CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Torres Vedras
" Napoleon's plan was always to try to give a great battle, gain a great victory, patch up a peace, such a peace as might leave an opening for a future war, and then hurry back to Paris. We starved him out. We showed him that we wouldn't let him fight a battle at first except under disadvantages. If you do fight, we shalj destroy you; if you do not fight, we shall in time destroy you still."
Wellington.
"The flame which we have so effectually kindled in Portugal will extend itself far and wide."
Walter Scott.
W
ITH the summer of 1810 the hour of decision, long delayed by Joseph's Andalusian adventure, was drawing near. The quarter of a million French troops originally in Spain had been joined by another sixty thousand: forty thousand more were waiting on the frontier at Bayonne. But, contrary to expectation and his own repeated declarations, the Emperor did not appear in person to lead them. Instead, he stayed behind to enjoy his new wife and parade her before his subjects in France and the Rhineland. This was in part the result of inclination: like his soldiers, Napoleon had come in the past two years to detest the very name of Spain. He affected to treat the war there as a mere colonial campaign, waged beyond the pale of civilisation against barbarians and the handful of British mercenaries who so wickedly assisted them.
Yet there was more in Napoleon's decision than reluctance to sacrifice time and reputation to a tedious campaign. He knew the importance of the Peninsula too well to miss any chance of completing its conquest. He did not maintain 300,000 soldiers there merely to provide a throne for his brother Joseph. For all his victories on the Danube, his Imperial marriage and the defeat of the Walcheren invasion, he was uneasy. For, though he tried to conceal the fact even from himself, the English, inch by inch, were forcing him on to the defensive. Two and a half years before, he had entered Spain to secure a bridge into North Africa and make the Mediterranean a French lake. But instead of breaking the ring of sea-power and carrying his Eagles into Africa and Asia, his venture had ended in his opponents themselves securing a bridgehead in Europe and, what was worse, retaining it in the teeth of his personal intervention. With their sea-ring still unbroken, they were perpetually stirring up trouble round the European circumference. In the previous year they had made Austria their catspaw. Now, though he had dealt with that Power, Russia—hampered in her trade by the Continental blockade—was in turn growing restless. Pier Czar's petty grievances—the French creation of a Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the dispute over Constantinople, the slight to his sister—threatened, under British encouragement, to become serious matters. For, so long as England's cruisers could carry her corrupting wares and gold to every back door in Europe, there was always a court of appeal for Napoleon's dissatisfied friends and clients.
Because of this Napoleon refused to commit either himself or the flower of his army to Spain. He knew too well that it might soon be needed elsewhere. He sent the Young Guard but not the Old, and transferred only a limited number of troops from central and eastern Europe. Instead he made up new drafts by anticipating the next two years' conscription and calling up 40,000 lads between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. This, together with growing taxation, did not enhance his popularity. After two years of war in the Peninsula a balanced budget had degenerated into a deficit of fifty-seven million francs. The Emperor did his best to reduce the drain of the campaign by reducing payments to the Peninsula armies and by imperative orders to Joseph to raise more money from his Spanish subjects. When that unhappy monarch, still anxious to win their hearts, raised objections, his kingdom was summarily divided into military districts under Governors directly responsible to Paris. Their corrupt and exorbitant demands destroyed his last chance of establishing an honest and therefore tolerable administration.
In his own place Napoleon sent against the British the most experienced and cunning of all his Marshals, Andre Massena, Prince of Essling and Duke of Rivoli. But, jealous as always of any power that might rival his own, he refrained from giving him any general authority and left Soult in Andalusia, Suchetr in Aragon and Augereau in Catalonia in independent command. This system of divide et impera enabled him to play off one Marshal against another and intervene personally in distant operations without leaving Paris. But it scarcely made for vigorous prosecution of the war. Massena's Army of Portugal was confined to Ney's 6th Corps on the frontiers of Leon, Reynier's 2nd Corps in the Tagus valley and Junot's 8th Corps in Old Castile, numbering, together with Montbrun's Cavalry
Reserve and the garrison and administrative troops, some 138,000 men or perhaps 70,000 field effectives. Large though this force was compared with the British army, which it outnumbered by two to one, it was not big enough for its purpose.
