Wellesley had moved with such speed that it was not till that night that Soult realised his danger. Even then he merely contented himself with destroying his pontoon bridge over the Douro. The river, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, was in full flood, and, having removed all vessels to its northern bank, the Duke of Dalmatia could see no reason for hurry. His chief care was for the five miles of open country between Oporto and the sea where he feared that the British, using the fishing-boats gathered for their outflanking movement over the Vouga, might try to rush the estuary. He took little care of the steep banks above the city; only a madman, he felt, would dream of throwing part of his army over that angry spring flood with an undefeated enemy on the other shore.
But the Marshal had overlooked his adversary's experience of crossing Indian rivers. He had forgotten, too, his almost Napoleonic boldness. At dawn on May 12th, reconnoitring the Douro from the Serra height east of Villa Nova, Wellesley found that the rocky banks opposite were deserted at a point where the lie of the cliffs and a sudden bend in the river broke the vision of the French sentries in Oporto. Meanwhile his scouts, seeking for boats, had discovered a barber who had not only concealed a small skiff in a thicket but knew where there were four unguarded wine-barges on the northern bank. With the help of a local prior these were ferried over without raising an alarm. At the same time it became known that a scuttled ferry-boat at the village of Barca d'Avintas, four miles above the town, had been only superficially damaged.
Wellesley immediately decided to throw every man he could across the river, relying on the unorthodoxy of his tactics for surprise. He was taking an immense risk, but with the future dependent on a swift victory before Soult could fall back on his reserves, he meant to put everything to the test. While Major-General Murray with two battalions of the King's German Legion and two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons was sent to cross at. Barca d'Avintas, thirty men of the Buffs were piled into each of the four barges and hurried over to seize a large, empty seminary on the cliffs near the eastern outskirts of Oporto. The ground in front was carefully covered by three batteries concealed in the gardens of a convent on the Serra height. It was not till the barges had crossed for the third time, when half the Buffs were established on the northern bank, that the enemy awoke to what was happening.
During the ensuing counter-attack Wellesley's eighteen guns from across the river mowed down every frontal assault on the seminary, while more and more troops, including the 48th and 66th, were ferried over to support the Buffs. When Lieutenant-General Edward Paget, the hero of the Corunna rearguard, was dangerously wounded, his place was taken by a thirty-six-year-old Salopian, Major-General Rowland Hill, who continued to hold the position against every attack. Soon after midday Soult, realising the situation was taking an ugly turn, threw in a brigade which had been guarding the southern quayside of the city. Immediately hundreds of Portuguese emerged from the houses and began to paddle boats across to the southern bank. In these Wellesley rushed over the 29th Foot and the Brigade of Guards whom he had concealed in the streets and gardens of Villa Nova. The Guards were to have embarked first, but the Worcesters—resolved that none should go before them— passed back word that they were so packed in the narrow streets that it was impossible to open their ranks.1 Crowding into the boats, they landed in any order and stormed into the town. The whole city was by now in the wildest confusion, the inhabitants cheering from the windows, the streets filled with cannon and musket smoke and many of the houses on fire. At this point Soult, seeing the game was up, ordered a general retreat along the eastern road before it became too late. In the town jail Private Hennessy of the 50th—taken at Corunna with Charles Napier and recaptured, after escaping, in northern Portugal—cried out to his fellow captives at the sound of the firing that it must be the English, for their own bloody countrymen would never make such a fight! A moment later he was beating out the brains of the French sentry as the first detachment of the Buffs battered on the door.-'
By the time that Mr. Perceval was rising that afternoon at Westminster to introduce the Budget, the battle was over and Wellesley was sitting down to eat the dinner cooked for Soult. The latter, leaving behind him 300 dead, 1300 prisoners and six French and fifty-two captured Portuguese guns, was in full retreat to the east. His losses would have been still heavier had Murray done his duty, but that officer, encountering the entire French army as he advanced westwards from Avintas, drew aside and let them pass unchallenged. A superb charge by a squadron of the 14th Dragoons redeemed the occasion, but the bulk of the enemy escaped. With only
1 Leslie, m-12. 2Charles Napier, I, 113.
a weak force of cavalry and with his artillery and supply baggage still on the far side of an unbridged river, Wellesley, who had to husband every man of his little army, could not sustain a close pursuit.
