the occasion, and doing its best as an interim government, there were some politicians who saw in the crisis only an opportunity for pushing their private ambitions. Those veteran intriguers, the Conde de Montijo and Francisco Palafox, undismayed by the failure of the September plot, began to make arrangements with the Seville demagogues for a fresh attempt at a coup d’état. Their plots seem to have distracted Romana and his colleagues from their obvious military duties—the conspirator at home is always the enemy who looms most large before the eyes of a weak government. But after some search both were discovered, arrested and imprisoned.

Meanwhile the executive committee, with the Junta’s approval, issued a long series of edicts concerning the reorganization of the army, and the defence of Andalusia from the French attack, which might at any moment begin. The ‘Army of the Centre,’ of which Areizaga was still, strange to say, left in command, was to be raised to 100,000 men by a strenuous conscription. The press was to be all-embracing, married men, novices in monasteries, persons in minor orders, only sons of widows, all the classes hitherto exempt, were to be subject to it. To provide funds the clergy were ordered to send in to the mint all church plate save such as was strictly necessary for the celebration of the sacraments, and all private citizens were bidden to contribute one half of their table-silver. In order to provide teams for the artillery—which had lost nearly all its horses and guns at Ocaña—a strict requisition for draught animals was begun all over Andalusia. Engineers were sent out to fortify all the passes of the Sierra Morena, with permission to exact forced labour from the peasantry of the hill country. Three members of the Junta—Rabe, Riquelme and Campo Sagrado—were sent to Areizaga’s head quarters at La Carolina as ‘field deputies,’ to stir up or support the energy of the commander-in-chief. This was a device borrowed from the practice of the French Revolution, and had no better effect than might have been expected. As in 1793, the ‘Representatives on Mission’ were either useless or positively harmful. They either wished to thrust amateurish plans of their own upon the military men, or at least distracted them by constant inquisitorial supervision.

On the whole the effect of this volley of violent decrees was small. With six months to carry them out they might, no doubt, have produced great results. But within nine weeks after the disaster of Ocaña the French had commenced their attack, and in that space of time little had been accomplished. The money was beginning to come in, the recruits were being collected, but had not been armed or clothed, still less drilled. Of the fortifications in the passes many had been sketched out, but only a few had begun to take tangible shape. To man them there was still only the wrecks of Areizaga’s old army, which had hardly begun to receive its drafts of conscripts. Its whole force at the New Year did not exceed 30,000 men, and these were distributed over a front of more than 150 miles, for not only the main group of passes in front of La Carolina had to be watched, but also the eastern ingress into Andalusia by Baeza and Ubeda, and the western defiles from Almaden and Benalcazar, which lead directly down on to Cordova. The whole country-side was in a state of desperate turmoil and excitement, yet very little in the way of practical defence had been completed by the middle of January.

Meanwhile, in accordance with the ridiculous constitution of the ‘executive committee,’ half of its members went out of office at the New Year, and were succeeded by other individuals of the Junta. Among those superseded was La Romana, who was now directed to go off to Valencia as captain-general. The Junta seems to have considered that he would be less dangerous in company with his brother José Caro in that province, than when posted at the seat of government, with his brother to back him by threats of Valencian military interference. Yet La Romana did not depart, and was still lingering at Seville when the French crossed the Sierra Morena.

There was a larger military problem before the Junta and the new ‘executive committee’ than the mere defence of Andalusia. The whole arrangement of the national armies had to be recast in consequence of the black day of Ocaña. The corps of Del Parque and Albuquerque, as well as all the smaller outlying bodies of troops, had to receive new orders. Above all it was necessary to discover what were the plans of Wellington, for the present position of the British army at Badajoz was the most important factor in the whole situation. As long as it remained there, in support of the small force under Albuquerque which was guarding the passages of the Tagus at Almaraz and Arzobispo, the western section of the front of Andalusia was secure. The defence of the eastern section, too, was in no small degree helped by the fact that Wellington’s solid troops were in a position to march up the Guadiana, and to threaten the flank of any French army which might intend to attack the Despeña-Perros, or any other of the passes which lead from La Mancha down to the Andalusian plains.

It was a terribly disquieting fact for the Junta that, even before Ocaña had been fought and lost, Wellington had begun to announce his intention of leaving Badajoz and retiring within the boundaries of Portugal. He had paid a flying visit to Seville on the 2nd-4th[107] of November, just as Areizaga’s unhappy advance into La Mancha was commencing. The project had been concealed from him[108], and when he learnt of it he had expressed his entire disapprobation of it, and had refused to give any promise to support the Spanish armies in their offensive movements. For this reason he had been bitterly provoked when Areizaga and Albuquerque both wrote him, a little later, to say that they had been promised the assistance of his army by the Junta[109]. He had consistently prophesied ill of the adventure, and had recorded his opinion that both Del Parque and Areizaga would probably lose their armies. In a dispatch of November 20, six days before the news of Ocaña reached him, he had announced his definite intention of leaving Badajoz with the main body of his army, and transferring himself to the north of the Tagus, where, by posting himself in the Portuguese province of Beira, he would cover the high-roads to Lisbon from Old Castile. This decision was founded on his belief that when the French had made an end of Areizaga and Del Parque—a contingency which he regarded as almost certain[110]—they would strike at Lisbon and not at Seville. He had good reasons for holding this view; it was exactly consonant with Napoleon’s own plan, which was only abandoned by reason of King Joseph’s pleadings with his brother. For, from the French standpoint, it was far more profitable to conquer Portugal and to expel the British army from the Peninsula, than to overrun Andalusia. Wellington and his troops formed the one solid nucleus of resistance which still remained; it was clear that the dispersion of the miserable wrecks of Areizaga’s host would present no difficulty. And not only was it advisable, from the Emperor’s point of view, to destroy the most formidable hostile force still surviving, but the balance of strategical advantage was all in favour of subduing Portugal, before Andalusia should be invaded. For Portugal flanks the attack on southern Spain, and a good army based upon it could check the advance on Seville and Cadiz by demonstrations aimed at Valladolid or Madrid, which might wreck or delay the conquest of Andalusia. It may be objected that Andalusia also flanks the attack on Portugal; but the objection had no validity since the day of Ocaña, as the Junta had now no longer any striking force in hand. It would be many months before Areizaga’s host was in a proper condition for undertaking even cautious defensive operations. A French attack on Portugal, therefore, would be practically unmolested by external interference.

At the present moment the strength of the French troops in Spain was not sufficient to provide two armies for offensive purposes, the one destined to march on Seville, the other on Lisbon. The numbers at the front had not appreciably increased since the autumn, though already the reinforcements which the Emperor had set upon the march, after concluding his peace with Austria, had begun to appear at Bayonne, and to cross the Bidassoa. But in December and January the roads were bad, the days short, and provisions hard to procure. Hence Wellington reckoned that, till the spring should arrive, the allies would have to face no more than the forces which were already opposed to them. When, however, the campaigning season should have come round, and the reinforcements from Germany should have been incorporated with the old Army of Spain, he thought that Portugal would be the enemy’s main objective. It was therefore his intention to withdraw his army, or at least the greater part of it, from Spanish Estremadura, and to arrange it so as to cover Lisbon, even though by making this movement he was weakening the left flank of the defence of Andalusia. If he had to choose between the interests of Portugal and those of Spain, he was prepared to sacrifice the latter. His reasons were simple: (1) he considered Portugal more important in the grand strategy of the defence of the Peninsula than Andalusia; (2) he regarded it as more defensible, and he had already—as we shall presently see—sketched out and commenced the construction of his great lines of Torres Vedras, in which his trust as a final impregnable stronghold was already fixed; (3) he held that although Great Britain was pledged to assist both Spain and Portugal, yet her moral obligation to the latter was far more binding, since Portugal had placed herself entirely in the hands of her allies, had put her army at their disposal, and had contributed all her resources to the common cause, while the Spanish Junta had shown a jealous and suspicious spirit, had refused to show confidence in Great Britain, and had persisted in carrying out a military policy of its own, which led to a consistent series of disasters; (4) the Portuguese army, though its fighting power was not as yet ascertained, could be at least relied upon for obedience; experience had shown that the promises of the Spaniards could not be trusted, and that any campaign undertaken in their company might be wrecked by some incalculable piece of slackness or miscalculation[111].

Accordingly on November 20 Wellington declared his intention of withdrawing his army—save one single division—to the north of the Tagus, and of placing it at various points in the province of Beira, so as to cover all the practicable roads to Lisbon from the side of Old Castile. On the twenty-sixth he sent formal notice of his intentions to Seville, well knowing the storm of indignation that would be roused thereby. At the same time he advised the Junta to reinforce Albuquerque’s army of Estremadura with troops drawn from Del Parque, adding that to keep Albuquerque well to the front, in his present positions at Almaraz and Arzobispo, was the best means of protecting the western approaches of Andalusia. Del Parque’s corps, whose reason for existence was the ‘containing’ of the French troops in Old Castile, would be able to spare troops to strengthen the army of Estremadura, because the English host, in its new position, would be behind it, and opposed to the forces under Kellermann and Marchand, which had hitherto had nothing in their front but the ‘Army of the Left.’ Moreover, it would be an appreciable relief to Del Parque, who was finding the greatest difficulty in feeding his army in the thinly-peopled mountain region between Ciudad Rodrigo and Bejar, to be freed from the burden of maintaining one or two of his five divisions.

