1 Charles Napier, I, 96. 1 Blakeney, 121.
told him that victory was his; the sufferings he and his men had endured for so long were about to be avenged.
At that moment a cannon-ball from the threatened battery struck him from his horse, carrying away his left shoulder and part of his collar-bone, and leaving his lungs exposed and his arm hanging by a torn string of flesh. For a moment he lay motionless, then raised himself to a sitting position, and, with eyes kindling with their habitual brilliance, resumed his gaze on the smoke and turmoil ahead. So unmoved was his face that those about him could scarcely realise the deadly nature of his wound.
A little later Commissary Schaumann saw him being borne by six Highlanders through the streets of Corunna on a blood-stained blanket, with a little group of aides-de-camp and doctors walking beside. He had refused to be parted from his sword which he carried out of the field with him like a Spartan his shield. Though breathing only with intense pain, he repeatedly made his bearers pause so that he might look back on the battle. " You know," he murmured to his friend, Colonel Anderson, "I have always wished to die this way."
After Moore's departure—for Baird had also had his arm shattered by the great battery's raking fire—the command devolved on a fellow Scot, Sir John Hope. The latter, isolated on the left from the decisive events which had been taking place elsewhere, was unable to follow up the swift succession of blows planned by his fallen chief. The gallantest of men, pottering instinctively—as one of his officers testified—to wherever the fire was hottest,1 he was a little overawed by the weight of the responsibility that had suddenly fallen on him; England's only army was in his keeping and her fleet was waiting in a perilous anchorage. It was growing dark and, seeing that the French attack was broken, he called off the pursuit and ordered Moore's instructions of the morning to be put into immediate operation. It was certain now that the embarkation would be unmolested.
In darkness and weariness the men marched to the quayside while the rearguard piquets lit bivouac fires on the abandoned ridge. Hollow-eyed and covered with blood and filth, they looked so terrible that the townsfolk crossed themselves as they passed.2 But the withdrawal was carried out in perfect order, so well had Moore's measures and a brush with the enemy restored the discipline of his tattered troops. Presently, on the dark, tossing water-front they were grasped by the mighty fists of the sailors and pulled into the boats. As they were rowed across the harbour to the waiting ships,
1 Boothby, 219.
2Schaumann, 141.
their General lay breathing his last on the soil of the land he had come to save. "I hope the people of England will be satisfied," he whispered, "I hope my country will do me justice." He repeatedly inquired after his officers, urging that this one should be recommended for promotion and begging to be remembered to another. "Is Paget in the room?" he asked, "remember me to him, he is a fine fellow." Then, as his wound congealed and grew cold and the agony increased, he became silent lest he should show weakness.
By the morning of the 17th the whole army was on board except for 1500 troops whom Hope, resolved to depart in dignity, had left under Hill and Beresford to cover the embarkation of the wounded. The Spaniards, stirred by the battle to a sudden ecstasy of generous enthusiasm, had volunteered to defend the ramparts while the fleet got to sea. The whole town, men, women and children had turned out; "everybody commanded, everybody fired, everybody halloed, everybody ordered silence, everybody forbade the fire, everybody thought musketry best and everybody cannon."1 "Thus, after all," wrote Schaumann, "we became reconciled to the Spanish character." About the same time Napoleon, having threatened to hang the municipality for the murder of a French soldier, was preparing to leave Valladollid for Paris. His eagles had not been planted on the towers of Lisbon after all. Nor had he destroyed the British army. As it began to grow light and the wind in the bay of Corunna freshened, a party of the 9th Foot with a chaplain and a few mournful officers could be seen making their way along the ramparts on the landward bastion of the citadel. They carried the body of their dead Commander, wrapped in his military cloak. Presently they committed it to the ground, and "left him alone with his glory."