At a total cost of twenty-three killed, two missing and ninety-eight wounded, Wellesley had defeated the more urgent of the two threats to Lisbon, driven a French Marshal from an almost impregnable position and freed the second city of Portugal. Nor was his triumph yet at an end. For on the following day Soult, still retreating eastwards, learnt that Beresford, advancing across the Douro from Lamego with his Portuguese-British corps, had unexpectedly thrown back Loison's division and occupied the town of Amarante on the only highway left into Spain.
With Wellesley behind him there was only one thing to be done. Soult, who did not bear an Imperial baton for nothing, acted promptly. He left the high road and struck northwards into the wild, tangled Serra de Santa Catalina. To do so he had to abandon all his remaining transport and guns and expose his men to an ordeal as severe as the retreat to Corunna. For nine days they struggled over perilous mountains and flooded rivers until, after losing everything they possessed, they reached Galicia. By May 19th a quarter of their number had perished or fallen by the way, many suffering a terrible fate at the hands of the revengeful hill-folk. A British commissary saw French soldiers nailed alive to the doors of barns and others trussed and emasculated with their amputated members stuffed into their mouths.1
Having outrun their supplies in a countryside that offered nothing but wine, the British were unable to prevent their escape. For a week they struggled after them, bivouacking on soaking hills and marching fifteen or sixteen miles a day over rocks till their shoes were cut to ribbons. A commissary, entering Ruivaens on May 18th, found the village street full of exhausted troops with pale and famished faces, standing up to their knees in mud. As Wellesley wrote that day to Castlereagh: "If an army throws away all its cannon, equipment and baggage and everything which can strengthen it and enable it to act together as a body, and abandons all those who are entitled to its protection but add to its weight and impede its progress, it must be able to march by roads through wrhich it cannot be followed by any army that has not made the same sacrifices." Hearing that Victor had advanced into eastern Portugal almost to Castello Branco, he therefore withdrew his
1 Schaumann, 156-7. See also Burgoyne, 41-4; Oman, n, 346-63; Gurwood, 258; Fortescue, VII, 165-7; Munster, 177-8.
victorious troops and reunited his army at Abrantes. In three weeks he had secured his northern flank and done all, or almost all, that he had set out to do.
The passage of the Douro took place at a moment when England sadly needed cheering. For several weeks no direct news had come from Germany, but salvoes and other signs of rejoicing on the French coast had had an ominous ring for those who remembered 1805.1 Then in the middle of May it became known in London that Napoleon had struck back at his foes with his customary swiftness. Leaving Paris on April 12 th, he had reached Donaiiwerth on the Bavarian plain at dawn on the 17th and thereafter in five successive days had won as many battles, culminating in the great victory of Eckmuhl on the 23rd. Forcing the Archduke Charles back into the Bohemian mountains with the loss of 30,000 men and a hundred guns, he had pressed on at high speed for Vienna. He entered the Austrian capital on May 13th, the day after Wellesley forced the Douro
.
All tins happened while the British were still making preliminary arrangements for the second front which was to divert French forces from the Danube and accompany a general rising in northern Germany. On April 24th a formal alliance with Austria had been signed in London; on May 18th the command of the 'invasion army was offered to Lord Chatham. A second expedition, which was to sail from Sicily for the Italian mainland, was still unembarked when the Archduke John, after an initial victory over the Viceroy Eugene at Sacile, was forced to withdraw into Carinthia as a result of the French advance on the capital. Disregarding all Collingwood's efforts to hurry him, Lieutenant-General Sir John Stuart, the childishly vain victor of Maida, was still "dawdling and fretting in his quarters" in Messina with 15,000 unused troops when Napoleon entered Vienna. By not grasping the chance her sea power gave her with sufficient promptitude, England had once again failed to pin down her foe on the continental circumference at the crucial moment.
Two Duchesses, 325-6; Jackson, 446.