The Junta, as might have been expected, took Wellington’s determination to remove from Badajoz with the worst of graces. They could hardly have failed to do so, when one of his main reasons for departing, barely concealed in his dispatches to them, was his fear of getting involved in their operations, and his reluctance to place his troops in line with the Spanish armies. Nor could they have been expected to agree with his strategical view that Lisbon, not Cadiz, would be the main objective of the grand advance of the French armies, when the spring should come round. To every man or body of men their own possible dangers naturally seem more imminent and more interesting than those of their neighbours. The departure of the English from Badajoz was formally announced to the Junta on November 26, and began to be carried out on December 8, when the brigade of Guards marched for Portalegre, and was followed on successive days by the other brigades of the army. By the 24th of December Wellington and his staff alone were left in the Estremaduran fortress, and next day his head quarters were at Elvas, across the frontier. The second division, under Hill, halted at Abrantes, where Wellington intended to leave it, as the nucleus of a covering force which was to guard Lisbon from any possible attack from the south side of the Tagus. The rest of the army pursued its way across the mountains of Beira, and by January 3, 1810, head quarters were at Coimbra, and the main body of the British troops was beginning to take up billets in the small towns of the valley of the Mondego.

Convinced that no more was to be hoped from Wellington, the Executive Committee issued their orders for a new arrangement of the line of defence of Andalusia. Albuquerque was ordered to leave no more than a small corps of observation on the Tagus, in front of Almaraz, and to bring back the main body of the army of Estremadura to the line of the Guadiana, in order to link his right wing to the left of Areizaga’s forces. On December 24 his new head quarters were at Don Benito, and he had some 8,000 men collected there and at the neighbouring town of Merida; the rest of his small army was furnishing the garrison of Badajoz, and the detached force on the Tagus, whose duty was to watch the movements of the French 2nd Corps, which still lay in its old post at Talavera, and remained entirely quiescent.

From Albuquerque’s post at Don Benito there was a gap of seventy-five miles to the next force in the Spanish line. This consisted of the wrecks of the two old divisions of Copons and Zerain from the army of Areizaga, not more than 4,500 strong[112]. They were encamped at Pozo Blanco and at Almaden, the mining town on the Alcudia, where the frontiers of Estremadura, Andalusia, and La Mancha meet. This place lies near the northern exit of the two passes, the Puerto Blanco and Puerto Rubio which lead down from La Mancha on to Cordova, the one by Villaharta, the other by Villanueva de la Jara and Adamuz. Both are difficult, both pass through a desolate and uninhabited country, but either of them might conceivably serve for the passage of an army. Sixty miles east of Almaden was the main body of the rallied Army of the Centre, occupying the group of passes which lie around the high-road from Madrid to Andalusia. Head quarters were at La Carolina, the central point upon which the routes from most of these passes converge. About 13,000 men were disposed in front, covering the main chaussée through the Despeña-Perros, and the side defiles of the Puerto del Rey and the Puerto del Muradal. Here Areizaga had concentrated the remains of the divisions of Zayas, Castejon, Giron and Lacy, of which the last two were mere wrecks, while the two former counted about 4,000 bayonets apiece. Finally, some fifteen miles off to the right, the remnants of the divisions of Vigodet and Jacomé, perhaps 6,000 men in all, covered the two easternmost passes from La Mancha, those of Aldea Quemada and Villa Manrique, which descend not upon La Carolina, but on Ubeda and Linares, the towns at the headwaters of the Guadalquivir in the extreme north-eastern angle of the Andalusian plain. Areizaga’s artillery was all in the passes, placed in the various new entrenchments which were being thrown up. His cavalry had for the most part been sent back to recruit and reform itself in the interior of the province, being useless in the mountains.

The mere description of this disposition of forces is sufficient to show the hopeless condition of the defence of Andalusia. Areizaga was trying to cover every possible line by which the French might advance, with the result that his army and that of Albuquerque were strung out on a front of 150 miles, and could not concentrate 15,000 men on any single point. The passes which they were trying to guard were not only numerous, but in several cases very practicable, where roads lay not between cliffs or precipices, but over slopes which could be ascended by infantry on each side of the pass. The fortifications and the troops holding them could be turned by enemies who took the trouble to climb the side acclivities. It was clear that if the French chose to attack the Sierra Morena with no more than the 60,000 men who had been concentrated after the battle of Ocaña, they could bring an overwhelming force to bear on any one or two of the passes which they might select, while leaving the garrisons of the rest alone, or threatening them with trifling demonstrations. If the enemy should choose to strike by Almaden at Cordova, the Spanish centre and right wing would be cut off from their retreat on Seville, and would have to take refuge in the kingdom of Murcia. If the Despeña-Perros and its neighbours should turn out to be the selected objective, Areizaga’s right wing must suffer the same fate. And, if driven from the passes, the army would have to encounter, in the broad plain behind, the overpowering force of French cavalry which King Joseph could bring up. The problem set before the defence was a hopeless one, and most of the generals under Areizaga were aware of the fact—as indeed were the rank and file. Disaster was bound to follow if the enemy managed his business with ordinary prudence.

[Note]: This shows the old uniform of Charles IV. The Line regiments had white, the Foreign and Light regiments blue, coats. Both wore white breeches and black gaiters: the plume and facings varied in colour for each regiment.

SECTION XVIII: CHAPTER II

THE CONQUEST OF ANDALUSIA. KING JOSEPH AND HIS PLANS

When considering the action of the French after the victory of Ocaña, it is necessary to remember that King Joseph and Soult were not in the position of ordinary invaders, who have just succeeded in demolishing the last army of their enemy. In wars of a normal type the victor knows that the vanquished will sue for terms when further resistance appears hopeless; he proceeds to dictate the cessions of territory or payments of indemnities that he thinks proper, as the price of peace. But it was not a profitable treaty which Napoleon desired: he had put it out of his own power to end the war in such a fashion, when he declared his brother King of Spain. For him there was no Spanish government in existence save that which he had set up at Madrid: the Central Junta, and the Cortes when it should meet, were mere illegal assemblies, with which he could not deign to enter into negotiations. It was now perfectly clear that the Spaniards would never submit of their own accord. Their position in December 1809, desperate as it might be, was no worse than it had been in the March of the same year. Areizaga’s army had suffered no more at Ocaña than had those of Cuesta and Cartaojal nine months before, on the disastrous fields of Medellin and Ciudad Real. Indeed, there were probably more men actually in line to defend Andalusia in December than there had been in April. Moreover, in the early spring Soult had been in the full career of conquest in Portugal, and nothing save Cradock’s insignificant force appeared to prevent his onward march to Lisbon. At mid-winter, on the other hand, the flank of Andalusia was covered by Wellington’s victorious army, and by the reorganized Portuguese host of Beresford. If the Junta had refused to listen to the insidious advances of Sotelo in April[113], there was no reason to suppose that it would lend a ready ear to any similar advocate of submission in December. Indeed, its every action showed a resolve to fight out the losing game to the end.

Joseph Bonaparte would never be King of Spain till every province was held down by French bayonets. Not only must each corner of the land be conquered, but after conquest it must be garrisoned. For, where there was no garrison, insurrection burst out at once, and the weary process of pacification had to be repeated.

It was this last fact that restrained King Joseph from following up his pursuit of the wrecks of the Spanish army to the Sierra Morena, and the gates of Seville, on the morning after Ocaña. To make up the host that had defeated Areizaga, and the other smaller force that was dealing with Del Parque in Leon, the King had been forced to concentrate all his divisions, and the consequence had been that the control of the broad tracts behind him had been lost. We have already had occasion to mention[114] that throughout Old Castile and Leon, the open country was now in the hands of the guerrilleros, who had been growing in force and numbers ever since the time of Talavera, and had risen to the height of their confidence after the day of Tamames, and Del Parque’s repeated occupation of Salamanca. Navarre, and many parts of New Castile were equally disturbed, and Aragon, which Suchet had tamed during the autumn, was beginning once more to move. There were no French troops in the disturbed regions save scanty garrisons at Burgos, Valladolid, Benavente, Avila, Segovia, Guadalajara, Palencia, Tudela, Tafalla, and a few other strategic points. These were cut off from each other, and from Madrid, save when a governor sent out his messenger with an escort many hundreds strong, and even such a force had often to fight its way through half a dozen bands before reaching its destination. The garrisons themselves were not always safe: so powerful were the bands of some of the guerrillero chiefs that they aspired to waging regular war, and did not confine themselves to blocking the roads, or intercepting couriers and convoys. The Empecinado, whose sphere of activity lay on the borders of Old and New Castile, got possession of Guadalajara for a day, though he retired when reinforcements from Madrid were reported to be approaching. Somewhat later, the younger Mina—‘the Student,’ as he was called to distinguish him from his more celebrated uncle Espoz, stormed the town of Tafalla, and shut up the remains of its garrison in its castle, while the flying-columns of the governor of Navarre were seeking him in every other direction. He too, like the Empecinado, had to seek safety in retreat and dispersion, when his exploit drew in upon him forces sent from Suchet’s army of Aragon.

