It was Napoleon's way when thwarted to react with all the violence of his passionate nature. When that failed—and he had thrice tried to drive the English into the sea—he fell back on the other device of his Corsican forbears, guile. In the flush of his last victory over Austria two years before, and again when Perceval's Government seemed about to be extinguished in the early months of 1811, he had offered peace, hinting at a possible evacuation of Holland and the Hanse Towns in return for the abandonment of Sicily and the Peninsula and an end to the blockade. But, having been cheated by him before, his foes treated his overtures with contempt.
In the face of such maddening obstinacy Napoleon resorted to a passionate unrealism. He sent repeated orders to his Marshals for some grand sweeping advance that should clear the Peninsula, based always on information months out of date or on facts and figures that only existed in his own imagination. When they failed to carry these out, he turned on them furiously as he had turned in happier days on his admirals. At other times he issued grandiloquent proclamations assuring the world that England's end was near: that he had drained her of men and money and that her inglorious campaign in the Peninsula had bared for the final blow which, terminating a Second Punic War, should free Europe and Asia. In the autumn of 1811 he busied himself with a new invasion
1 Alsop, 13-15.
attempt, ordering an expenditure of two million francs on his neglected flotilla and concentrating 80,000 men at Boulogne, though they had as little chance of crossing the Channel as Wellington had of descending on the Danube. It was partly a despairing hope that such preparations might bluff the British Government into withdrawing from Spain; partly the sheer escapism of a mind that was losing its grip on reality. The Emperor would allow no shadow of doubt to be cast on these chimeras, expending on them the same energy and industry that he had formerly given to the planning of his victories. Having long been accustomed to astonish and deceive mankind, Napoleon, as Wellington said, had come at last to deceive himself.1
As he contended with the advancing tide, the Emperor fell once more into the old fault which had vitiated his grandest achievements —overweening impatience. He would not withdraw before the flood, biding his time, but would go out at once and overwhelm it. To every sign of rebellion among his European underlings he responded with uncontrollable rage. On August nth, 1811, he broke out in one of his famous tirades against the Russian Ambassador. War he shouted, was bound to follow the Czar's repeated defiance; he would march to Moscow with half a million men and two thousand cannon; he would enforce the independence of the Occident. Yet, as it was plainly too late for an army which lived on its conquests to invade Muscovy in the winter, till the suns of 1812 melted the snows and dried the roads Napoleon had to be content with preparing for the great enterprise. Accordingly in September he cracked his whip at Prussia, ordering her timid King to stop the evasions by which she was trying to build up a short-service conscript army. Two months later he sent her an ultimatum, threatening to reoccupy Berlin unless she agreed to march by his side against Russia. At the New Year he sent Davout into Swedish Pomerania to strengthen his hold on the Baltic and punish the renegade Bernadotte for his refusal to keep Sweden's ports closed.
Yet Napoleon was back where he had been before Tilsit; where, in fact, he had been ever since Nelson's victory at the Nile thirteen years before had turned the Mediterranean into a British lake. He could not break out of the cage which British naval power to west and south and Muscovite space to east and north had made of Europe. He had sought a way by the pretended truce of Amiens, by Malta and Sicily, by attempted invasion of England, by Poland and Tilsit and, during the past three years, by Spain. And now in despair, regardless of the bloody lessons of Eylau and the sinister
1 G. R. Gleig, Personal Reminiscences of Wellington, 388.
warnings of history, he was planning to strike eastwards once more. England's dogged enmity had left him no other road to his destiny but across the wastes of Russia.
A conqueror, like a cannon-ball, Wellington observed, must go on; if he rebounds his career is over. Before the end of 1811 Napoleon had issued his orders for the mobilisation of the Grand Army against Russia. He called up another 120,000 conscripts and recalled forty of his best battalions from Spain, filling their places with raw drafts from France. Refusing to draw in his horns—a thing he now seemed incapable of doing—he left the Peninsula to look after itself while he directed his forces elsewhere. He did not abandon it: he merely ignored it.