1 Boothby, 222. "The Spaniards are a courageous people. Unmindful of themselves, they braved a superior enemy to assist a friend whom they had no prospect of ever seeing again."—Journal of a Soldier, 78.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Gates of Europe
" England, although she has every right to expect worse generals than France, is much more rigid with them in articles of skill and judgment. For, if she can by any means attribute a disaster to the error of a general, she is not only savage but sanguinary. And this makes very good generals and very brave men so vastly afraid of responsibility that when they assume command they appear cowardly and indecisive."
Lieutenant Boothby
A SOUTH-WESTERLY gale carried Sir John Moore's army swiftly to England. Battened down in the holds of tiny transports— few of them of more than two hundred tons burden1—the exhausted men reached Plymouth and Portsmouth more dead than alive. Barefooted, gaunt and verminous, their filthy rags and pallid, bearded faces horrified southern England. As they hobbled up the quaysides in their dirt and misery, cracking after the manner of their race jests about their appearance, they were greeted as the survivors of a terrible disaster.
Of 35,000 who had gone forth to liberate Spain, 8000 remained behind. Their chief had fallen in battle, his second-in-command had been dangerously wounded, and many distinguished officers— including Coote Manningham, the trainer of the Rifle Corps—had died from their sufferings. Every hour brought tidings of some new loss. The inhabitants of the south coast ports and the villages along the line of march were harrowed by tales of suffering; their hearts were deeply touched. "The people," wrote a Highlander of the 71st, "come around us, showing all manner of kindness, carrying the lame and leading the blind. We were received into every house as if we had been their own relations. How proud did I feel to belong to such a people !"2
The romantic dreams of Spanish valour and patriotism vanished in a night. The returned soldiers presented the Spaniards as heartless
1 Harris described how, when the ship in which he was travelling heeled over, an officer was posted over the hold with a drawn sword in one hand and a lantern in the other to keep the men from moving.—Harris, 157.
2 "Journal of a Soldier, 80. See also Boothby, 221; Harris, 91-2, 157-60; Smith, I, 17, Costeilo, 6; Fortescue, VI, 393; Schaumann, 146-7; Paget Brothers, 111; Dyott, I, 268; 272; Jackson, II, 372; Blakency, 124.
curmudgeons who had barred their doors and hidden their food and wine; as cravens who had fled from the battlefield leaving their would-be liberators surrounded. Nobody had a good word to say for them or their beggarly country: a land, it seemed, of rain-soaked, frozen uplands and stinking hovels swarming with lice and fleas, where a clean bed and a coal fire were as little known as kindliness and honesty. Even the story of Saragossa was now discredited; " our people returning from Spain," wrote Francis Jackson, " treat the whole thing as a fable. They cannot believe the Spaniards to be capable of anything like energy and bravery."
For their disillusionment the British people blamed not themselves but their leaders. Moore's death saved him from official censure, but many laid the sufferings of the troops at his door, blaming alternatively his inactivity and his precipitate retreat. The nature of his achievement was unperceivcd; at best, it seemed that he had got his army out of an impossible scrape at the cost of drawing the enemy into a province that had hitherto escaped invasion. It was the old, familiar tale, wrote Walter Scott; England wanted everything but courage and virtue in her struggle against genius. "Skill, knowledge of mankind, ineffable, unhesitating villainy, combination of movement and combination of means are with our adversary. We can only fight like mastiffs, blindly and desperately." Old Lord St. Vincent, speaking in the Lords, went further; the campaign had proved the greatest disgrace of the whole war. Tr
ansports had been frittered away conveying Junot's ruffians to the battlefield; the army should have been sent at the start to northern Spain instead of Portugal; it was the grossest miscarriage to make it traverse a wild and inhospitable country in the rainy season. He ended by appealing for the employment of one of the Princes of the Blood—preferably the Duke of Kent—in its command.1
It was a measure of the Opposition's irresponsibility that while one of its leaders was clamouring in the Lords for a Royal Duke to command in the field, its members in the Commons were engaged in hounding the Duke of York from the Horse Guards where he was supremely useful. At the beginning of February, 1809, a Volunteer colonel of convivial habits named Wardle, supported by the radical member for Westminster, Sir Francis Burdett, electrified the House by revealing not only—what everybody but the general public knew2—that the Duke's matrimonial life was not what it
1" They have made the science ot" war their study from childhood," he declared, "if they are not to be employed, I am at a loss to conjecture for what purpose they were bred to arms."—Tucker, II, 341-3. See also Scott, II, 151; Jackson, II, 348-9, 352; Campbell, II, 159.