The activity of the guerrilleros did not merely constitute a military danger for King Joseph. It affected him in another, and an equally vexatious, fashion, by cutting off nearly all his sources of revenue. While the open country was in the hands of the insurgents, he could raise neither imposts nor requisitions from it. The only regular income that he could procure during the later months of 1809 was that which came in from the local taxes of Madrid, and the few other large towns of which he was in secure possession. And save in the capital itself, his agents and intendants had to fight hard with the military governors to secure even this meagre pittance[115]. The King could not command a quarter of the sum which he required to pay the ordinary expenses of government. His courtiers and ministers, French and Spanish, failed to receive their salaries, and the Spanish army, which he was busily striving to form, could not be clothed or armed, much less paid. Nothing vexed Joseph more than this: he wished to make himself independent of his brother’s generals, by raising a large force of his own, which should be at his personal disposition. He formed the cadre of regiment after regiment, and filled them with deserters from the foreign troops of the Junta, and with any prisoners who could be induced to enlist under his banners in order to avoid transportation to France. But the recruits, when sent to join the new regiments, disappeared for the most part within a few weeks. Joseph thought that it was from lack of pay and proper sustenance, and raged at the idea that, but for the want of money, he might have at his disposition a formidable army of his own. But he deceived himself: the ‘juramentados’ had for the most part no desire save to desert and rejoin their old colours: the real renegades were few. In the ranks of the Junta’s army the soldier was even worse clothed, fed, and paid than in that of Joseph. No amount of pampering would have turned the King’s Spanish levies into loyal servants.

Pending the reduction to order of the country-side of the two Castiles, which he vainly hoped to see accomplished during the next six months, Joseph found only one expedient for raising money. It was a ruinous one, and could not be repeated. This was the confiscation of property belonging to all persons who were in the service of the Junta, and of all the religious orders. This would have given him vast sums, if only he could have found buyers. But it was not easy to persuade any one to pay ready cash for lands overrun by the guerrilleros, or for houses in towns which were practically in a state of siege, and were also subject to a grinding taxation. Property of immense value had to be alienated for wholly inadequate sums. The afrancesados, whom Joseph was most anxious to conciliate, got such payment as he could afford, mainly in the form of vain grants of property which they could not turn to account. The only ready money which was in circulation was that which came from the coining down, at the Madrid mint, of the considerable amount of plate belonging to the monasteries and the churches on which the King had laid hands. Naturally, he was regarded as a sacrilegious robber by his unwilling subjects—though few, or none, murmured when the Central Junta filled its exchequer by similar expedients. But the Junta had not decreed the abolition of the religious orders—it only purported to be raising a patriotic loan from their resources. A minister of Joseph sums up the situation sufficiently well in three sentences. ‘Spanish public opinion was inexorable: it rejected everything coming from us—even benefits: thus the King and his councillors spent themselves in fruitless labours. Nothing answered their expectations, and the void in the Treasury, the worst danger, showed no sign of diminution. On the contrary, the financial distress increased every day, and the unpleasant means which we were compelled to employ in order to supply the never-ceasing wants of the army completely alienated the nation from us[116].’

The orders issued by the King and Soult after the battle of Ocaña, show that they had no immediate intention of pursuing Areizaga’s routed host, and entering Andalusia at its heels—tempting though such a policy might be from the purely military point of view. After Victor and the 1st Corps had joined him, on the day following the battle, Joseph had nearly 60,000 men in hand. But his first move was to disperse this formidable army: Gazan’s division of Mortier’s corps was at once hurried off towards the north, to reinforce Kellermann in Leon—for the battle of Alba de Tormes had not yet taken place, and it was thought that the 6th Corps needed prompt assistance. Laval’s division of Sebastiani’s corps was detached in another direction, being told off to escort to Madrid, and afterwards to Burgos and Vittoria, the vast mass of prisoners taken at Ocaña. Milhaud, with his own dragoons, and an infantry brigade taken from Sebastiani’s corps, was directed to push eastwards by way of Tarancon, and then to march on Cuenca, where it was reported that many of the fugitives from Areizaga’s army had rallied. The brigade of Dessolles’ division which had been present at Ocaña and Joseph’s own troops returned to Madrid, in company with their master. When the capital was again adequately garrisoned, numerous flying-columns were sent out from it, to clear the roads, and disperse the guerrilleros. Mortier, with that part of the 5th Corps which had not been detached under Gazan, was drawn back to Toledo. Thus of all the troops which had been concentrated on November 20th, only Victor’s corps and the Polish division, with the cavalry brigade of the 4th Corps, were retained in La Mancha, facing the Sierra Morena. The 1st Corps was pushed forward to Ciudad Real and its neighbourhood, with its advanced cavalry watching the passes. The Poles remained at Ocaña and La Guardia, with Perreymond’s three regiments of light horse in front of them at Madridejos[117].

In the dispatch which detailed to the Minister of War at Paris this disposition of the army, Soult explained his reasons for holding back. It was a more pressing necessity to restore order in the provinces of the interior than to pursue the wrecks of Areizaga’s force, which was so completely dispersed that no further danger need be feared from it. Before undertaking any large general scheme of operation, the King thought it best to consult his imperial brother as to his wishes. It was rumoured that Napoleon himself might appear on the scene within a few weeks, and it was certain that the first columns of reinforcements from Germany, which might prove to be the heralds of his approach, were just about to cross the Bidassoa. Moreover, it would be prudent to discover what had become of Albuquerque and of the English, before any great move to the southward was made, as also to make an end of the army of Del Parque, by means of the reinforcements which had just been sent to Kellermann[118].

Within three weeks the situation had changed, and many of the reasons which had induced the King and Soult to adopt a waiting policy had disappeared. On November 28th, as we have already seen, Kellermann routed Del Parque at Alba de Tormes, though he had not yet received the succours which Gazan was bringing up to his aid. The Army of the Left being no longer a source of danger, Kellermann not only sent orders to Gazan—who had reached Segovia—to return to New Castile, since he was no longer wanted in the North, but presently sent back to the King Rey’s brigade of Dessolles’ division which had been lent him early in November. Thus 10,000 men who had been detached came back under the King’s control[119], and were once more available for offensive operations.

Still more important was the fact that in the first days of December the reinforcements from Germany had at last begun to cross the Pyrenees, and were arriving in Navarre and Biscay in enormous numbers. Two strong divisions, commanded by Loison and Reynier and counting more than 20,000 bayonets, had already appeared, and the head of the interminable column which followed them had reached Bayonne. It was certain that at least 90,000 men were on the march, to fill up the void in Old Castile which had been causing the King and Soult so much trouble. The roads would soon be cleared, the isolated garrisons relieved, and the communications with Madrid made safe. The newly arrived generals had received orders to sweep every valley on their southward march, and to disperse every band of guerrilleros[120]. Another possible source of danger, which had preoccupied the minds of Joseph and his Major-general after Ocaña, had also been removed. The English had made no forward movement towards the Tagus; they were reported to be still quiescent at Badajoz, and rumours (which afterwards turned out to be correct) had already reached the French head quarters, to the effect that Wellington was just about to retire into Portugal. Moreover, Milhaud’s expedition to Tarancon and Cuenca, and the excursions of the flying-columns sent out from Madrid, had all proved successful. The insurgents had been dispersed with ease, wherever they had been met with.

Of all the reasons for delay which were valid on November 20th there was now none left unremoved save the most important of all. The Emperor had not yet made his intentions known; though pressed to declare his will by every letter sent by his brother or by Soult, he gave no answer as to a general plan of campaign. Several of his dispatches had reached Madrid: they were full of details as to the troops which he was sending across the Pyrenees, they contained some advice as to finance, and some rebukes for the King concerning petty matters of administration[121], but there was no permission, still less any order, to invade Andalusia or Portugal; nor did Napoleon deign to state that he was, or was not, coming to Spain in person. It was only when Joseph received the first dispatch opening up the matter of the divorce of Josephine[122], that he was able to guess that, with such an affair on hand, his brother would not set out for the Peninsula during the winter or the early spring.

By the middle of December Joseph had made up his mind that it would be politic to attack Andalusia without delay. He had won over Soult to his ideas—the Marshal having now abandoned the plan, which he had urged so strongly in the autumn, that Lisbon not Seville should be the objective of the next French advance. It is easy to understand the King’s point of view—he wished rather to complete the conquest of his own realm, by subduing its wealthiest and most populous province, than to do his brother’s work in Portugal, where he had no personal interest. It is less obvious why Soult concurred with him—as a great strategist he should have envisaged the situation from the military rather than the political point of view. Apparently Joseph had won him over by giving him all that he asked, and treating him with effusive courtesy: their old quarrels of the preceding summer had been entirely forgotten. At any rate Soult had now become the ardent advocate of the invasion of Andalusia, though—as his predecessor Jourdan tersely puts it—‘the English army being now the only organized force in a state to face the imperial troops, and its presence in the Peninsula being the thing that sustained the Spanish government and gave confidence to the Spanish people, I imagine that we ought to have set ourselves to destroy that army, rather than to have disseminated our troops in garrisoning the whole surface of Spain[123].’ The same thought was in the Emperor’s mind when he wrote in January—too late to stop the Andalusian expedition—that ‘the only danger in Spain is the English army; the rest are partisans who can never hold the field against us[124].’