He did not even withdraw from Andalusia but, to Wellington's delight, left Joseph and Soult to persist in their fatal blunder in the south. So obstinate was Napoleon's refusal to consider the Anglo-Portuguese army as a serious menace that he ordered a concentration on the far coast of Spain. The capture of Tarragona in the summer of 1811, and of Sagunto in October opened—or seemed to open—a way not only to Valencia, where Blake, supported by British cruisers, was holding out with 30,000 troops, but to the complete elimination of organised Spanish resistance in the east of the Peninsula. Accordingly while the infatuated Emperor prepared himself to march into the heart of Russia with the greatest army the world had ever seen, he made Marmont detach a third of his force to strengthen Suchet in front of Valencia.
By this incredible act of folly Napoleon temporarily reduced the Army of Portugal to 30,000 men. Relying on British inability to move during the winter and on an utterly groundless belief that Wellington had 20,000 sick and—in the teeth of all evidence—that his Portuguese troops were worthless, the Emperor unbolted the door into northern Spain at the very moment when his greater plans depended on keeping it barred. It was the chance for which his adversary had waited so long.
Ever since the summer Wellington had been secretly preparing for' an assault on Ciudad Rodrigo. Two reasons had caused him to concentrate against the northern fortress in preference to the southern. The hill country round it, being healthier than the Guadiana valley, was more suitable for a spell of indefinite waiting, while, by leaving Badajoz alone, he avoided the risk of drawing Soult from his unprofitable ventures in the south—the sham siege of Cadiz, the pursuit of Ballasteros' phantom army over the Ronda hills, and the occupation of Andalusia. When Rodrigo had fallen and the entire Anglo-Portuguese army could be moved against Badajoz, it would be time enough to distract the Duke of Dalmatia from the honey-pot into which he had crammed his head.
So after El Bodon Wellington had cantoned Ins men in the hill villages between Guarda and the Agueda which they regarded as their natural element. "Garnerin's balloon," wrote one of them, "was never more seated in the clouds than we are at this moment."1 Here, watching every movement of the French like a cat its prey, he completed his preparations during the final months of 1811. Sanchez's guerrillas and Wallace's Connaught Rangers closed in unostentatiously on Rodrigo, filching more than two hundred cattle as they grazed on the glacis and, when General Renaud, the Governor, tried to recover them, capturing him too. The roads were put in order, Dickson's siege-guns were dragged from the Lower Douro over the mountains to Almeida, a new kind of bullock-cart, with iron axle-trees and brass boxes, was manufactured in hundreds, and mules were assembled in the unprecedented proportion of one for every six infantrymen and two for every four cavalrymen.2 Meanwhile in their scattered cantonments among the clouds the regiments were busy making fascines and gabions. All this was done with such elaborate devices to deceive that scarcely any one, even in his own army, was aware of Wellington's intentions. The storming apparatus was spoken of as a sham preparation for keeping the enemy on the qui vive.3 To those learned in such matters it scarcely seemed likely that their chief would dare to assail —at such a forbidding season—a powerful fortress in the presence of a field army which only a few weeks before he had been unable to contain.
But Wellington was no longer outnumbered. The Guadiana fevers of the summer had run their course, his hospitals were almost empty, and reinforcements, including for the first time large numbers of cavalry, had been flowing
into Lisbon throughout the autumn. There were now 38,000 British and 22,000 Portuguese facing Marmont's depleted army in the north. In their bones the men knew that something was going to happen. Despite the rain, the cold, the miserable, dirty villages and wolf-haunted mountains among which their lot was cast, they were in magnificent health and spirits. Their very privations had become a matter of pride to them. "Ours," wrote Johnny Kincaid, "was an esprit de corps—a buoyancy of feeling animating all which nothing could quell. We were alike ready for the field or for frolic, and when not engaged in
1 Gomm, 239. See also Grattan, 108. 2 Fortcscue, VIII, 343-5; Oman, IV, 584. 'Random Shots, 252; Tomkinson, 12; Donaldson, 218; Burgoyne, I, 151; Smith, I, 55; Napier, Book XVI, ch. iii.
