On the face of it there seemed reason for confidence in Spain. Within a few weeks the French had been expelled from every part of the peninsula save Navarre and Barcelona, where they were now closely blockaded. Madrid had been reoccupied by Castanos on August 23rd, Saragossa relieved of all danger a week earlier. Joseph, scared by the spectre of Baylen, had abandoned Burgos and withdrawn as far as Vittoria without a fight. By the end of August a bare 60,000 French troops stood behind the Ebro in the extreme north-west corner of the peninsula they had hoped to conquer. 40,000 of their comrades remained behind as corpses or prisoners.
British belief that the French had met their match in the Spaniards was more than shared by the latter. They did not merely suppose they could smash Napoleon: they knew it. "They have no idea," wrote The Times correspondent from Corunna, " that it is possible for them to be beaten; their rage is unbounded when the name of Bonaparte is mentioned, but their hatred of the French' is mixed with contempt."1 All the fierce hereditary pride of their race had been re-kindled. A spontaneous popular outburst had thrown off both the French invader and the corrupt Government that had obscured their national glories. Once more as in the days of Charles V. and Philip II. they were the greatest nation in the world. They took no thought for the morrow, but gave themselves up to unbridled rejoicing.
What this valiant and ancient people failed to see was that in overturning a corrupt Administration and scaring a few French generals they had not solved their real problem. They had merely exchanged, with Napoleon's help, a bad Government for no Government at all. Their grandees, poisoned by the same sterile pride and servile attendance on an idle Court that had ruined the aristocracy of France, were without backbone or political experience; for generations they had hardly been free to leave Madrid without the King's permission. Some of them, as a result of the former French alliance or because they feared anarchy, sympathised with the enemy or were suspected by the people of doing so. The lesser nobles, the provincial gentry and ecclesiastics, who, with the urban mobs, had taken the lead in raising the standard of independence, were mostly narrow provincials whose sympathies were bounded by their own mountain skyline. They were without the slightest capacity for administration or for co-operating with any one whose views differed from their own. They shared to the full the national contempt for compromise and the strong national sense of personal pride. Within a few weeks of the French retreat several of the provincial Juntas were almost at open war and were threatening to employ their respective armies not against the enemy but each other. All competed for British arms and money, demanding fantastic quantities of both and doing their utmost to prevent their neighbours from getting any. Only with the utmost difficulty, and under pressure from England, could they be got to join in setting up a Supreme Junta. Nor, thereafter, did they pay it the slightest respect.
To local jealousies* and vanity was added what a warm British admirer called the "apathy and confidence of the Spanish character." The corrupting gold and silver of South America and the consequent ease with which labour could be bought had had a fatal effect on the
1 Crabb Robinson, I, 275.
Spanish possessing classes. Instead of creating real wealth themselves they used its illusory symbol—money—to hire foreign labour and fell into habits of idleness and improvidence. The Midas touch had brought yet another of earth's great empires to decay and ruin. In the towns, though quick to resent and avenge any personal affront with his cuchello, every Spaniard was ready to postpone public business to an indefinite to-morrow. The need for application, perseverance and discipline was universally ignored. It was imagined that victories were made by instinctive courage, armies by popular enthusiasm, strategic combinations by eloquence. Ragged hordes of armed peasants and students trailed about the countryside, undrilled and unsupplied, discussing with all the fervour of their race the grand operations which were to overthrow the greatest soldier of all time. There was no supreme command, for no provincial Junta would allow the army to be commanded by any general but its own. Yet in imagination and boastful talk—to which the whole nation seemed prone—this leaderless force, exaggerated in numbers and untrained for war, was not merely to drive the veterans of France from their strongholds in the north but, by a series of intricate converging operations over a three-hundred mile front, was to encircle and annihilate them. Afterwards it was to advance to Paris and dictate peace.
