1 Fortescue, VIII, 254-5. "We have certainly altered the nature of the war in Spain," wrote Wellington. " Marmont says he can do nothing without magazines, which is a quite new era in the French military system."
division of infantry, were moving through El Bodon on Fuente Guinaldo, while two other cavalry brigades under General Wathier were starting on a sweep to the north through Espeja.
It was the larger of these two forces, comprising nearly 3000 horse and 8000 foot, which came up against the 3rd Division, 5000 strong, on the El Bodon plateau. Driving through the British outpost screen, Montbrun suddenly became aware that the troops in front of him, instead of being concentrated for battle, were spread over a front of nearly six miles with huge gaps between them. On this he decided to probe more closely and, without waiting for the infantry, sent the whole of his cavalry in to attack two British battalions which, with some Portuguese guns and three squadrons of horse, were posted across the main road.
The French cavalry were on their chosen ground, an open plain. They saw before them the kind of situation which had proved the prelude to so many triumphs on the battlefields of the Continent. They went forward in a glorious sweep of flashing helmets and sabres to scatter the outnumbered infantry and massacre them as they ran. The Portuguese gunners, though keeping up a heavy fire at point-blank range, were overpowered and forced to take shelter; many were cut down. But the 5th Foot behind them—the Northumberland Fusiliers—instead of flying, advanced on the amazed dragoons before they could recover breath and, pouring in three deadly volleys, scattered them and recaptured the guns. This unorthodox performance temporarily restored the situation, and for the next hour, ordered by Wellington to hold on at all costs until the isolated units on their flanks could be withdrawn, the 5th and its companion regiment, the 77th—a unit still fresh from England —resisted every attack. All the while the 1st Hussars of the King's German Legion and the nth Light Dragoons1 kept charging the enemy's cavalry to gain time.
By the time that the French gave up their frontal attacks for the less costly and more profitable tactics of infiltration, the remainder of the division had been disengaged and was in retreat towards the south. The 5th and 77th then formed a single square and, preceded by a supporting Portuguese battalion, brought up the rear. For the next two hours the 3rd Division withdrew in column of regiments across a perfectly flat plain with Montbrun's cavalry riding furiously round it. Once the rearguard square was assailed from three sides simultaneously; for some minutes nothing could be seen but a
1 In modern parlance the nth Hussars. The Hanoverian Hussars were many years later absorbed into the Prussian Army, where they continued to bear the battle honour, El Bodon, on their helmets.
cloud of dust and smoke checkered by the glint of helmets and sabres. Then the 5th and 77th emerged, still marching. Other regiments—in particular the 74th, 88th and 94th—distinguished themselves in that perilous six miles, retreat, repeatedly bringing the French horsemen to a halt almost on the point of their bayonets while the hussars and dragoons kept charging and re-forming in turn to prevent the enemy getting into battle order. By the end of the day every officer of the nth Light Dragoons bore the marks of the foeman's weapons either on his person or his horse.1
As the French began to weary, the division, to quicken its pace, formed column of march along the high road. Only the rearguard remained in square. The enemy's artillery now took a hand in the game, galloping up and unlimbering on the flank. Those who fell under the hail of round-shot and grape had to be abandoned, but the stolid infantry remained unshaken, continuing at a normal marching pace and keeping exact stations in readiness to form square should Montbrun's dragoons charge. If they dared to, the lads of the 88th cried out, every one of their officers should have a nate horse to ride upon.2 By their side, with his familiar cane cocked over his shoulder, rode their big, bony, foul-mouthed divisional commander, Thomas Picton, exuding the genial confidence which always marked him in time of danger. "Never mind the French," he told an officer who seemed too intent on the enemy's cavalry, " mind your regiment. If the fellows come here, we'll give them a warm reception !"3 All the while he kept moving from battalion to battalion, warning the men to keep proper distance and dressing and telling them that the credit and honour of the army as well as their own safety depended on it. When, as they drew near the lines of Guinaldo, Montbrun's squadrons began to swing inwards as though for a final charge, he took off his hat and, using it to shade his eyes from the fierce noonday glare, gazed long and sternly at them. Then, as with an immense clatter of hoofs and clanking of sabres they rode up to within half a pistol shot, he called out, "No, it is but a ruse to frighten us, but it won't do."4 At that moment the 3rd Dragoon Guards hove in sight, coming up at a slinging trot, and the French horse drew off. The division was saved.