In fact, as the test approached and the impression gained ground in England and Portugal that an evacuation was inevitable, the British Commander-in-Chief remained grimly confident. "I am prepared for all events," he wrote to the Military Secretary, "and, if I am in a scrape, as appears to be the general belief in England, a though certainly not my own, I'll get out of it!"1 He saw, as always, the inherent weakness in the imposing French structure—the rival Marshals, the lack of financial and administrative confidence, the slapdash arrangements for feeding and transporting so great a host through the wilderness. "This is not the way in which they have conquered Europe," he wrote to his brother, as June followed May and still MassJna made no move. "There is something discordant in all the French arrangements for Spain. Joseph divides his Kingdom into prefetures, while Napoleon parcels it out into governments; Joseph makes a great military expedition into the south of Spain and undertakes the siege of Cadiz, while Napoleon places all the troops and half the kingdom under the command of Masscna and calls it the Army of Portugal. ... I suspect that the impatience of Napoleon's temper will not bear the delay of the completion of the conquest of Spain."2
Wellington judged rightly. Massena's difficulties were immense. The Marshal did not minimise them when he addressed his officers on taking up his appointment on May 15th. He had not wanted to come to Spain at all. He was fifty-two and, after nearly twenty years of continuous war in an age when men aged rapidly, was losing his vigour. The spoils of victory and plunder had begun to soften his native toughness; he had learnt to love ease and luxury, including a most expensive and exacting mistress. The prospect of carrying an army of 70,000 men and their innumerable followers through two hundred miles of desolate mountain inhabited by vindictive savages appalled him. The very sight of that gaunt land filled him, as it did all Napoleon's Marshals, with an intense long-. ing for Paris.
None the less Massena was a great soldier—an old fox up to every trick of the game and worthy of Wellington's mettle. He was not a man in whose presence it was safe to take risks or to blunder.
1 To Col. Torrens, 31st March, 1810. Gurwood. See Simmons, 51, 64; Two Duchesses, 345; Charles Napier, 1, 129.
2 To Rt. Hon. H. Wellesley, 11th June, 1810. Gurwood.
His chief lieutenant, the forty-year-old Ney, was one of the most daring captains of his age, the Sarlouis cooper's son who had routed Mack at Elchingen and, by his assault on the Russian lines at Friedland, won from Napoleon the title of the " bravest of the brave." During the years when most of the British general and regimental officers had been drilling on provincial parade-grounds or garrisoning remote naval stations and sugar islands, the leaders of the Army of Portugal had been fighting and conquering in every corner of Europe. Continental warfare had been their trade since boyhood. They regarded the English as clumsy novices and the Portuguese as cowardly canaille. They never doubted, in the words of Massena's proclamation, that they would drive the leopards into the sea. It was only a question of gathering the necessary bullocks, mules and wagons to drag their guns and munitions over the mountains.
Massena, a cautious and methodical man, took his time. He had a European reputation to preserve, and neither he nor his master meant there to be any m
istake this time. Thrice in three years had a French army set out for Lisbon. The first under Junot, now a corps commander in the Army of Portugal, had reached it only to be ignominiously expelled by the British after Vimeiro; the second under Napoleon himself had had to turn back to crush Moore's threat to its communications; the third under Soult had met with disaster on the banks of the Douro at the hands of the same young general who had defeated Junot and was now once more in command of the British-Portuguese forces. The new advance was, therefore, to be no impetuous dash like Junot's costly march over the Estrella in November, 1807, but a slow, methodical avalanche which, gathering irresistible weight, should roll the British into the sea.
The first step was to clear the northern road to Lisbon by capturing the Spanish and Portuguese frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida at the eastern edge of the mountains. Ney moved forward with 30,000 men against the former in the last week of May. Ciudad Rodrigo was not a very formidable place—an old-fashioned, third-rate fortress and much neglected like everything else in Spain that belonged to the State. But the septuagenarian who commanded it and its garrison of 5000 Spaniards put up an unexpectedly stubborn defence, so much so that Wellington found himself in an embarrassing position. For as week followed week and the fortress still held out, both the Spanish authorities and his own soldiers began to clamour for its relief. It seemed shameful for a British army to stand by almost within gunshot and watch a brave ally being pounded and starved into surrender.
Yet nothing could move Wellington from his purpose. He had formed a clear conception of the campaign he wished to wage—one scrupulously adapted to his military and geographical resources— and he was not going to be deflected from it by any momentary advantage. Nor was he going to harass and tire his men by conforming to the enemy's movements. Permanent defence of Ciudad Rodrigo and the Portuguese frontier was out of the question against the forces threatening him; the sole service General Herrasti and its defenders could do was to hold out as long as possible and so gain additional time before the inevitable advance on Lisbon. Though only a day's march from the British advance-posts in the mountains, the besieged fortress was situated on an open plain within easy reach of Massena's massive cavalry. It could not be relieved without a pitched fight. And to give battle in such a position with 33,000 men, half of them untried Portuguese, against an almost equal French force would be to court heavy losses, even if by some miracle Ney could be defeated before the enemy's main body came to his aid. And Wellington knew that he was going to need every man he possessed, whereas the French could replace their losses many times over. Against such considerations neither sentiment nor hope of glory counted for anything with him. His officers grumbled at the humiliation, but a few were more far-seeing. "He is blamed for this," wrote Charles Napier, hitherto one of his severest critics, " but he is right and it gives me confidence in him. He is a much better general than I suspected him to be."1
Ciudad Rodrigo held out in the burning midsummer heats till July 10th when, after the walls had been breached and a quarter of the garrison had fallen, Herrasti surrendered. Wellington had reason to be satisfied, for his allies had gained him six valuable weeks. Having expended 11,000 shells and 18,000 round-shot on reducing the place, the French were forced to make a further wait till they could bring up fresh supplies. Meanwhile Craufurd with the Rifle and Light Infantry screen continued by brilliant skirmishing to impede their progress, making them deploy in front of every obstacle. So superbly trained and handled were his troops that the enemy never knew whether they were opposed by a few hundred men or by the whole British army.