8 See A Letter to his Royal Highness or a Delicate Enquiry into the. Doubt whether he be more favoured by Mars or Venus.—London, 1807.
appeared to be, but that his ex-mistress, Mrs. Clarke, had been dealing in Army commissions at prices that undercut regulation rates, presumably with his complicity. Her subsequent appearance in the House as a witness sent every member scurrying into the chamber to gape at her pert face and brazen answers; poor Wilberforce, wrote the irreverent Dudley Ward, was horrified "at the thought of this Babylonish person being brought into his holy presence." For a whole month, while the Commons sat in Grand Committee, the campaign in the Peninsula was forgotten. "If half a dozen Spains had been lost and half a dozen armies with them," Francis Jackson testified, "they would not have been thought of." In the end the Duke, though proved guiltless of any share in the lady's financial transactions, was forced to resign. Thus in the course of a few weeks the British soldier lost his two best friends, the one in battle, the other by slander.
The Opposition, however, had by then lost its chance of exploiting the wave of indignation over the retreat and the Convention of Cintra. By the time Mrs. Clarke had faded into comparative obscurity the public had regained its temper. Though there was unrest in the industrial towns and a rising undercurrent in favour of reform, few responsible men wanted to turn out the Government for aristocrats like Grenville and Grey, who seldom left their country seats,1 or politicians of the stamp of Whitbread and Sheridan. The former had become a public jest and the latter—" drunk, lazy and discontented"2—a public scandal. Even the noisy Wardle's brief blaze of popularity faded when it was found that he had bribed Mrs. Clarke to accuse the Duke by a promise of new furniture and then —so the lady affirmed—failed to pay for it. Nor was there any agreement between the various Opposition groups except in the hysterical vehemence with which they assailed the Government. They spoilt even the best case by violence and exaggeration.
But the Whigs' greatest disability was their failure in patriotism. For this the country could not forgive them. When Grenville reacted to Corunna by declaring that England must never again send an army to the Continent or Whitbread argued that the Government had been mad to reject the pretended peace overtures which Napoleon had made after Erfurt, the average man felt only contempt. Hatred of Bonaparte and all his ways was by now too deeply implanted in the national consciousness; Britons thought of him, like Walter Scott, as a demon permitted to scourge the earth
1" Many people enjoy their country houses, but Lord Grenville's attachment to Boconnoc surpasses anything I have yet seen. . . . Politics are no more alluded to in conversation than astrology."—Auckland, IV, 314.
2 Dudley, 62.
for its sins. It was not for them to compromise with him. For more than sixteen years they had grown accustomed to loathe the very name of Frenchman. Their army's late encounter with them only hardened their resolve to thrash them. It had proved that, man for man, they were a match for them on land as well as sea.1
In its uncompromising patriotism the Government represented the country. It even refused to despair of Spain. After Corunna many wrote the Peninsula off as a dead loss like Russia and Prussia. " That the wretch Bonaparte will get possession of all Spain," wrote good Mrs. Jackson from Bath in February; " I have no more doubt than that I shall send this letter to the post"; an old captain she met at the Pump House told her that she might as well send her cook to Newbury to stop the mail coach as try to hold up the Grand Army. News of further Spanish disasters followed the return of Moore's troops. Venegas was routed by Victor at Ucles, Corunna and Ferrol were yielded by their Governors a few days after the British evacuation, Joseph Bonaparte was crowned at the end of January, 1809, in Madrid. In the next month, St. Cyr, overwhelming the Spaniards at Vails, made himself master of nearly all Catalonia, while, after 50,000 of the defenders of Saragossa had perished and a third of the city been reduced to nubble, 16,000 pestilence-stricken survivors—still proudly dragging their starved bones to the sound of the drum—staggered out to surrender. Even the staunch Collingwood, directing his interminable blockade in the Mediterranean, admitted that he could hear of no success from any quarter.