With such confidence in their prowess the Spaniards were in no mood to take advice from British generals. They did not need amateurs to teach them how to make war. They took the money, arms and ammunition they proffered, but for the rest ignored the foreign heretics who until so recently had been their enemies. So long as the British remained at a distance, a warm and truly Spanish eloquence was extended to them; the moment they set their clumsy and unhallowed feet on Spanish soil or tried to interfere with the Spaniard's imperious preference for his own way, they became objects of loathing and suspicion. Any discipline, save of its own choosing, was anathema to this stark and passionate people. Thus the released Spanish prisoners from England, who had been feasted, clothed and armed by their former captors, mutinied on the way home and carried off the British ships in which they were sailing.
It was in such circumstances that Moore at the end of the first week of October, 1808, received his mission. Leaving 10,000 troops to defend Portugal, he was to proceed with the remaining 20,000 to northern Spain, where he would be joined by another 17,000 under Sir David Baird. He was to support the Spanish armies in their attempt to encircle the French and, in the event of a Supreme Commander being appointed by the Junta, to place himself—with reservations—under his orders. He was to convey his troops into Spain by land or sea as he thought best. A correct and friendly personal letter from Castlereagh assured him of every assistance.
The army heard of the appointment with satisfaction. Even the chivalrous Sir Harry Burrard, who had been superseded, rejoiced; "happy I shall be," he wrote, "if in anything I can serve an officer whose whole soul is in the Service." A new spirit began to run through the dusty camp of Queluz; the men knew instinctively that the unaccountable inertia of the past six weeks was at an end. The new general appeared everywhere; inspecting regiments, reorganising magazines and stores, dismissing fraudulent contractors and talking to every one he encountered.1 Men suddenly began to work with a will.
Yet some of those to whom the Commander-in-Chief spoke noticed an underlying gravity in his expression. Ministers might write of going into Spain like going into Hyde Park, but Moore as a practical soldier knew the difficulties. He could not effect his junction with Baird by sea because, without previously establishing magazines in the barren Galician hills, it would be impossible to march so large an army through the passes to Castile in time to succour the Spaniards. And though Ministers talked about the impending envelopment of the French—" a sort of gibberish," Moore privately noted, "which men in office use and fancy themselves military men without knowing how far it is susceptible of being carried into practice"—he was painfully aware that the problem was not, as people in England supposed, whether he could reach the Ebro in" time to share the triumph of the Spanish armies but whether he could unite his own forces behind them before Napoleon launched his attack. His one chance of doing so in time—for he was convinced that Napoleon would strike before winter—was to march his men across the Portuguese highlands to Salamanca and join forces with Baird in the Castilian plain at Valladollid or Burgos. Yet it was this very route which less than a year before had put nine-tenths of Junot's army out of action.
For such a march—more than three hundred miles across mountains rising in places to 4000 feet—Moore had neither maps nor magazines. His commissariat and Staff were both raw, and, owing to the Treasury's failure to supply bullion, it was impossible to obtain enough carts and draught animals.2 His men had therefore to
1 Moore, II, 273, 325; Fortescue, VI, 291-6; Blakeney, 20, 25; Schaumann, 43, 55.
2To add to his difficulties, t
he Treasury clerks had subjected his officers' "bat, baggage and forage" allowance to income tax, being unaware that it was granted to defray the cost of regimental transport. Fortescue, VI, 293.
carry the bulk of their equipment. And though he sent his engineers ahead to prospect, he was unable in the time at his disposal to discover whether any of the roads were fit for heavy artillery. The Portuguese seemed certain that none were, and, with the torrential autumn rains daily expected, Moore dared not risk it. He therefore dispatched all his guns save half a dozen light six-pounders by the Elvas and Badajoz highway to Madrid together with his transport park and an escort of 4000 troops, including his entire cavalry force, under Lieutenant-Gencral Sir John. Hope. Only when they had gone too far for recall, did Moore discover that his allies had misinformed him. On October 16th, while the foxhunters in England were riding out in their autumnal glory, the army turned its face towards Spain. "A more glorious set of fellows," wrote young George Napier, "never was seen." They wanted only experience in Continental warfare. Their equipment was still incomplete, but Moore could wait no longer. "The regiments are already marching," he wrote to Lady Hester Stanhope, "I pray for good weather. If it rains, the torrents will swell and be impassable, and I shall be accounted a bungler. I wish you. were here with us, in your red habit a l’Amazone."1
For the next three weeks the troops pressed across the mountains into the north-east. The sand and olive trees of the Tagus plain, the crash of the muskets on the paving stones, the gloomy, stinking streets and high, shuttered houses, with barbers strumming on guitars in every doorway and loafing crowds in long brown cloaks and three-cornered hats, gave way to primitive hill villages where the corn was threshed by trampling bullocks and mules and the blowflies swarmed over the middens in the central square. The roads became goat-tracks and ravines; every few minutes a cart would sink into a hole or overturn on a stone. Presently there were precipices and gullies over which the six-pounders had to be hauled on ropes by sweating, cursing infantrymen.