On the 14th of December, 1809, Soult at last made a formal appeal, in a dispatch to Berthier, for leave to commence the march on Seville. ‘At no time since the Spanish War began,’ he wrote, ‘have circumstances been so favourable for invading Andalusia, and it is probable that such a movement would have the most advantageous results. I have already informed your Excellency that preparations would be made for this movement, while we waited for his Majesty to deign to make known to us his supreme will.’ Soult adds that if only Loison’s division of the reinforcements may be brought up to Burgos, and a second division sent to Saragossa, in order to free Suchet for field service, the invasion can be begun, as soon as the army in New Castile has completed its equipment and received its drafts.

No direct reply was received to this dispatch, nor to several subsequent communications, in which Soult and Joseph set forth the arrangements which they were making, always subject to the Imperial approval, for concentrating an army for the Andalusian expedition. Strange as it may appear, it was only in a letter written on January 31, 1810, when the King had already crossed the Sierra Morena, that Napoleon vouchsafed a word concerning the all-important problem[125]. It is clear that he had ample time to have stopped it, if such had been his will; the ultimate responsibility, therefore, lay with him. But he refrained from ordering it, or from approving it, thus reserving to himself all the possibilities of ex-post-facto criticism. Since no prohibition came, Joseph made up his mind to strike; it was natural that he should be fascinated by the idea of conquering in person the one great province of Spain which remained intact. A brilliant campaign, in which he would figure as commander-in-chief as well as king, might at last convince the Spaniards of his capacity. He was prepared to play the part of a merciful and generous conqueror. At the worst the revenues of the wealthy Andalusia would be a godsend to his depleted treasury.

Two plans were drawn up for the invasion. The first was more cautious, and more consonant with the strict rules of strategy. The second was bolder and promised more immediate results. According to the first the King was to concentrate his main army in La Mancha, and to threaten the passes, while two great flanking columns carried out the preliminary conquest of Estremadura and Valencia. Mortier was to march with the 5th and 2nd Corps upon Badajoz, to crush Albuquerque, and to occupy the valley of the Guadiana. Simultaneously Suchet was to make a push from Aragon into Valencia with the bulk of his corps, while his place at Saragossa was to be taken by a large force drawn from the newly-arrived reinforcements from France. Only when Badajoz and Valencia had fallen, and Suchet and Mortier could advance parallel with him on either flank, was the King to march against Seville. The weak point of the scheme was that either Badajoz or Valencia might make a long resistance; if their garrisons fought like that of Gerona the central advance on Andalusia might be delayed for an indefinite time.

The second plan, the one that was adopted, was to leave the 2nd Corps alone to watch Albuquerque and Estremadura, to order Suchet to advance against Valencia, but to strike straight at Seville, without waiting for the completion of either the Estremaduran or the Valencian operations. In the original draft for this campaign[126], nearly the whole of the King’s army was to concentrate at Almaden and Ciudad Real, and from thence to strike straight at Cordova, by the difficult and little-used passes of the central Sierra Morena. Meanwhile Sebastiani, with no more than a single infantry division and Milhaud’s dragoons, was to demonstrate against the main group of passes in front of La Carolina, along the line of the high-road from Madrid, so as to distract the attention of the Spaniards from the real point of attack. More than 50,000 men were to descend suddenly on Cordova, for the whole of the 1st and 5th Corps, Dessolles’ Reserve division, the King’s Guard, and Latour-Maubourg’s dragoons, were to march in a mass by the unexpected route via Almaden, Villanueva de la Jara, and Adamuz. The Spanish centre would undoubtedly be broken, and it was probable that Cordova, Seville, and Cadiz would be carried by the first rush, for Areizaga’s army would be cut off from them and driven eastward towards Murcia.

The plan, an admirable one from the point of view of strategy, had to be abandoned, for it was found that the country between Almaden and Cordova was so absolutely barren and uninhabited, and the roads so bad, that it would be impossible to carry a very large body of troops across it at mid-winter. It was doubtful whether the passes were practicable for artillery; it was certain that no food could be obtained, and the train required to carry rations for 50,000 men would be so large and heavy that it would probably stick fast in the mountains.

On January 11, when Mortier, Dessolles, and the rest of the army had already moved out of their cantonments and taken the road for La Mancha, the revised draft of the plan of campaign was issued. It was inferior in unity of conception to the first plan, and did not seem likely to produce such good results; but it had the merit of being practicable. By this scheme Victor alone was to march on Cordova, with the 22,000 men of the 1st Corps: he was to endeavour to take his artillery with him, but if the passes proved too rough, he was to send it back by Almaden to join the main army. Mortier, Dessolles, Sebastiani, Milhaud, and the King’s Reserves were to strike at the group of passes in front of La Carolina, and to drive the Spaniards out of them: it was hoped that they would thrust Areizaga’s host into the arms of Victor, who would be descending into the valley of the Guadalquivir just in time to meet the enemy retiring from the defiles. For this operation the King was to take with him rather more than 40,000 men.

It may be remarked that this plan divided the French army into two separate columns entirely destitute of lateral communications, and that, if the Spaniards had been stronger, considerable danger would have been incurred. Areizaga might have concentrated every man against one or other of the columns, and have brought it to a stand, while merely observing the other. But to do so he would have required a far larger force than he actually possessed: he had, as we have seen, only 23,000 men under arms, and even if he collected every available bayonet in one mass, either half of the French army was strong enough to meet and to beat him. The King, therefore, was running no real risk when he divided up his troops. As a matter of fact, Areizaga had made matters easy for the enemy, by splitting his small and dilapidated host into three sections—Zerain, with 4,500 men only, was on Victor’s road; the head quarters, with 13,000 men, were at La Carolina opposite the King; Vigodet with 6,000, was far to the right in the eastern passes[127]. Disaster was inevitable from the first moment of the campaign.

On January 7 King Joseph and Soult moved out from Madrid in the wake of the columns of Dessolles and the Royal Guard, which had already started. On the 8th they were at Toledo, on the 11th at Almagro, near Ciudad Real; here they conferred with Victor, and, in consequence of his reports concerning the state of the passes in the direction of Cordova, recast their plans, and adopted the scheme of operations which has just been detailed. On the following day Victor and his corps marched from Ciudad Real for Almaden, to carry out the great turning movement. The main army waited for six days to allow him to get far forward on his rugged route, and only on the 18th started out to deliver the frontal attack on the Despeña-Perros and the other passes in front of La Carolina.

It may be mentioned that Joseph had left behind him to garrison Madrid the French division of the 4th Corps[128], and not Dessolles’ troops, who had been wont to occupy the capital during the earlier operations. Both Dessolles’ and Joseph’s own reserves, his Royal Guard and a strong brigade of his newly-raised Spanish army, joined in the invasion. Since the German division of the 4th Corps was still absent, escorting the prisoners of Ocaña, it resulted that Sebastiani had with him only his Polish division, his cavalry, and some details sufficient to muster up a total of just 10,000 men. His corps was never properly reassembled during the whole of the rest of the war, as some of the regiments which he now left behind never rejoined him in Andalusia, but were left in garrison in New Castile till 1812, and practically became part of the ‘Army of the Centre.’

Besides the garrison of Madrid, Joseph left to cover his rear the whole 2nd Corps, still under the provisional command of Heudelet, which lay at Talavera and was charged to watch Albuquerque. If the rumour of the departure of the English from Badajoz were true, there would be no danger in this quarter. But Joseph was not yet quite certain that Wellington had retired into Portugal. The only serious preoccupation which vexed his mind, at the moment when he was preparing to attack, was the idea that the English might still come up by Truxillo and join Albuquerque in a raid on Madrid. Heudelet, the constant purveyor of false information, did his best to scare his master on January 13, by sending him a report that Wellington was still at Badajoz with 23,000 men[129]. But later and more trustworthy news from other quarters, showing that the English army had marched off for Abrantes long before Christmas, at last set the King’s mind at rest on this all-important topic.

There was nothing to be feared from the west when Wellington had taken his departure. Albuquerque’s small force was powerless, and if Del Parque moved down from the Sierra de Francia into the valley of the Tagus, the 6th Corps could make a corresponding movement. Ney had now returned to take command at Salamanca, and the confidence of his troops, shaken somewhat by Marchand’s incapable leadership, was now restored. Behind Ney and Kellermann were the innumerable battalions of the new reinforcements from Germany, the head of whose column had now reached Burgos. The King’s rear, therefore, was well guarded when he began his great offensive movement against Andalusia.

