Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  On December nth the advance began. But three days later, when the army was half-way to Valladollid, a sheaf of captured documents was brought into Moore's headquarters at Alaejos. A French officer, carrying dispatches from Napoleon's Chief-of-Staff to Marshal Soult near Burgos, had been murdered in a roadside village for insulting the postmaster. .His papers came into the hands of the British skirmishing cavalry. They showed that Napoleon had far greater forces in Spain than had been supposed—well over 300,000 men—and that, all resistance in the centre of the country having collapsed, he was advancing towards Badajoz and Lisbon. But their most valuable disclosure was that Soult, unaware that the British were in his path, was moving westwards across the Carrion with 18,000 men, while Junot with the army recently evacuated from Portugal was marching on Burgos in support.

  It was the most useful information that Moore had received from his allies since he entered the country, and it reached him characteristically, not from their rulers but through the rude and obscure. It revealed both his danger and his opportunity. If Baird continued his march on Carrion and Burgos unsupported by the rest of the army fifty miles to the south, he would be overwhelmed. But if the British united promptly and fell on Soult's lines on the Carrion before Junot arrived, it would be Soult who would be overwhelmed. With La Romana announcing his readiness to move from Leon against the Marshal's right flank, Moore had a chance of confronting an isolated group of the French army with forces twice as large. If he could only be quick enough he might, before retreating to the sea, present his country with a resounding victory.

  He therefore gave orders to change his march from north-east to north so as to join Baird at the earliest moment. On December 15th, with the latter's advance guard at Benavente, he crossed the Douro in two columns at Zamora and Toro. The snow from the mountains was beginning to fall and the violence of the wind was such that the men could hardly stand. But nothing could halt Moore's pace; already his cavalry screen had made contact with Soult's patrols around Tordesillas and he knew that the alarm must soon be raised. Rifleman Harris of the 95th dropped under his load in the streets of Zamora like one dead; " we staggered on," he wrote, "looking neither to the right nor to the left." In his haste Moore was trying discipline high; the Spaniards still barred their houses a and hid their food; the wintry plain was treeless and fuel unobtainable. But the troops were sustained by the thought of a fight; it was believed that Soult—the Duke of Damnation as they called him after his Dalmatian title1—was flying before them and that they were near the end of the chase which they supposed had been going on ever since they left Lisbon. They were rough, unlettered men ·who knew nothing of strategy. But fighting the French was in their blood.

  By December 20th the British forces had met, the infantry around Mayorga, the cavalry at Melgar Abaxo. The men surveyed each other curiously; those from Corunna, fresh from good quarters and rations, with bright jackets and shining accoutrements, those from Portugal gaunt, wayworn and rugged, with faces burnt dark by the sun. Next day they pushed on together towards Sahagun. Here at dawn on the 21st, after Lord Paget's cavalry had tried to surround a brigade of French horse, 500 men of the 15th Hussars charged and routed 700 French dragoons, capturing 13 officers, including two colonels, and 144 other ranks. Later, while the British marched into the town, Soult, now thoroughly alarmed, halted his advance and withdrew his outposts behind the Carrion.

  Though Moore could not know it, news of his move had reached Napoleon. Busied with edicts for reconstituting Spain, the Emperor had assumed that the British were in retreat before his vanguard down the Madrid-Lisbon road. The capture of some stragglers from Hope's division at Talavera had confirmed this impression. But on December 19th, just as he was about to set off from Madrid for

  1 Journal of a Soldier, 52.

  Badajoz, Napoleon learnt the truth. The swaggering islanders, instead of retiring on their ships, had marched out of Salamanca eastwards and were already. half-way across his lines of communication.

  Napoleon retrieved his error with characteristic speed. Halting his westward march, he ordered an immediate concentration on the Castilian plain north of the Guadarramas. Leaving the Badajoz highway for Salamanca, his advance guard was to sever Moore's communications with Portugal. Ney was recalled from Aragon to support Soult, thus giving a respite to Saragossa, now facing a second siege. Soult himself was to act on the defensive and decoy the British on to Burgos. Meanwhile the flower of the Grand Army was to cross the Guadarramas under Napoleon's personal command and fall on Moore's flank at Tordesillas and Valladollid. Everything was to give way to the destruction of the arch-enemy.