"One of the most brilliant things ever done."— Two Duchesses, 326.
Yet the chances and changes of war are infinite. On May 22nd an England in sombre mood was startled by the Tower guns firing for the victory of the Douro.2 On the same day Napoleon, worsted in the bloodiest battle of his career, fell back before the Archduke Charles on to the Danube island of Lobau. His ammunition was exhausted and his one bridge broken behind him. Once more uncontrollable ambition and impatience had imperilled the fruits of his splendid genius. Resolved to end the campaign at a blow and contemptuously underestimating his enemy, he had started to cross the Danube in the presence of 80,000 Austrians. The Archduke Charles had counter-attacked when half the Grand Army was still on the far bank and, in two days of desperate fighting around the villages of Aspern and Essling, had inflicted more than 20,000 casualties. The battle, which made those of the Peninsula seem skirmishes, showed that Napoleon was mortal. With his army in deadly peril the hopes of Europe suddenly rose.
It was in the light of these hopes that Wellesley, having twice in nine months driven the French out of Portugal, prepared in June, 1809, to march into Spain. With the withdrawal of French troops to German battlefields and the temporary elimination of Soult, the war in the Peninsula had taken a turn which even the most optimistic could not have foreseen two months before. The entire French forces in the north-west were out of action or tied down in operations against the patriots of Galicia and Asturias, who in their mountain fortresses were now more than holding their own against the corps of Ney and Mortier. Elsewhere Spaniards were fighting bravely in Catalonia and Aragon, while the defeated armies of Estremadura and La Mancha, with the astonishing resilience of their country, were reforming south of the Tagus and in the Sierra Morena. But the greatest, sign of Spain's recovery was the mastery which her rustic guerrillas were establishing on every foot of her soil not actually occupied by the invader. So intense was this spontaneous explosion that the French found themselves unable to obtain the most elementary intelligence of British and Spanish movements and were hard put even to maintain communication between their own armies.
In these circumstances the British Government, wishing to denude northern France and the Dutch coast of defenders, had given Wellesley authority to extend his campaign beyond the Portuguese frontier. In its anxiety to release transports for the coming invasion of Europe it even agreed to make him temporarily independent of England by sending him 8000 additional troops. These included the veteran first battalions of the Light Brigade for which he had expressly asked and the Chestnut Troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. By June, though the bulk of his reinforcements had still to arrive, he had some 25,000 British and German effectives—the Portuguese were still unfit for service beyond their own borders—with another
4500 in hospital. Facing them in Spanish Estremadura between the Tagus and Guadiana were Victor's 23,000, watched—from the south bank of the Guadiana—by a ragged horde of more than 30,000 Spaniards, partly survivors of Medellin and partly new recruits, commanded by General Cuesta. The latter's proposal was that the British and Spanish armies should combine in one of those elaborate encircling movements which since Baylen had been the lodestar and bane of Spanish strategy. Its weakness lay in the assumption that Victor would remain motionless while his destroyers surrounded him.
Before Wellesley could join in this project he had to overcome immense difficulties. After five weeks' continuous marching and campaigning his troops were in need of shoes and clothing, as well as drastic reorganisation. Above all they needed transport and pack animals to enable them to advance through regions notoriously deficient in fodder and forage. This, in a land in which everything had to be paid for in cash, was not made easier by a serious shortage of specie; owing to the Treasury's currency troubles at home the British Commander for several weeks lacked money to defray even the most essential expenses. This in turn complicated the question of discipline. For the troops, being both underfed and unpaid, took to straggling and plundering the countryside. "They are a rabble," Wellesley reported angrily to Castlereagh, " who cannot bear success any more than Sir John Moore's army could bear failure; there is not an outrage of any description which they have not committed. . . . Take my word for it, either defeat or success would dissolve us." With so large a proportion of Irish militiamen in the ranks discipline was almost as much a problem on shore as it had been a decade earlier at sea. Its solution was not simplified by recent well-meaning political interference with the powers of provost-marshals or the application of the laws of civil evidence to the procedure of courts-martial—a piece of parliamentary folly against which Wellesley bitterly protested.