Wellington's anxiety did not quite end there—deservedly for once, for he had a little under-estimated his adversary. The Light Division under Craufurd had also got -delayed, though more
1 Burgoyne, I, 142-3. See also Gratran, 112-4; Schaumann, 329; Donaldson, 223; Oman, IV, "568-70. 5 2 Grattan, 116. 3 Donaldson, 223. 4 Grattan, 167.
because of its chief's habitual reluctance to relinquish independent command than through any interference by the enemy. By the morning of September 26th its position, with the French on three sides of it and an almost impassable mountain on the fourth, had become decidedly ticklish. However, with its usual dexterity it extricated itself and joined the army at Guinaldo during the same afternoon, to Wellington's undisguised relief. " I am glad to see you safe," he snapped at his erring lieutenant.
"I was in no danger, I assure you."
"No, but I was through your conduct."
"He's damned crusty to-day," was Craufurd's comment.1
Even before the remainder of the army came in, the crisis had passed. In a sense it had never existed, for the French commanders, mesmerised by Wellington's reputation for the defensive, declined— as he had always foreseen—to attack. Instead they spent an entire day waiting for their reserves and picking out through their telescopes insuperable but mostly imaginary obstacles on the heights before them.2 Nor was there ever the slightest apprehension of danger in the British lines. In the view of his men Wellington was now invincible; "every one," wrote Simmons of the 95th, "felt the greatest security in his out-manoeuvring Johnny and bringing out the division in safety." It was during the reaction of that slightly tense afternoon that a drunken private of the Light Division, stumbling in his unholy state into the Commander-in-Chief's proximity,
loudly hailed him as " the long-nosed b** that beats the French."3
It was precisely the same conviction that caused Marmont and Dorsenne to decide to retreat.
Before they could do so Wellington himself had gone. During the night he suddenly retired on his main defence-line in front of Sabugal, leaving his camp-fires burning to deceive the enemy. He had taken enough risks for the moment and was going to run no more. Throughout the 27th the enemy followed cautiously, a brisk rearguard action taking place between a French division and the Fusilier brigade of the British 4th Division at Aldea da Ponte. By nightfall Wellington had his entire 45,000 men in the position he had chosen. The French had a good look at it and withdrew towards Salamanca on the following evening. By the time they regained their base they had consumed the greater part of the food they had brought for the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo.
· · · . · · · ·
1 Larpent, I, 80. 2 Thiebault, IV, 66. 3 Tomkinson, 117.
That was the end of the campaign in the north. Yet before finis . was written to the Anglo-French account for 1811 there was a repercussion far away in the south. Marmont's short-lived concentration had drawn away the troops who should have been supporting Drouet's 9th Corps, left in Estremadura at midsummer to watch Hill and prevent a third attack on Badajoz. Other units belonging to Soult's Army of Andalusia had been drawn southwards by Ballasteros's amphibious activities around Algeciras. Drouet wa
s thus left in a kind of vacuum, with Hill's 2nd Division and Hamilton's Portuguese more or less equally matched against him on the other side of the frontier. But, being without regular supplies, he was forced to disperse his troops to plunder. This placed him at a* disadvantage.