  But the price was the postponement for another year of the * conquest of the Peninsula and the crossing of the Mediterranean. Napoleon knew that Austria was rearming, that his exactions and conscriptions in Germany were rousing a Teuton hornets' nest and that the example of Spain was awakening dangerous hopes in every corner of Europe. With Russian revenues dwindling under the pressure of the British blockade, he dared not rely on the Czar's friendship. Once more the islanders with their meddling and stupidity had spoilt his best-laid designs. "All the evils, all the plagues which can afflict the human race," he wrote to Josephine, "come from London!"

  . Only one thing could retrieve the situation: the complete destruction of the British army. And that, thanks to Moore's temerity, was imminent. "The day we succeed in seeing these English," Napoleon wrote as he hurried north from Madrid, "will be a day of jubilee. Ah! that these 20,000 were 100,000 so that more English mothers might feel the horrors of war!" That night, while Moore's troops were resting and repairing their boots, the Grand Army began to ascend the Guadarrama. It was bitterly cold, a blizzard was blowing ariTl the track was thick with snow. Three times the officers of the advance-guard reported that the pass was impracticable in such weather. But nothing could shake Napoleon's purpose: linking arms with two of his generals, lie marched with the leading files till the summit was reached. It almost seemed that night as though the Revolution incarnate was hunting the soul of England over the mountains.

  By December 23rd, Napoleon was at Villacastin, only 60 miles south of Valladollid where—unaware of the last minute alteration in the British march—he supposed Moore to be. Actually the latter was at Sahagun—40 miles further north—issuing orders for an attack on Souk's lines across the Carrion. "Sir John dines with General Paget," wrote a subaltern, "and battle is the word!" Advancing through the night, the troops were to fall on the French at dawn, following up with an assault on the enemy's main position at Saldana on Christmas Day. " The movement I am making," Moore reported to Frere, "is of the most dangerous kind; I not only risk to be surrounded at any moment by superior forces, but to have my communications intercepted with the Galicias. I wish it to be apparent to the whole world that we have done everything in our power in support of the Spanish cause, and that we do not abandon it until long after the Spaniards had abandoned it."1

  Yet by a strange irony the unseeking soldier who was staking so much to keep his country's word was at that moment being reviled by ignorant amateurs as a timid procrastinator who had sullied England's honour by looking on while the Spaniards were overwhelmed. "I can't bear to think of it," wrote a grand lady; a retired ambassador at Brighton spoke with scorn of the British Commander's readiness to get out of the way.2 Even Hookham Frere, flying with the Junta to Seville, bombarded Moore with petulant notes charging him with an inactivity that had brought indelible disgrace to England and ruin to her ally. So outrageous did this brilliant man's letters become that his friend Canning was forced to remind him that the force he was seeking to commit to adventures in the Spanish hinterland was his country's only army; another, he was told, she had not to send.

  On- the evening of December 23rd, 1808, while Walter Scott at Ashestiel was writing that little could be hoped of a general who was always looking over his shoulder, Moore's men set out on their momentous march. They were in the highest spirits, telling each other that now they w
ould beat the French to death and have their case. " Every heart," wrote Captain Sterling, " beat high, every breast was buoyant for victory." As each column moved off into the snowlit night the regiments broke into cheers. Then they marched in silence, though some, remembering that it was the eve of Christmas, spoke of friends in England and of the yuletide feast.3

  But a little after midnight the leading files of the Light Brigade

  1 Moore, II, 374. See also idem., 286-7.

  2 Two Duchesses, 315-17; Jackson, II, 334.

  3 Harris, 109; Scott, II, 139; Journal of a Soldier, 52; Moore, II, 375-6.

  heaid the sound of galloping on the road behind and saw a dragoon spur furiously past towards General Craufurd at the head of the column. Turning in his saddle, the general, after a glance at the dispatch, gave the order, "Halt!" A few minutes later the troops, grumbling furiously, were retracing their steps. Everywhere, as the orders were received, exultation gave way to gloom; even the best-disciplined murmured. When the First Foot Guards, drawn up outside Sahagun Convent, were told by Sir David Baird to go back to their quarters and be ready to march in the morning, "nothing could be heard on every side but the clang of firelocks thrown down in despair."