Yet in his confidence in his own and his men's skill Craufurd tempted fate too far. In spite of Wellington's warnings not to linger in the open plain, he was still retaining his position on the exposed bank of the Coa when, in the third week of July, the enemy moved forward against the Portuguese fortress of Almeida. He thus needlessly exposed his four thousand men—the very eyes of the army
1 Charles Napier I, 129-3.
—to attack by a force six times as large, with a raging stream and a single bridge in his rear. For, as one of his officers remarked, Craufurd was as enamoured of his separate command as any youth of his mistress.
The result was that on the morning of July 24th—in the half-light between night and day which Wellington had foretold as the danger period—Ney, probing his adversary's strength, suddenly, realised the weakness of the British rearguard and immediately launched his entire corps, including two cavalry brigades, against the thin, over-extended line of skirmishers. A company of the Rifles on the left were overwhelmed by a cavalry charge, and within a few minutes Craufurd, who had failed to get his guns over the bridge in time, was faced with disaster.
The situation was saved by the steadiness of the infantry of the Light Division. While the hussars and artillery galloped under heavy fire down a steep hairpin-bend road for the bridge, the men of the 43rd, 52nd and 95th, covering their retreat and that of the Portuguese, fell back from wall to wall firing as coolly and steadily as on a Kentish field-day. Cut by the weight and speed of the French advance into isolated groups, they continued to fight as they had been taught in small sections, every officer and man knowing exactly what to do. "Moore's matchless discipline was their protection," wrote Charles Napier, "a phantom hero from Corunna saved them!" A final stand by the 43rd, the Rifles and a company of the 52nd on a small knoll of pine trees immediately in front of the bridge enabled the remainder of the division to take up a strong position beyond the Coa where it should have been stationed from the first. Five companies of the 52nd still fighting on the eastern slopes above the knoll were almost cut off and were only saved by a brilliant counter-attack led by Colonel Beckwith in person. By the time the last man had crossed the stream more than three hundred of the light infantry, including twenty-eight of their fine officers, had been lost.
Yet the disaster so rashly courted had been averted. Ncy's subsequent attempt to rush the bridge in a deluge of rain proved as expensive to his troops as Craufurd's over-confidence had been to his, more than five hundred falling under the fire of the British guns and marksmen now posted among the rocks on the western bank. And though Massena in Ins dispatches, which were published with fanfares in the Paris papers, claimed to have inflicted immense losses on the defenders whose strength he estimated at ten thousand, the general impression left on the attackers was one of deep respect for the fighting qualities of the British. Indeed one of Ney's brigadiers, General Foy, gloomily recorded in his diary that the despised islanders were better soldiers than the French, at any rate than the young conscripts with whom Napoleon was beginning to flood his veteran regiments.
Not unnaturally Wellington was extremely angry. Through Craufurd's folly he had come within an ace of losing the Light .Division. Yet in his dispatches he refrained from any censure of his hot-headed lieutenant, transmitting his report without comment and taking the responsibility for the needless loss of life on his own shoulders. It was one of-the idiosyncrasies of this stern, lonely man, who never forgave the least disobedience to his orders in any other subordinate, that he always treated Craufurd with exceptional tenderness. If he was to be hanged for it, he told his brother, he could not accuse a man whom he believed had meant well and whose error was one of judgment, not of intention. "That is not the way in which any, much less a British army, can be commanded."
During the week that followed the engagement on the Coa the French formally invested Almeida. Contrary to Wellington's expectation they made no attempt to mask the town and press over the mountains towards the Coimbra plain. Nor did they move south of the Tagus, where Hill with his two divisions were still watching for an enemy attempt to break through Alemtejo and, by a passage of the river near Abrantes, to cut off the main allied army from Lisbon. The truth was that, owing to Souk's preoccupation in Andalusia, Massena had not sufficient force for the dual advance against the capital which Wellington had always feared. And, having lost nearly two thousa
nd draught animals and used up his forward ammunition during the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, the Marshal was in no position to hurry. Not till August 15th did his troops commence active siege operations.
With the fortifications of Almeida in far better repair than those of Ciudad Rodrigo and garrisoned by 5000 Portuguese regulars under a British brigadier, Wellington began to hope that the advance over the mountains might be held up until the October rains. But on August 26th an unexpected disaster occurred. That night a tremendous explosion was heard in the British lines". A chance bomb, falling in the courtyard of the castle of Almeida, just as a convoy of powder for the ramparts was being loaded opposite the open door of the main magazine, exploded a trail of powder from a leaky barrel and in a moment sent castle, cathedral and half the town into the air. Two days later the garrison surrendered. There was no ammunition left and, though the British commander tried to brazen it out, his Portuguese lieutenants, seeing no point in further resistance, betrayed the fact to the enemy.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 52