After the first week the rains came down: not ordinary rain such as Englishmen knew, but cascades of huge globular drops which soaked everyone to the marrow and drew clouds of steam from the dripping columns. There was no shelter save for a rare mountain farm or peasant's hut, swarming with fleas and rank with the stench of the communal vessel round which the family and the livestock slept. Every mile the way grew more rocky and bleak. Occasionally a ruined Moorish castle on a conical hill guarding a defile would relieve the monotony. But still the army pressed on, climbing ever higher into the cold, dripping clquds. As it approached the Spanish
1 Hester Stanhope, 59.
frontier, all sign of human habitation vanished, save once in a glimpse through clouds a solitary convent nestling in a bunch of trees on the bosom of the mountain, a vast abrupt vale, and below, revealed in that apocalyptic second, the whole system of the waters. Then the swirling mist closed down again, and there was nothing to be seen but the bleak, rocky, wretched road with a black hill on one side and a precipice on the other, both lost in impenetrable, icy cloud. It made a young officer, with a touch of the poet, feel as if he were travelling on the bare outside of the world, "bordered by the chaotic beginning of things."1
With the crossing of the frontier in the second week of November spirits rose. First impressions of the new country were greatly in its favour; the houses were cleaner and the farms better stocked, the proud, courtly people more handsome and hospitable, the landscape more romantic. Ensign Boothby, who had gone ahead of the right flank of the army to Alcantara, where Trajan's viaduct over the Tagus reminded him of "the bridge of Sin and Death striding over chaos," was greeted by the Alcalde in his scarlet cloak and treated to the fandango by girls whose graceful pride, as they snapped their fingers and alternately raised and lowered their heads, awed alike their rustic partners and the watching redcoats. Later he was entertained in a capital house with curtains and clean beds by "a fine, black, animated Spaniard" with a most beautiful wife, from whose long, black mantilla, brilliant rolling eyes, Roman nose, sweet mouth, jet black hair and graceful curls he could not take his eyes. The quicker tempo of the land affected the marching columns as they hurried on through sparkling air and cork woods to Salamanca. They felt ready for anything. " We had fought and conquered and felt elated," wrote Rifleman Harris of the 95th; "Spain was before us and every man in the Rifles seemed only too anxious to get a rap at the French again. It was a glorious sight to see our colours spread in those fields. The men seemed invincible and nothing, I thought, could beat them."2
Meanwhile another British army had entered Spain. On the morning of October 13th, Mr. Crabb Robinson, The Tunes correspondent at Corunna, was startled by the report of cannon and, running to the ramparts, saw more than a hundred and fifty transports sailing
1 Boothby, 185-6. See idem., 162-3, 168-9, 188, 216; Blakeney, 22-4, 29; Schaumann, 11, 15, 17, 19-20, 24, 27, 35, 37, 53, 55, 63; Moore, II, 273-6; Oxfordshire Light Infantry Chronick (1902), 226.