  For during the evening of the 24th Moore had learnt, first from La Romana and then from his own cavalry patrols, that Napoleon had recrossed the Guadarramas. At Palencia, only twenty miles to the south of Carrion, billeting officers had arrived with Imperial cavalry; the Emperor himself was reported close behind. Any further advance by the British would be suicidal. A day would be needed to reach Soult, another to beat him and a third to return to Sahagun, and by that time Napoleon's forces would be all round them. There was only one thing to do: to get back to Astorga and the mountain road to Corunna before it was too late.

  War is largely a matter of guesswork; a general can seldom see what is happening on the other side of the hill. He must form the picture on which his plain of campaign is based on imperfect evidence and constantly refashion it on better. Yet it is a frailty of the human mind to cling rigidly to conceptions once formed. The hall-mark of a great commander is that, while refusing to allow mere rurnour to confuse his dispositions, he is quick on receiving fresh data to abandon a false conception.

  On the evidence of Marshal Berthier's captured dispatch Moore had formed a picture of the military situation in northern Spain as it was in the third week of December. On that picture he had acted boldly and decisively. But just as his stroke was in mid-air, he received new information showing that the picture on which he was acting was no longer true. He did not hesitate. He withdrew his army westwards as quickly as it had come.

  By doing so he averted—just in time—what might have been the greatest military disaster in British history. Napoleon was seeking to avenge by a single decisive stroke the Nile and Trafalgar, Copenhagen and Egypt, Maida and Vimiero, his lost colonies and the blockade of the Continent. He believed that England, war-weary and politically divided, would never recover from the catastrophe of her last military hope. Her striking force was within his grasp. While the Grand Army drove up like a thundercloud out of the south against Moore's exposed flank, Junot was about to reinforce Soult on his front and Lefebvre was hurrying up from the south-west to seize the Galician passes in his rear. Yet, by his sudden change of direction on December 13th and then by his equally prompt retreat on the 23rd, Moore still eluded that grasping hand. Like a matador, as the infuriated beast he had drawn charged down on him, he stepped quickly aside.

  But, unlike an athlete in the ring, a commander has more to control than his own body. He has to adjust his movements to his command. It is courting disaster to ask too much of it. And Moore's men had been sorely tried. During the past few days they had been driven forward at a pace only endurable under the conviction that victory was at hand. In bitter weather and an inhospitable countryside they had outrun their supplies. Half of them were young unfledged troops fresh from England; the other half had been marching, save for one halt, at extreme pressure since the middle of October. Now, without explanation, they were ordered to retreat at an even faster pace. Discipline threatened to crack under the strain.

  Moore's problem was twofold. It was to cross the Esla and gain the mountain defile beyond Astorga before the fastest mover in the world should cut him off. It was also to hold his army together as a fighting, manageable unit. He could not defend any position for long or it would starve or be surrounded. He could not go too fast or his discouraged and uneducated men would lose cohesion. His assets were that his best troops were of his own training and that by skilful and timely dispositions he had left a margin of space and time between himself and the hunter. His handicaps were that his solitary line of supply was too congested and ill-found to maintain so large a force in mid-winter, and that, owing to the habit of his country, his army was drawn largely from the wastrel and criminal classes.

  From Sahagun to Benavente and the Esla was nearly fifty miles: to Astorga and the Galician defile another thirty. Beyond that lay a hundred and fifty miles of mountain road to Corunna. There were few towns and villages on the way; the countryside afforded neither food nor fuel. The army was therefore forced to retire in corps by succession. Allowing La Romana with 7000 ragged Spaniards to follow the safest route and that least likely to impede the British retreat, Moore sent off Hope and Fraser on the 24th and Baird on Christmas Day. He himself took the road nearest Napoleon's line of advance with Edward Pager's Reserve division and the Light Infantry regiments he had trained. Lord Paget, Edward Paget's brother, covered the rear with the cavalry.