Yet, though the north and centre of Spain might be lost, the British colours flew over Lisbon. Seville and Cadiz were still un-conquered. Command of the sea enabled Britain to dominate the wide perimeter of the Peninsula: her troops withdrawn from one point on the coast could be moved more swiftly than Napoleon's road-bound legions to another. The Spaniards had suffered disasters but their resistance was unbroken. The extension of French conquests only hardened it. No sooner had Soult's army, followed by Ney's, overrun Galicia than that province—hitherto indifferent to the war—rose in passionate revolt. The moral forces which had made the Revolution and which had ever since operated against its excesses came into play. The exuberant lawlessness that prompted Napoleon to filch the Spanish crown, and the private of his Guard to rob the peasant's household peace, aroused instincts deep in the human conscience. Spain might still be medieval, but nowhere were individuals more ready to respond to elemental moral promptings.
1 Two Ducheses, 317-18. See also Windham Papers, II, 344-5; Windham, 488 ; Jackson, H, 374; Haydon, I, 244; Scott, II, 135.
The doctrine that a revolutionary army was entitled to live on a conquered country was met by the still more revolutionary doctrine that a country so treated was morally obliged to destroy the invader. Scarcely a day passed that February without ten or twenty of the French being killed; the banks of the Tagus were lined with peasants armed with fowling pieces, whose victims fell before they knew they were being attacked.1 The Spanish temperament, with its fierce individualism, heroic obstinacy and passion for revenge, lent itself to such warfare. So did the landscape with its wild and inaccessible hills and immense distances.
The British Government had other reasons for persevering in the Peninsula. The enslaved peoples of the Continent watching Napoleon's veterans recede into Spain, had realised there was only one Grand Army. They were thrilled by Saragossa and Baylen; the Spaniards, wrote a German in the autumn of 1808, were the ruling theme of every conversation. To still such hopes Napoleon was now issuing terrifying threats against traitors, foreign and domestic. In the last week of January, 1809, arriving from Valladollid at St. Cloud, he had turned on Talleyrand and denounced him as so much dung in silk stockings. For, being more concerned with his own future safety—and so by implication France's—than with Napoleon's present glory, Talleyrand had ventured to criticise his master's foreign policy. He wished to reconcile Europe to French hegemony. Napoleon only wanted to subjugate it to his will.
For, in Europe as in Spain, the exercise of the new Charlemagne's will was so vehement and unscrupulous that he invariably drove those opposed to it to desperation. It was this that Talleyrand feared. It was impossible for Napoleon to
leave his conquests alone; he had perpetually to re-mould them to his will. He had found Germany divided, politically unconscious, and ready to subscribe to the revolutionary ideology of the Revolution. Yet within a year of his victory over Prussia, his incessant interference, extortion and military tyranny were already creating a dangerous German nationalism round a single point—hatred of himself and France. In June, 1807 Crabb Robinson, who five years before had witnessed the dawn of radical idealism in middle-class Germany, could scarcely discover a partisan of Napoleon. His foremost admirers were now rabidly opposed to him. Typical was Beethoven, who re-dedicated his Eroica Symphony to the memory of a great man, and Fichte whose cosmopolitan indifference was transformed by the shooting of a Nuremberg bookseller into a fiery patriotism. The latter's " Addresses to the German People," delivered in Berlin during the winter of
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