SECTION XVIII: CHAPTER III

ANDALUSIA OVERRUN: CADIZ PRESERVED. JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1810

On the 19th of January, 1810, the unfortunate Areizaga began to receive from all quarters dispatches which left him no doubt that the fatal hour had arrived, and that the whole of his line, from Villamanrique on the east to Almaden on the west, was about to be assailed by the enemy. From every point on his front of 150 miles, his subordinates sent him in reports to the effect that strong hostile columns had come up, and had thrust in their outposts. Indeed, Zerain, from his remote cantonment on the extreme left, had announced that an overwhelming force, coming from the direction of Ciudad Real, had beaten him out of the town of Almaden as early as the 15th, and had compelled him to retire towards the south-west, leaving the direct road to Cordova uncovered. This was, of course, the corps of Victor, whose flanking movement was already threatening to cut the line of communication between La Carolina and Seville. But it would take some days for the 1st Corps to pass the rugged defiles of the Sierra de Los Pedroches, which lie between Almaden and the valley of the Guadalquivir. An even more pressing danger seemed to be foreshadowed from the less-remote right of the Spanish line, where Vigodet reported, from the pass of Villamanrique, that he had been driven in to his final fighting position at Montizon, by a French column marching up from Villanueva de los Infantes. In the centre, the enemy had advanced to Santa Cruz de la Mudela, where the roads to all the group of passes about the Despeña-Perros branch off, but had not yet shown how many of them he intended to use. Areizaga could not determine whether some of the French movements were mere demonstrations, or whether every one of them portended a real attack on the morrow. Zerain was too far off to be helped; but Vigodet’s demands for assistance were so pressing that the Commander-in-Chief sent off to his aid, on the night of the 19th, the one division which he had hitherto kept in reserve at La Carolina, the 4,000 bayonets of Castejon. This left him only three divisions—those of Zayas, Lacy, and Giron, not more than 9,000 men in all, to defend the high-road to Madrid and the subsidiary passes on its immediate flank.

As a matter of fact, the appearance of the French advanced guards implied a genuine attack at every possible point of access. King Joseph had resolved to carry the whole of the defiles by a simultaneous onslaught on the morning of the 20th. His policy seems to have been one of very doubtful wisdom, for it would have been as effective to pierce the Spanish line at one point as at four, and he could have concentrated an overwhelming force, and have been absolutely certain of success, if he had launched his main body at one objective, while demonstrating against the rest. He had preferred, however, to cut up his army into four columns, each of which assailed a different pass. Sebastiani, on the extreme French left, separated by a gap of twenty miles from the main column, was the enemy who had driven in Vigodet at the opening of the Villamanrique pass. He had with him the remains of his own 4th Corps—of which such a large proportion had been left behind in New Castile,—a body of about 10,000 men[130]. His orders were to force the defile in his front, and to descend into the plain in the rear of the Spanish centre, by way of Ubeda and Linares, so as to cut off the enemy’s retreat towards Murcia, and to envelop him if he should hold the Despeña-Perros too long.

Next to Sebastiani in the French line was a column composed of Girard’s division of the 5th Corps, the King’s Guards, and the Spanish regiments in Joseph’s service[131]. It was nearly 14,000 strong, and advanced straight up the Madrid chaussée, aiming at the Despeña-Perros and the Spanish centre. If the enemy should fight well, and if the flanking movements should fail, this column would have the hardest work before it: for, unlike the minor passes to east and west, the Despeña-Perros becomes in its central length a narrow and precipitous defile, easily capable of defence. The Spaniards had run entrenchments across it, and had mined the road at more than one point. But its fatal weakness lay in the fact that the by-paths from the western passes descend into it to the rear of the point where these obstructions had been placed. If they were seized by the advancing French, the fortifications across the chaussée would prove a mere trap for the troops which held them.

Mortier, with Gazan’s division of the 5th Corps and Dessolles’ troops, about 15,000 strong, was told off to assail these flanking defiles on the Spanish left[132]. The two passes are the Puerto del Rey and the Puerto del Muradal. The former got its name from Alfonso VIII, who in 1212 had turned the position of the Almohad Sultan Mohammed-abu-Yakub by this route, and so forced him to the decisive battle of Navas de Tolosa, a few miles to the rear. In 1810 it was a tortuous and rough road, but practicable for artillery: the slopes on either side of it, moreover, were not inaccessible to infantry. A mile or two to its left, nearer the Despeña-Perros, was the still rougher path of the Puerto del Muradal, which was practicable for infantry but not for guns. Between this defile and the entrenchments across the Madrid chaussée, the crest of the Sierra was accessible to troops advancing in loose order and prepared for a stiff climb: the Spanish engineers had therefore placed a large earthwork on its culminating point, known as the Collado de Valdeazores. Giron’s weak division of no more than 3,200 bayonets was entrusted with the defence both of the Puerto del Rey and the Puerto del Muradal. Those of Lacy and Zayas, about 5,000 in all, held the Despeña-Perros and the entrenchments on each side of it. Areizaga lay behind them, with a reserve of 1,000 men at most—having sent off Castejon and his division to join Vigodet on the preceding night, he had no more with him than his personal guard, the ‘Batallón del General’, and some detached companies.

Mortier, like the good general that he was, did not confine his operations to an attack against the narrow fronts of the two passes, but assailed the rough hillside on each side of them, sending out whole battalions deployed as skirmishers to climb the slopes. Of Gazan’s division, one brigade marched against the Puerto del Muradal, but the other went up, in open order, on the space between the Puerto and the Spanish redoubt at the Collado de Valdeazores. Similarly, Dessolles attacked the Puerto del Rey with a few battalions, but sent the rest up the less formidable portions of the flanking slopes. Girard and the King’s Reserves, meanwhile, did not press their attack on the Despeña-Perros, till the troops on their right had already begun to drive the enemy before them.

The results of these tactics might have been foreseen from the first: Giron’s 3,200 men, attacked by 15,000, were driven in at a pace that ever grew more rapid. They could not defend the passes, because the slopes on each side were turned by the enemy. Their line was broken in two or three places, and they fled in haste down the rear of the Sierra, to escape being captured by flanking detachments which were pushing on at full speed to head them off. The moment that the Despeña-Perros was turned by Mortier’s movement, the troops occupying it had to retreat at headlong speed, just as Girard was commencing his attack on them. All did not retire with sufficient promptness: the battalion in a redoubt on the Collado de los Jardines, on the right flank of the high-road, was cut off and captured en masse. All the guns in the pass were taken, there being no time to get them away down the steep road in their rear. After two hours of scrambling rather than fighting, the main passages of the Sierra Morena were in the hands of the French. The mines on the high-road had been fired when the retreat was ordered, but did not wreck the chaussée in such a way as to prevent the enemy from pursuing. The losses of the Spaniards were no more than a few hundreds killed and wounded, and 500 prisoners; those of the French were less than 100 in all[133]. There had, in truth, been hardly the semblance of a battle.

The full results of the disaster were only developed next day: the troops which had defended the central passes escaped, though in dreadful disorder. But those further to their right were destined to a worse fate. While Mortier and the King were forcing the great defiles, Sebastiani had been fighting all day with Vigodet, in the defiles about Montizon and St. Esteban del Puerto. He had no such superiority in numbers over his enemy as had the King on the main field of operations[134], hence his progress was slower, and his victory, though complete, was not so prompt and crushing. Vigodet and his 6,000 men were dispersed by the afternoon, and fled down the valley of the Guadalen towards the plains, with Sebastiani’s cavalry in pursuit. Having fought much longer than Lacy and Giron, their losses were heavier than those of the central division—probably 1,000 killed, wounded, or taken. Shortly after, there appeared on the scene, moving along the steep hill-path from La Carolina, the Spanish division of Castejon, which had been sent off on the previous night to support Vigodet. It found the St. Esteban position in the possession of the French, and turned hastily back to rejoin Areizaga. But, while it had been on the march, the Commander-in-Chief and his army had been routed, and La Carolina was in the hands of the French. Castejon found himself enclosed between Sebastiani and the King, in a most perilous position. On the morning of the 21st, he tried to escape by the by-path to Linares, but on arriving near that place found that Mortier’s troops were already across his road. A brigade of Sebastiani’s corps was in hot pursuit in his rear, and Castejon, seeing himself thus enclosed, surrendered at Arquillos, with his whole intact division of over 4,000 men and ten guns.

Already, before the capture of this Spanish corps, the King and Sebastiani had joined hands, their reconnoitring parties having met in the valley of the Guadalen. On learning of the complete success of both columns, Joseph and Soult resolved to urge the pursuit in two separate directions. Sebastiani was told to push forward by way of Ubeda and Baeza to Jaen, while the main column marched by Baylen on Andujar and Cordova. It was hoped that news of Victor would soon be received: if all had gone well, he would have reached the Guadalquivir somewhere in the neighbourhood of Cordova, so as to be in the rear of any Spanish force that might have retreated from La Carolina in the direction of Seville.

As a matter of fact, however, both Vigodet and also Areizaga with the wreck of the troops from the central passes, had abandoned any hope of covering Seville, and had retreated southwards on Jaen. There was no force whatever left upon the Cordova road, and the King met no resistance upon the 22nd or the 23rd. On the latter day Sebastiani, arriving in front of Jaen, found the Spanish commander-in-chief with some 7,000 or 8,000 men prepared to defend the town. He attacked at once, and routed these dispirited troops, who made little or no show of resistance. Practically the whole force went to pieces: the French captured forty-six guns, mostly those of the reserve-park of the Army of Andalusia, which had been deposited in Jaen. Of the wrecks of that unhappy force, Areizaga carried off a small remnant to Guadix in the eastern mountains, near the borders of Murcia. Lacy, with another fraction, retired on Granada. But the large majority had left their colours, and dispersed to their homes.