Rowland Hill was quick to realise it. Under the placid and good-humoured exterior which caused his men to christen him Daddy Hill, this shrewd, brilliant officer1—still only in his fortieth year-had as fine an eye for war as any of Napoleon's Marshals. Seeing in October that one of Drouet's divisions had got dangerously far from its companions while levying contributions on the wild country to the north of Merida, he sought Wellington's leave to attack. It was immediately given. Taking 3000 British and 4000 Portuguese infantry and 900 cavalry, Hill left Portalegre in the utmost secrecy on October 22nd. General Girard with 4000 foot and 1000 horse was at that moment at Caceres, sixty miles away and nearly as far from his base at Merida. Everything depended on catching him before he suspected the presence of a superior allied force. On the first day Hill marched thirty miles. The winter rains and gales had begun, and his men, soaked to the skin and half frozen, herded at night on the open hills. For three days they pushed on in almost continuous rain, the old soldiers convinced that they could smell the crappos ahead by the stink of their tobacco and onions. On the 26th, when they were only eight miles from Caceres, they learnt that the French had taken alarm and begun to retreat on Merida. Next day the British and Portuguese marched parallel to their foes, covering twenty-eight miles 'to their twelve and crossing two mountain ranges. By nightfall they were within five miles of Girard's halting place at Arroyo dos Molinos, a little town among the clouds of the Sierra de Montanches.
For the fifth night running the pursuers bivouacked in their wet clothes in a gale, six thousand feet above sea level. Orders were given to preserve absolute silence; no fires were to be lit or bugles
1 "He never," wrote one of his officers, "under any excitement whatsoever forgot that he was a gentleman."—Blakeney, 227.
sounded, and the men, dismissed to cheerless ditches and fields, were warned to parade at two in the morning. Long before dawn on the 28th they were of?, moving through mountain fog and icy, driving rain to surround Arroyo dos Molinos. When day broke they were already closing in on it from three sides. The surprise was complete. One column, consisting of the ist battalion of the 50th, and the 71st and 92nd Highlanders, broke into the town just as the French main body was about to move off, charging down the street with their pipes playing, " Hey Johnny Cope, are ye waukin yet?" As they went through, upsetting baggage and baggage-carts and pushing the astonished French before them, General Girard, "beside himself with rage, ran out of one of the houses where he had been at his breakfast, gnashing his teeth and stamping on his cocked hat to think he had been so tricked. One of his brigades had already marched and was beyond pursuit, but the remainder were caught and engaged on the plain outside the gates by the other allied columns. Within half an hour all was over. Four or five hundred of the enemy led by Girard got away over the mountain, eight hundred were killed and nearly fifteen hundred taken prisoner, including the second-in-command, General Bron. Three guns, several hundred horse and much booty were also captured. The British losses were seven killed and seven officers and fifty-seven men wounded. The parlez-vous, as a subaltern of the 34th put it, had been handsomely trounced.1
1 Bell, I, 13-17; Blakeney, 215-31; Journal of a Soldier, 117-20; Burgoyne, 1,149; Oman. IV, 599-606; Fortescue, VIII, 270-6.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Over the Hills and Far Away
"Or may 1 give adventurous fancy scope
And stretch a bold hand to the awful veil
That hides futurity from anxious hope,
Bidding beyond it scenes of glory hail,
And painting Europe rising at the tale :
Of Spain's invaders from her confines hurl'd,
While kindling nations buckle on their mail,
And Fame, with clarion-blast and wings unfurl'd,
To freedom and revenge awakes an injured world ?"
Walter Scott, The Vision of Don Roderick, 1811.
E
NGLAND was becoming too strong for Napoleon. Despite persistent dfficulties—unemployment in her hungry, chaotic industrial towns, bankruptcies and strikes, the decay of old crafts and equities, riots and machine-breakings—her power increased inexorably. All hopes that the noisy faction-fights in Parliament and Press portended her dissolution had proved utterly vain. Perceval's Government of alleged Tory nonentities survived crisis after crisis and continued, quietly and persistently, to send troops to Portugal, to throttle the Continent's trade and to raise troubles for France in every corner of the world. And all the while British manufactures seeped into Napoleon's forbidden fortress, and the stranglehold on the world's colonial products tightened. A month before El Bodon 3500 troops from India under Major-General Sir Samuel Auchmuty conquered Java—the last and richest of the overseas possessions of France's satellites—destroying an army of 10,000 Dutch, French and Javanese in the supposedly impregnable lines of Cornells.1
Such triumphs England made by sleight of hand with minute forces to which sea-power lent a magic cloak of invisibility and mobility. She could concentrate against any spot, leaving vast continents and archipelagos almost unguarded and destroying her isolated foes piecemeal. But in Portugal and Spain she used sea-power as the basis of a more ambitious strategy, building up an army in the trackless mountains of that inaccessible peninsula and threatening Napoleon's southern ramparts. The utterly unaccountable
1 The hero of the day was a forty-five-year-old Ulsterman, Brigadier-General Rollo Gillespie—" the bravest of the brave "—who led the attack and conducted the pursuit in the throes of a fever, personally capturing two generals and killing a colonel in single combat.—Fortescue, VIII, 625.