  The advance had been made in frost and snow; the retreat began in a thaw. By day the roads were rivers of slush and mud; at night they became glaciers. All Christmas Day, while Napoleon rested his troops at Tordesillas, the English, soaked and frozen, pressed on. Tired, dispirited men looked in one another's faces and asked whether they were ever to halt again. "By Jesus, Master Hill," demanded an Irishman of the 95th, " where the devil is this you're taking us to ?" "To England, M'Lauchlan," came the disquieting reply, "if we can get there."1

  "Should the English pass to-day in their positions," Napoleon observed at Tordesillas, "they are lost." "Put it in the newspapers," he ordered, " and make it universally known that 36,000 English are surrounded, that I am at Benavente in their rear while Soult is in their front." But, imagining them to be still at Sahagun, he resumed his northward march on the 27th towards that town instead of north-west wards to Benavente. So well did Paget's cavalry screen do its work that not till he reached Medina del Rioseco that night did the Emperor discover that Moore had been too quick. By then all but the British rearguard had crossed the Esla which, swollen by the thaw, had become a torrent.

  But under the strain of the march, tempers and discipline collapsed. Dejection and ignominy now showed on every face. The men could not comprehend the leadership that refused to let them stand at bay. Forbidden to loose their anger against the French, they wreaked it on the Spaniards. There was a rumour that the retreat was due to La Romana's refusal to co-operate: the memory of barred doors and sullen scowls was in every heart. The villages on the road were mercilessly ransacked for firewood; " everyone found at home," wrote a private of the 71st, "was looked upon as a traitor to his country." All Moore's remonstrances and rebukes could not stop the rot; his officers were losing control. Wet, cold and shivered to death, with every door in the town shut against them and the army commissaries hastily burning the provisions and stores, the soldiers took the law into their own hands. In the Duke of Ossuna's lovely castle at Benavente—"surpassing anything I had ever seen," declared a Highlander, "such as I have read the description of in books of fairy tales"—they drove their bayonets into the painted walls to hang up their knapsacks and washing, broke up priceless furniture for

  1 Harris, 112, 114; Journal of a Soldier, 53; Lynedoch, 292; Fortescue, VI, 340; Lcith Hay, I, 98; Schaumann, 95.

  firewood and ripped up the tapestries for bed-clothes. "What the Engli
sh soldiers cannot see any purpose in," wrote the German, Schaumann, "docs not interest them."1

  Behind the dissolving army the Reserve Division and the Light Brigade remained obedient to their orders. They were facing the enemy and were therefore occupied and cheerful. " We are all well," wrote General Paget, " but a good deal harassed." The riflemen whom Moore had trained at Shorncliffe lay in the path of the oncoming French like cats watching for their prey, and, when their chance came, they did not waste ammunition. On the night of the 28th, after repeatedly driving off Napoleon's Imperial Chasseurs, they filed silently across the bridge over the Esla at Castro-Gonzala while the engineers prepared to fire the mine at which they had been working all day. But though the men were so tired that they could scarcely keep open their eyes, when the drums beat to arms on an alarm everyone was at his post in an instant.2

  The British cavalry, under Lord Paget's confident hand, behaved, too, magnificently. On his arrival at Medina del Rioseco Napoleon, realising that Moore had already crossed his front, swung his columns to the north-west and ordered his cavalry forward through Mayorga and Valderas to drive the British rearguards into the Esla. Hitherto these superb horsemen, drawn from the finest fighting races in Europe, had been accustomed to carry everything before them; in Spain the mere sight of their brazen casques and streaming horsehair had turned armies into rabbles. But the British and Hanoverian cavalry were quite unimpressed by them. Three brilliant regiments in particular—the 7th, 10th and 15th Hussars—proved, as at Beaumont fourteen years before, that, though inexperienced in the art of manoeuvring with large armies, the British in personal encounter could match any cavalry in the world.