King Joseph and Soult meanwhile, advancing unopposed along the high-road to Cordova and Seville, got into touch at Andujar with the advanced cavalry of Victor on the night of the 22nd of January. The march of the 1st Corps had been toilsome in the extreme, but almost unopposed save by the difficulties of the road. After driving Zerain’s little detachment out of Almaden on the 15th, they had hardly seen an enemy. Zerain and his colleague Copons had retired by the road towards Seville south-westward. Victor, though he sent out flying parties of cavalry to threaten Benalcazar and Hinojosa, to his right, had really pushed further to the left, on the easternmost of the two rough passes which lead to Cordova. The day after leaving Almaden he had sent his artillery back to La Mancha, the dilapidated and abandoned road to which he had committed himself proving absolutely impracticable for anything that travelled on wheels. But he pushed on with his infantry and horsemen, and passing Santa Eufemia, Torrecampo and Villanueva de la Jara, came down into the plain of the Guadalquivir at Adamuz, fifteen miles to the east of Cordova, on January 21st, the day after Soult and King Joseph had forced the Despeña Perros and the Puerto del Rey. Wishing to get into touch with them before attacking Cordova, he halted his infantry, but sent out his cavalry to the gates of that city on the one side, and on the other to Montoro and Andujar, where they met the vedettes of the main army on the evening of the 22nd. Thus the French host was once more concentrated: the march on Seville could be continued without delay. Victor now became the advanced guard: he entered Cordova, which opened its gates without resistance, on the 24th. There was no Spanish force in front of the French army, since Zerain and Copons had retired towards Seville by a road far to the west, while the wrecks of Areizaga’s army had been driven off in a south-easterly direction.

Soult and King Joseph, therefore, had leisure to plan out the remainder of their campaign without any disturbance from the enemy. On the 25th[135] they resolved to detach Sebastiani and his 10,000 men for the conquest of Granada, to leave Dessolles’ division at Cordova and Andujar, but to march on Seville in a single mass with the remaining 50,000 sabres and bayonets of the Army of Andalusia. The desire to seize the capital from which the Junta had so long defied him, seems to have mastered every other idea in the mind of the intrusive King. The rebel government should be captured, or at least forced to take refuge in Portugal or the sea. Then at last the provinces would submit, the regular armies would lay down their arms, the guerrillero bands would disperse to their homes, and he might reign as a real king, not as the mere tool of his imperious brother. The capture of Seville would be the last act but one of the drama: after that he would become the national monarch of a submissive people, and carry out all the schemes of vague benevolence on which his mind was wont to dwell in his more hopeful hours. That the resistance would continue, even if Seville were his own and the Junta were scattered and discredited, he did not dream. And Seville, he knew, must fall; to defend it there could be, as he concluded, nothing but a half-armed mob, backed by the few thousand dispirited soldiers who had fled before Victor from the western section of the Sierra Morena. Even if the rebel capital made itself a second Saragossa, he had at his disposal an army double the strength of that which had reduced the obstinate Aragonese city.

In subsequent years critics, wise after the event, never tired of declaiming against the policy which Joseph and Soult approved on January 25, 1810. It was easy in 1811 or 1812 to point out that a division or two might have been spared from the victorious army to execute a march upon Cadiz, while the main force was dealing with Seville. The island-fortress, which was to defy the French during the next three years, might have been caught while it was still ungarrisoned and panic-stricken, if only the invaders had detached a column from Carmona, where the road from Cordova bifurcates to Seville on the right and Cadiz on the left. It is certain that, if any suggestion to that effect was made at the time, Soult, Mortier, and the other generals present at the council of war passed it over[136]. The fact was that Seville loomed large before the imaginations of them all: Cadiz seemed but a secondary affair at the moment. It appeared probable that the whole of the scattered forces of the enemy would mass themselves to defend the insurgent capital. On January 25th, when the original plan was drawn up, no one realized that there was a Spanish army approaching, whose presence in Andalusia had not yet become known, or that the general of that army would deliberately leave Seville to its fate, as incapable of defence and doomed to destruction, and hasten by forced marches to throw himself into the island-city which was destined to become the new capital of insurgent Spain. Unable to foresee such a development, Joseph wrote to his brother on January 27 that Seville would probably submit without fighting, and that he would then enter Cadiz ‘sans coup férir.’

Albuquerque’s operations, which ultimately turned out to be the most important section of the Andalusian campaign, need a word of explanation. It will be remembered that, early in January, he had assembled, at Don Benito and Medellin, the small field-force that he could command, after providing the garrison of Badajoz and leaving a detachment above Almaraz to watch the French 2nd Corps. It did not amount to more than 8,000 men, of which some 1,000 were cavalry. His position at Don Benito was intended to protect the flank of Zerain and Copons, who lay to his right, covering the passes that lead from Almaden on to Cordova. On January 15th he received from Zerain the news that he was about to be attacked at Almaden by a French column of at least 20,000 men. The Duke promptly began to march eastward to join his colleague, and reached Campanario on January 16th. Here he was met by the information that Zerain had been driven out of Almaden on the preceding day, and had drawn back by Benalcazar and Hinojosa on to the Seville road. Copons from Pozo Blanco was retiring in the same direction. The Duke thereupon concluded that his duty was to fall back by a route parallel to that of Victor’s advance, and to draw nearer to Seville, strengthening himself as he approached that city by Zerain’s and Copons’ small corps.

Accordingly he sent off three of his weakest battalions to strengthen the garrison of Badajoz, which was very small at the moment, directed his artillery (with a cavalry escort) to take the good but circuitous high-road to Seville by Merida, Los Santos, and Santa Olalla, and started off across the mountains with his infantry and 500 horse. Marching very rapidly, though the roads were bad and the days short, he moved by Zalamea and Maguilla to Guadalcanal, on the borders of Andalusia, which he reached on January 18th. Here he received from the Central Junta an absurd order, apparently based on the idea that he was still at Campanario, which bade him stop Victor’s advance, by falling on his flank and rear by the road to Agudo and Almaden. But since the marshal had seized Almaden on the 15th, and was known to have moved southward from thence, it was clear that he must now be more than half-way to Cordova: if the Army of Estremadura plunged back into the mountains to seek Agudo and Almaden, it would only reach them on the 22nd or 23rd, and Victor would be at the gates of Cordova on the 21st. The Junta’s order was so hopelessly impracticable that the Duke took upon himself to disobey it, and wrote in reply that he should move so as to place himself between Victor and Seville, and would cover the Andalusian capital ‘so far as was possible with the small force at his disposition.’

Accordingly Albuquerque, instead of returning northward into the Estremaduran mountains, moved a stage further south, to El Pedroso, on the road from Guadalcanal to Seville, and sent orders to Copons and Zerain to join him with their small divisions. Two days later he received the order which should have been sent him on the 18th, instead of the insane directions that were actually given; by it he was directed to march on Seville with all speed. On the 23rd, therefore, he arrived at the ferry of Cantillana, twenty miles north of Seville: here he received news that his artillery and its escort had safely completed its round, and were about to cross the Guadalquivir at Rinconada, fifteen miles to the south. At Cantillana, however, the Duke got the last dispatch which the Central Junta ever issued; it was dated on the 23rd, a few hours before the members dispersed and fled. By this he was directed to march not on Seville but on Cordova, which at the moment the document came to hand—the morning of the 24th—had just been occupied by Victor.

That day Albuquerque crossed the Guadalquivir and occupied Carmona, where he was joined by his artillery, and by part of Copons’ division, but not (apparently) by Zerain’s, which had retired into Seville. He had now about 10,000 men, of whom 1,000 were horsemen, and 20 guns. From Carmona he threw out a cavalry screen on all sides: his vedettes on the 27th struck French cavalry at Ecija, and were driven in; they reported that the enemy was advancing in enormous force from Cordova—as was indeed the case. Meanwhile news had come up from Seville that the Junta had fled on the night of the 23rd-24th, that anarchy reigned in the city, and that a new revolutionary government had been installed. There was no longer any legitimate executive from which orders could be received. Albuquerque had to make up his mind whether he would retire into Seville, and put himself at the disposition of the mob and its leaders, or whether he should seek some safer base of operations. Without a moment’s hesitation he resolved to leave the Andalusian capital to itself, and to retire on Cadiz, which he knew to be ungarrisoned, yet to be absolutely impregnable if it were properly held. This wise resolution, it may be said without hesitation, saved the cause of Spain in the south. If Cadiz had been left unoccupied there would have been no further resistance in Andalusia.

But we must return to the operations of the French. On the 25th Victor had advanced from Cordova, taking the direct road to Seville via La Carlota and Ecija, while Mortier and the Royal Guard followed him at short intervals. The Duke of Belluno occupied Ecija on the 27th and Carmona on the 28th. On these two days his advanced guard got into contact with Albuquerque’s cavalry screen, and learnt from prisoners that the Army of Estremadura, whose presence in Andalusia thus became known, was in front of them[137]. On reaching Carmona Victor obtained the still more important news that Albuquerque, after staying in that place for two days, had not retired into Seville, as might have been expected, but had marched southward to Utrera on the road to Cadiz, leaving the greater city uncovered. On the night of the 29th the leading division of Victor’s corps, the dragoons of Latour-Maubourg, appeared in front of Seville, and reported that works were being hastily thrown up around it on all sides[138], and that they had been fired on by masses of armed irregulars at every point where they had pushed forward vedettes towards its suburbs[139].