victories of the thin red line over one after another of his best generals had given hope to all Europe; in the flashes of its musketry it seemed that the Grande Armee was not invincible after all.
Napoleon's Empire stretched from the Ems to the Adriatic and from the Baltic to the Ebro. Rome, Barcelona, Hamburg, Cologne, Geneva, Lubeck, Osnabruck, Trieste, Genoa and Ragusa were all French cities. Round this immense territory stood an outer ring of subservient States, controlled by the Emperor's kinsfolk and Marshals: the Kingdoms of Italy, Spain, Naples, Westphalia and Sweden, the Swiss Confederation, the Confederation of the Rhine and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Austria was his ally, Denmark, Bavaria and Saxony his vassals, the Turks were at war with Russia—the only State in the world still able to put a great Continental army into the field against him. Except for Portugal, whose reigning House had had to fly to Brazil, there was not an established Government in Europe which openly adhered to England's cause.
Yet they nearly all sympathised with her and tried in every way open to them short of actual revolt to give expression to their feelings. Napoleon's unifying New Order seemed to ungrateful Europeans only an intolerable and tyrannic interference with their commerce and revenues: a heartless denial of spices, dyes and cottons, tea and tobacco. Confiscated sugar and coffee were burnt by French soldiers while hungry crowds silently watched in the streets; the whole of Europe seemed sunk, in Fichte's phrase, in the bottomless abyss of one arbitrary will. Everybody was needy: every one lived in fear. Trade was-at a complete standstill, and England represented the sole hope of its revival. A Dutch merchant, questioned about his allegiance, remarked that the Emperor was all but omnipotent, but there was one thing he could not do—make a Dutchman hate an Englishman.
Even in France itself and among Napoleon's own entourage rebellion had begun to lift its head. Talleyrand, ex-Foreign Minister and Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, was in the pay of Russia; Lucien Bonaparte, flying from his brother's despotism, had been captured by a British cruiser on his way to America. In August, 1811, the Secret Police in Paris discovered traces of a treasonable conspiracy to evade the Continental Decrees be
tween the Courts of St. Petersburg and Vienna and the Emperor's brother-in-law and comrade in arms, Murat—now King Joachim of Naples. In Sweden another Marshal, Bernadotte, was turning ingrate for the sake of his adopted country's trade. In the last resort, when Napoleon tried their loyalty too high, such Imperial satraps, it was found, placed their own interests before his.
So did less ambitious men. The year that followed Torres Vedras was one of terrible scarcity in France. While Massena's starving scarecrows trudged eastwards over the Portuguese mountains, their wives and mothers stood in the snow outside empty bakeries.1 The peasant's fear of the return of priest and emigre to filch his fields was being slowly banished by the reality of an eternal war which, though still far from the borders of his homeland, threatened to rob him of all he possessed. Despite constantly rising taxes the deficit in the national revenues by the end of 1811 was nearly fifty millions. So acute was the shortage of money that Napoleon was forced to cheat the very dead, cancelling by Imperial Decree the arrears of pay owed to his fallen soldiers.
And the cause of all this trouble was England's refusal to loosen her sea grip or to withdraw from the Peninsula. In his darker hours Napoleon was coming to despair of Spain. If only, he was heard to say, he could get the English out and throw that country back to Ferdinand or the Cortez! It was like an open wound that was slowly draining his strength; if the obdurate islanders persisted, he did not know what he should do.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 63