2 " We had some of as desperate fellows in the Rifles as had ever toiled under the burning sun of an enemy's country." Harris, 71. See also Boothby, 163, 173, 176, 180, 182-3; Blakeney, 27-8, 33; Schaumann, 65; Journal of a Soldier, 50-1.
in a double line before a gentle breeze; it made him proud to see them. It was Baird with the first 12,000 from England. Unfortunately there was a hitch, for no one had given authority for them to land, and the "Provincial Junta was either unable or unwilling to do so. In the end a special messenger had to be sent to Madrid to obtain the Supreme Junta's leave. Hookham Frere, however, who landed at Corunna a few days later as British Envoy, was given a tremendous reception. His carriage was dragged through the streets amid vivas, crackers and rockets, he was feasted at a banquet of countless dishes highly flavoured with garlic and treated to a theatrical performance at which Pluto appeared trampling Bonaparte under foot while the whole audience rose and sang "God Save the King" and "Rule Britannia."1
But not till October 25th was any reply received from Madrid. It then only gave authority for Baird to land if he insisted and strongly urged that he and his transports should remove themselves to some point on the coast less dangerously near the naval arsenal of Ferrol. Baird, a blunt Anglo-Indian soldier, however insisted, and next day his troops began to put ashore. But his difficulties had only just begun. The authorities objected to their disembarking in any but the smallest detachments and failed to make any arrangements for their feeding. It was not till November 4th that they were all ashore. Even then their progress over the two hundred miles of mountain road to Astorga was painfully slow. As in Portugal, the Treasury had omitted to provide bullion to hire forage waggons and draught cattle. There was not even money to pay the troops.
All this took place in an atmosphere of complete unreality. Nobody in Corunna seemed to have the slightest idea what was happening elsewhere in Spain. The only information that could be obtained from the local leaders was that the French were flying; questioned as to where they were flying or from whom, they took refuge in vague generalities and evasions. Moore was faced by precisely the same difficulties: there was no Spanish Commander-in-Chief or General Staff, and the only authority to whom he could appeal was a Supreme Junta of thirty-four persons, all possessing equal powers and all apparently equally unpractical. So far as they gave their minds to military matters—most of their time was spent in discussing theoretical constitutions and quarrelling with the Provincial Juntas about their powers—they were obsessed by a fantastic plan for encircling the French with a converging movement of three almost
1 Crabb Robinson, I, 275; Jackson, II, 271-9. About the same time Captain Leith Hay witnessed in Madrid a "representation of the union between Great Britain and Spain, depicting a flaringly-colourcd transparency in which figured His Majesty King George III and the amiable Fernando Septimo locked in a close embrace." Leith Hay, I, 57.
completely unco-ordinated armies whose numbers in their own imaginations they exaggerated as much a
s their fighting capacity. Any anxiety Moore might feel for the junction of his own forces, now moving across Spain in widely separated columns, he was assured, was entirely needless, since the enemy was securely hemmed in by immensely superior strength. The British Government seemed to share this illusion; misled by the uncritical optimism of its military agents with the Spanish armies,1 Castlereagh wrote on November ist that the French—a bare 50,000—were threatened from Saragossa to Bilbao by forces more than twice as large and that Napoleon's reinforcements could never reach them.
The Spanish leaders gave little thought to Napoleon. That he was likely to strike before their schemes eventuated never crossed their minds. Yet since the disaster at Baylen he had increased the year's levee of conscripts to a quarter of a million and transferred the pick of his veterans from Germany and Italy to Bayonne, using continuous relays of waggons to move them quickly. Within four weeks of leaving the Danube and Elbe they were concentrated on the Spanish frontier.
At the same time the Emperor took steps to safeguard his rear. Putting his jack-boot down on underground patriotic activities in Prussia and browbeating the Austrian Ambassador, he summoned his ally, the Emperor Alexander, to Erfurt. Here at the end of September, amid servile princes and splendid pageantry, he secured a promise of Russian military aid against any uprising in the east. Then he hurried back home to Paris and told his Legislative Assembly that he was on his way to Spain to crown his brother in Madrid and plant his eagles on the towers of Lisbon. As his berlin drove southwards, the long columns of the Grand Army were already pouring along the trunk road to Vittoria. By November ist, 1808, 120,000 troops were already on the Ebro.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 37