Seville was at this moment, and had been now for six days, in a state of chaos. The Central Junta had absconded on the 23rd, taking along with it both its Executive Committee and the Ministers of State. The panic had begun on the 18th, when the news had come in that Victor’s corps had thrust Zerain out of Almaden three days before, and was marching on Cordova. It had grown worse two days later, when Areizaga reported that another French army was marching against the Despeña-Perros. The Junta published a proclamation on the 20th, exhorting the Andalusians to have no fear, for Albuquerque had been directed to fall on Victor’s flank, and Del Parque with the Army of Castile was on the march to join him, so that the enemy would be forced to turn back to guard himself. Such orders were indeed sent, but any man of sense could see that they must arrive too late. If Victor was at Almaden on the 15th, he might be at Cordova on the 21st: if King Joseph was at the foot of the passes on the 19th, he might be across them on the 20th. What use, therefore, would be a summons sent to Albuquerque in Estremadura, or to Del Parque in the mountains between Bejar and Ciudad Rodrigo? The French would be in the valley of the Guadalquivir long before Del Parque had even received his orders to move. As a matter of fact, that general got his dispatch on January 24, the day that Victor entered Cordova, and even Albuquerque was informed of the Junta’s behests only on the 18th, when he reached Guadalcanal.

The obvious ineptitude which the Government had shown, and the imminent peril to which Seville was exposed, gave another chance to the local conspirators, who had already twice prepared a pronunciamento against the Junta. On the 22nd riots broke out, and demagogues were preaching at every street corner the necessity for deposing these incapable rulers, and substituting for them a regency of true patriots, and a Committee of Public Safety, which should show the energy in which the Junta had been so lacking. The people clamoured at the doors of the Arsenal, asking for muskets and cannon, they mustered outside the prisons where Palafox, Montijo, and other chiefs who had been arrested for their earlier plots, were still confined. Many of the members of the Junta left Seville on this and the following day, on the plausible pretext that it was necessary for them to betake themselves to Cadiz—which, by a decree of Jan. 13, had been designated as the meeting-place of the approaching National Cortes—in order to make preparations for the meeting of that august assembly. Indeed, the Junta had been directed to meet at Cadiz on February 1 for that purpose. The news that King Joseph had forced the passes of the Sierra Morena, which came to hand early on the 22nd, sufficed to make an end of any shadow of power which the Junta still possessed. Next day those members who had hitherto stuck to their post, and the Ministers, left the town with elaborately contrived secrecy. Seville fell into the hands of the mob, who, led by a Capuchin friar riding on a mule and brandishing a crucifix, burst open the prisons and the Arsenal, armed themselves, and nominated a new ‘Supreme National Junta.’ Its executive was to be composed of Palafox and Montijo, the Marquis of La Romana, General Eguia, and Francisco Saavedra, an aged and respectable person, who had been president of the old Junta of Seville, the original committee which had been suppressed by the Central Junta. He is said to have been used as a mere tool by Palafox and Montijo, and to have been disgusted by their acts. This new, and obviously illegal, Government issued decrees stigmatizing the fugitive ‘Centralists’ as cowards and traitors, and claiming authority not only over Andalusia, but over all Spain. They ordered the calling out of the levy en masse, and issued commissions displacing generals and governors in all the provinces. One of these documents declared Del Parque removed from the command of the Army of the Left, and named La Romana as his successor. The marquis, glad to escape from the tumult, rode off at once, presented himself at the head quarters of the Castilian army, and was recognized without difficulty as its chief—though his authority might well have been contested if any general had chosen to take up the cause of the discredited Central Junta.

But that unhappy body had no longer a single friend: its members were mobbed and arrested on their flight from Seville to Cadiz; its President the Archbishop of Laodicea, its Vice-President the Conde de Altamira, and the War Minister Cornel were seized at Xeres by a frantic mob, and would have been murdered, if General Castaños, whom the Junta had treated so badly in December 1808, had not arrived in time to save their lives. Twenty-three members reached Cadiz, and there, by a proclamation dated January 29th, abdicated their authority, and nominated a Regency, to which they resigned their power, and the duty of receiving and welcoming the expected Cortes. The Regents were Castaños, the Bishop of Orense, Admiral Escaño, Saavedra—the president of the new and illegal Junta at Seville—and Fernandez de Leon, an American Treasury-official, who was to represent the Colonies[140]. It will be noted that the nominators were wise enough to refrain from appointing any of their own number to serve in the Regency.

Meanwhile, the duty of resisting the first shock of the French advance fell not on the Regency, but on the Revolutionary Government which had installed itself in power at Seville. These usurpers proved themselves quite as incapable as the men whom they had superseded. When once in possession of power, Palafox and his friends had to count up their resources: they had at their disposal an armed mob of 20,000 men, and a mere handful of regular troops, consisting of the regiments which had served as the guards of the late Junta, and four or five isolated battalions from the division of Zerain, which had finally sought refuge in Seville. These troops seem to have been about 4,000 strong at the most[141]. There was an immense quantity of artillery from the arsenal; it had been dragged out to line the new earthworks, on which the populace was busily engaged, but not two hundred trained gunners existed to man the batteries. It was hoped that Albuquerque’s Estremaduran army would come to their aid, but—as we have already seen—the Duke deliberately refused to acknowledge the authority of the Seville Junta, and, instead of falling back upon the city, marched southwards to Utrera on the Cadiz road, leaving the great chaussée Ecija-Carmona-Seville open to the French.

On the 28th, the leaders of the Junta having taken stock of their position, and discovered its danger (for the lines which the people had thrown up would have required 50,000 men to man them, and not half that force was forthcoming even if every rioter armed with a musket was counted), copied in the most ignominious fashion the prudence or cowardice of the Central Junta, which they had so fiercely denounced five days before. Under the cover of the night Eguia, Montijo, Saavedra, and Palafox absconded from Seville without taking leave of their followers. Saavedra fled to Cadiz, where it is surprising to find that he was made a member of the new Regency, Palafox to Albuquerque’s camp, Montijo to the southern mountains, where (as he announced) he was intending to collect an army of succour for Seville. When, therefore, on the next evening Latour-Maubourg’s dragoons appeared before the entrenchments of the city, there was no longer any responsible government to turn the ardour of the multitude to account. Nevertheless, mobs, headed by frantic friars, ran to the entrenchments, and discharged musketry and cannon-shot at every French vedette that showed itself.

On the afternoon of the 30th, Victor appeared to reinforce Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry, bringing with him the bulk of the infantry of the 1st Corps. The King, Soult, and Mortier were close behind[142]. On this day it had been settled at a Council-of-War held at Carmona that the whole of the army should march on Seville, leaving Cadiz alone for the present, and detaching only a brigade of cavalry to pursue the army of Albuquerque. On the next morning Victor received assurances, from persons who had escaped from the city, that it was doubtful whether he would be opposed, since the mob was panic-stricken at the flight of its leaders, and the senior military officers were convinced that resistance was impossible. Certain that the defence would be feeble, if any were offered, Soult gave orders that the 1st Corps should storm the lines on February 1st. But no military operations were necessary: on the evening of January 31st the corporation of Seville had sent out a deputation to negotiate for surrender. They offered to admit the enemy, if they were guaranteed security of life and property for all who should submit, and a promise that no extraordinary war-contribution should be levied on their city. To this the King, who was anxious to enter the place as a pacific conqueror, without storm or bloodshed, gave an eager consent. While the civil authorities were treating with Victor, the small body of regular troops in Seville, under the Visconde de Gand, quietly left the place by the bridge leading to the western side of the Guadalquivir, and retreated in haste toward the Condado de Niebla and the borders of Portugal.

On the afternoon of February 1, Joseph entered Seville in triumph at the head of his Guard, and lodged himself in the Alcazar, the old residence of the Kings of Spain. He was welcomed by a deputation which comprised some persons of mark. The impression made on the citizens by the conduct of the two Juntas, and the turbulence of the mob which had ruled during the last eight days, had been so deplorable that a considerable number of the Sevillians despaired of the national cause, and rushed to acknowledge the usurper. Indeed, there were more ‘Josefinos’ found in this city than in any other corner of Spain. The ‘intrusive king’ released a number of political prisoners, whom the last Junta had arrested on suspicion of treason. Apparently this suspicion had been well grounded, as many of the captives, headed by the Swiss generals Preux and Reding[143], did homage to Joseph, and accepted office under him.

Encouraged by these defections to his cause, and by the fact that deputations had presented themselves from Cordova and Jaen to bespeak his protection, Joseph hastened to publish an absurd address to his army, couched in the magniloquent style which all French writers of proclamations at this time were wont to borrow from their Emperor. ‘The barriers placed by Nature between the North and the South of Spain have fallen. You have met with friends only beyond the Sierra Morena. Jaen, Cordova, Seville have flung open their gates.... The King of Spain desires that between the Pillars of Hercules a third pillar shall arise, to recall to posterity, and to the navigators of both the new and the old world, the memory of the officers and men of that French army which drove back the English, saved thirty thousand Spaniards, pacified the ancient Baetica, and regained for France her natural allies.’ The rather puzzling passage concerning the ‘thirty thousand Spaniards saved’ refers to the prisoners of Ocaña and the Sierra Morena, whom the French, according to the King, ‘recognized as brethren led astray by the common enemy. You spared them, and I have received them as my children.’