Not till June 27th was the army ready to move forward from Abrantes. By that time any chance—if it ever existed—of getting between Victor and Madrid had passed, for, having eaten up Estremadura, the Marshal had crossed to the north bank of the Tagus and withdrawn towards Talavera. Following him with 21,000 British and German troops—4000 more and the Portuguese remained under Beresford to defend Portugal—Wellesley reached Plasencia, the capital of High Estremadura, on July 8th. Here he was only 125 miles from Madrid and within sixty of the Spanish army which was encamped near the Bridge of Almaraz on the Tagus.
Two evenings later, having ridden over from Plasencia, the British general inspected the latter's force by the light of torches and amid strains of medieval music. It was his first glimpse of a Spanish army. It was a strange spectacle: the swarthy faces of the sturdy young peasants in their soiled motley uniforms, the fiery, indisciplined way they handled their arms, the fantastic hats and long Toledo swords of the officers, the shaggy Barbary steeds of the cavalry and the wild movements of their riders. But the most remarkable sight of all was the aged Captain-General of Estremadura precariously held on his horse by two pages. In spite of countless medals, gold lace and traditional trunk hose, he looked in his bob-tailed wig more like an elderly German shopkeeper than a soldier. Nearly seventy years of age, Don Gregoria de la Cuesta had been ridden over three months before by his own cavalry at Medellin and was now forced to travel in a vast, lumbering coach drawn by nine mules. As, however, he never inspected the ground or reconnoitred the enemy, but, like a true countryman of Don Quixote, based his actions on strong imaginative hypotheses that had little or no relation to reality, this constituted no handicap in his eyes. He regarded Wellesley with contempt as a pretender to the art of war.1
On this occasion he scarcely spoke to him, being consumed with a jealous suspicion that he was intriguing with his rivals at Seville to deprive him of his command. The plan of campaign was therefore drawn up in consultation with his Chief of Staff, a very voluble officer of Irish descent named O'Donoju. Crossing to the north bank of the Tagusjhe Spaniards—33,000 strong—were to advance eastwards to Oropesa where they were to join forces with the British moving from Plasencia. The two armies were then to advance on Talavera and overwhelm Victor. Their northern flank was to be protected by a small contingent of Portuguese irreg
ulars—the Lusitanian Legion—skirmishing eastwards along the southern slopes of the Sierra de Gredos under an adventurous young Englishman named Colonel Robert Wilson. Other Spanish forces were to remain behind to hold the mountain passes of Bafios and Perales to the north-west against any attempt of Soult to move down the Portuguese frontier against Wellesley's base at Plasencia. Meanwhile General Venegas with 23,000 troops of the Army of La Mancha was to emerge from his lair in the Sierra Morena and, driving through Mazanares and Aranjuez towards Madrid, was to prevent
1" A perverse, stupid old blockhead," John Colborne called him.—Seaton, 30. See also Schaumann, 174-5,
2Shand, 37; Castlereagh, VII, 85; Stanhope, 46-7; H. M. C. Bathurst, 99; Leith Hay, I, 168; Stewart, 382-3; Leslie, 471.
the French troops in the neighbourhood of the capital from reinforcing Victor.
But, as Wellesley soon found, strategic plans in Spain were one thing, their execution another. Even for the British army to perform its part in this elaborate converging movement, food and supplies were necessary. And none, despite grandiloquent promises, were forthcoming. Even in the fertile Vera of Plasencia the troops went hungry. Though the march into Spain, with its clean houses, pretty women, clear air and crisp, brisk language, at first delighted them, like Moore's men before them they found that it meant short commons. The Supreme Junta was far too busy disputing with its subordinate authorities, the Provincial Juntas of Andalusia and Valencia,1 to spare any time for provisioning a heretic army. Nor when it was prevailed upon by an importunate Ambassador to issue requisitions for its wants, would the Estremaduran peasantry honour them. The truth was that for all practical purposes Spain—distracted and poverty-stricken—was without a government. British generals and soldiers found it hard to understand this and in default attributed their sufferings to sloth and treachery.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 44