Some elation in the King’s language was, perhaps, pardonable at the moment. The moral effect of the surrender of Seville was considerable in France, England, and the rest of Europe, though less in Spain than elsewhere. The tangible trophies of the conquest were enormous—the place had been the central arsenal of Spain, and the amount of artillery, ammunition, and warlike equipment captured was very large. The cannon-foundry and other military factories were taken over in excellent condition, and kept the French army of Andalusia well supplied during the three years of its existence. Tobacco to the value, as it was said, of £1,000,000 was found in the great central magazine, and quinine, quicksilver, and other commodities of government monopoly to a considerable additional sum. Nothing had been done, since the news of the passage of the Sierra Morena had arrived, to destroy or remove all this valuable state property.

On the day following their entry into Seville, Joseph and Soult directed Victor to march in pursuit of Albuquerque, and to take possession of Cadiz. So complete had been the débâcle of the Spanish armies since the Andalusian campaign began, that it seems to have been supposed that the Army of Estremadura would offer no serious resistance, even if it should succeed in throwing itself into Cadiz before it was overtaken. Marching with laudable expedition, the Duke of Belluno covered the eighty-three miles between Seville and Cadiz in four days, and presented himself in front of the place on the evening of February 5th. But Albuquerque, unmolested in his march from Utrera, had arrived on the 3rd, bringing with him not only his own troops and those of Copons, but several recruit-battalions picked up at Xeres, Lebrija, San Lucar, and Puerto Santa Maria, where they had been organizing. He had some 12,000 men in all, not counting the civic militia of Cadiz, which had hitherto been its sole garrison.

Cadiz, in the days when the practicable range of the heaviest artillery did not exceed 2,500 yards, was one of the strongest places in the world. The town lies on the extreme point of a long sandy peninsula, which runs out into the sea from the Isla de Leon, a large island separated from the mainland of Andalusia by the salt-water channel of the Rio Santi Petri, an arm of the sea varying from 300 to 400 yards in breadth, and flowing through marshes which make access to its banks very difficult. The Isla, protected by this enormous wet ditch, has a front towards the continent of about seven miles, from the naval arsenal of La Carraca at its north end to the Castle of Santi Petri at its south. Batteries had already been thrown up at all the commanding points, and Albuquerque had broken the only bridge, that of Zuazo, which crossed the marsh and the Rio. It would be impossible to pass the channel save by collecting great quantities of boats, and these would have to move under artillery fire. Venegas, the military governor of Cadiz, had already ordered all the vessels, small and great, of the villages round the bay to be destroyed or brought across to the city. Moreover, there were a score of gunboats in the channel, manned from the Spanish fleet, which could be used to oppose any attempt to cross the Rio. Indeed, naval assistance to any amount was available for the defence of Cadiz: there were a dozen Spanish and four English line-of-battle ships in the harbour. All through the three long years while the French lay in front of the Isla, no attempt was ever made to throw a force in boats across the channel: the venture seemed too hazardous.

If, however, Victor had, by some expedient, succeeded in crossing the Rio, there were two lines of defence behind it, of far greater strength than that formed by this outer ditch of the Cadiz works. The triangular Isla de Leon forms with its apex a long sand-spit, which projects for four miles into the Atlantic. Half way along it the breadth of the spit is contracted to no more than 200 yards, and here there was a continuous entrenchment from water to water, called the Cortadura, or the battery of San Fernando, armed with many heavy guns. Supposing this isthmus to have been passed, there lies, two miles further along the sand-spit, the outer enceinte of Cadiz itself, with a front of not more than 400 yards in breadth, and deep water on either side.

Cadiz had been captured more than once in earlier wars, but always by an enemy who could attack from the sea. Neither the Isla de Leon nor the San Fernando line could be held against an attack supported by a fleet which came close in shore, and battered the works from flank and rear, or landed troops behind them. The sea, it may be remarked, is four fathoms deep to within a short distance (about 300 yards) of the shore, all along the south front of the Isla and the Isthmus, so that there was nothing to prevent a fleet coming close to the works. But against any naval attack Cadiz was, in 1810, absolutely secured by the predominance of the English fleet. There was no armed French vessel nearer than Bayonne or Barcelona, nor any possibility of bringing one round. All that was done by the besiegers in a three years’ leaguer was to build some gunboats in the northern inlets of the bay, and these they never dared to bring out into the open water.

The real danger to Cadiz lay not from the sea side, nor on the Isla front, but from the inner side of the harbour and the east. Here a long spit of land runs out from beside the town of Puerto Real in the direction of Cadiz. It is called the Trocadero, from a village situated on its south-eastern side. At its extreme point is a fort named San José, while another fort, named San Luis, lies alongside of the other on a low mud-island. In advance of both, built right in the marsh, and surrounded by water at high-tide, was a third called Matagorda. These three forts were the outer defences of the harbour against a naval attack, and could cross fires with the town batteries and a castle called Puntales, which lies on the easternmost point of the isthmus, a mile from the battery of San Fernando. Matagorda is only 1,200 yards from Puntales, and 3,000 yards from the eastern point of the city of Cadiz. If the French took possession of it, and of the neighbouring San José and San Luis, they could bombard the Puntales castle and all the neighbouring section of the Isthmus, to the grave danger and discomfort of all who had to pass between the city and the Isla de Leon. They would also be able to annoy ships lying in all the eastern reaches of the great harbour. But before Victor arrived in front of Cadiz, San José, San Luis, and Matagorda were blown up, with the leave of the governor Venegas, by a detachment of seamen from the British fleet. There could, therefore, be no trouble from this direction, unless the enemy succeeded in restoring and rearming the three forts,—no easy task under the fire of the Puntales castle and the fleet. It was not till some months had passed that the struggle began for these ruined works, the only points from which the defence could be seriously incommoded.

On his first arrival Victor summoned the town, and received a prompt and angry answer of refusal from the governor and the local Junta. The marshal inspected the city’s outer defences, and was forced to report to the King at Seville that it seemed that nothing could be done against the place till he had brought up heavy artillery, and built himself boats. Joseph, unwilling to believe anything that contradicted the hopes of complete triumph that he had been nourishing ever since the passage of the Sierra Morena, came up to Puerto Santa Maria, on the bay of Cadiz, looked at the situation, did not find it reassuring, and wrote to his imperial brother to propose that he should send out his Toulon fleet to attack the place on the sea side[144]. Napoleon, still smarting under the memory of how Admiral Martin had destroyed an important section of that fleet in the preceding October, ignored this proposal. He did not forget, though his brother had apparently done so, the fact that the British Mediterranean fleet was still in existence.

Thus the position in front of Cadiz assumed the shape which it was to maintain for months, and even for years. Victor’s corps could provide enough men to observe the whole shore of the bay, and to blockade the garrison. But the Spaniards recovered their courage when they saw the enemy reduced to inactivity, and began ere long to receive reinforcements. The first to arrive were 3,000 of the regular troops which had been at Seville. This corps, under the Visconde de Gand, had escaped westward after the capitulation, and, though pursued by a brigade of Mortier’s corps, reached Ayamonte, at the mouth of the Guadiana, and there took ship for Cadiz. Somewhat later there arrived some troops sent by Wellington. The Spaniards in their day of disaster had forgotten their old jealousy about Cadiz, and asked for aid. Wellington, though loath to spare a man from Portugal, sent them in the early days of February three British[145] and two Portuguese battalions from Lisbon, under General William Stewart. So promptly were these troops shipped and landed, that they arrived at Cadiz between the 10th and the 15th of February, to the number of about 3,500 bayonets[146]. Thus the town was placed in security from any coup de main on Victor’s part.

The internal situation in Cadiz, however, left much to be desired. The town had elected a local Junta of defence, of which the governor Venegas was made President, and this body had frequent disputes with the new Regency, nominated by the Central Junta at the time of its abdication, and also with Albuquerque, whom Venegas did not wish to recognize as his hierarchical superior. The local body could make a fair show of objections to recognizing the legitimacy of the Regency: the old Central Junta itself had a doubtful origin, and the government nominated by those of its members who had taken refuge in Cadiz could not claim a clear title. But to raise the point at this moment of crisis was factious and unpatriotic, and the conduct of the local Junta became merely absurd when it tried to arrogate to itself authority extending outside its own city, and to issue orders to the outlying provinces, or the colonies of America. Still worse, it refused to issue clothing and footgear to Albuquerque’s army, whose equipment had been worn out by the long march from Estremadura, or to subsidize the military hospitals, though it had a considerable stock both of money and of military stores at its disposition. At the end of February the Regency nominated Venegas Viceroy of Mexico, and having bought him off with this splendid piece of preferment, made Albuquerque his successor in the governorship of Cadiz. But even thus they did not succeed in getting proper control over the city, for the Junta refused to allow the Duke to place his head quarters within the walls, or to issue orders to the civic militia. A modus vivendi was only reached when the Regents made an ignominious pact with the local oligarchy, by which the latter, in return for recognizing their legitimate authority, and undertaking to pay and feed the garrison, were granted the control of the port-revenues and other royal taxes of Cadiz, as well as of all the subsidies arriving from America. How the functions of government became still further complicated, when the members of the long-expected Cortes began to arrive, and to claim their rights as the sole legitimate representatives of the nation, must be told in another chapter[147].