the one, went headlong into the other." Coursing, fox-hunting, the chase of wolf and wild boar with the Commander-in-Chief himself in the field and a score of ragged, cheering riflemen acting as beaters, greyhound matches and boxing contests, football and donkey races with "every Jack sitting with his face to the tail and a smart fellow running in front with a bunch of carrots," were the characteristically English prelude to the adventure which was to knock Napoleon out of Spain. Straight across country and no flinching was the rule in all their contests; a favourite sport was for two officers to wager that each would reach a distant church-tower by a given time, whereupon off they would go with the entire Mess at their heels, stopping for nothing on the way—swamp, wall or ravine. At night there were theatricals in barns or gay, unconventional balls with the local senoritas and village girls joining uproariously in bolero, fandango and waltz to an improvised band of flute and guitar, and a supper of roast chestnuts, cakes and lemonade to follow. If some-* times the more squeamish of the ladies left early, no one minded so long as the rest remained. The avidity and delight of it all, wrote an officer in after years, was beyond the power of words to convey. "We lived united as men always are who are daily staring death in the face on the same side and who, caring little about it, look upon each new day added to their lives as one more to rejoice in."1
Foremost in that gallant company—in sport as in war—were the men of the Light Division. They were the very embodiment of the offensive spirit which now permeated the army. In one corner of Europe at least the cycle of the twenty years' war had come full circle; it was the French who had fallen back, like the allies in 1794, on defensive fortifications, their adversaries who had learnt to rely on audacity. "A soldier who trusts to his firelock," wrote Charles Napier, the living repository of Moore's teaching, " never despairs while he can use it, but he who puts much faith in works, on seeing them forced, thinks all is lost."2 "The first in the field and the last out of it," was the toast of the Rifles, "the bloody, fighting Ninety-fifth!" It was a long road that the gay, good-humoured riflemen and their comrades of the 43rd and 52nd had travelled since they marched behind their band of thirty bugle-horns to take boat at Dover in 1809. Their jackets were now patched and faded, their trousers indiscriminately black, blue and grey and even particoloured, their shakos dented, for Wellington did not mind what his men looked like so long as they were well appointed for battle
1 Kincaid, 95-6; Random Shots, 250-1; Bel!, I, 12, 22; Smith, I, 50, 55; Schaumann, 326; Costello, 88-9; Simmons, 134, 137.
2 Charles Napier, I, 158. Sec Scott, II, 67.
and carried their sixty rounds of ammunition. But the silver-mounted bugle-horns still sounded their merry invocation of "Over the Hills and Far Away," and, for all their rags and tanned, weather-beaten faces, "the grace and intrepidity and lightness of step and flippancy of a young colonel with a rill of grasshoppers at his heels" had lost none of its power to bring "the dear little dark creatures with their sweeping eyebrows," running with fluttering handkerchiefs and clapping hands to the windows and roadside.1
In the first days of 1812 Wellington drew his sword from the scabbard. If Napoleon was bound that summer for Moscow,"* he would go with his merry men to Madrid. His adversary had sent 16,000 troops to Valencia, and to encourage him in his folly the British Commander-in-Chief sent a thousand of his—from the Cadiz garrison—by sea to Cartagena. The remainder of the French Army of Portugal, deceived by his carefully studied attitude of winter inactivity, was strung out on account of supply difficulties from Salamanca to Toledo. Ciudad Rodrigo was Wellington's for the taking.
Early on January 4th the orders to march reached the waiting regiments in their cantonments. Before it was light they were on their way. It was a terrible day of sleet and rain. The snow from the hills drifted over the roads and made every village a sea of mire; the troops went through the Agueda with water up to their shoulders and with arms linked to save themselves from being swept away by the current. Next day five men of the 3rd Division died from the cold, though one stout Irishwoman of the 88th was delivered of a child by the wayside and continued the march with her new-born infant in her arms.
By January 7th the fortress was closely invested. The garrison was not expecting an attack, and when the British on the morning of the 8th appeared under its towering rocks and medieval walls, the French officers, treating the affair as an elaborate jest, stood on the ramparts and saluted. The day, they had been given to understand, had been specially appointed by their incomprehensible adversaries for a greyhound match; no serious attack at such a time of year could conceivably be intended.2
This was merely Wellington's cunning. That night three hundred- picked men of the Light Division, commanded by the thirty-three-year-old Colonel Colborne, stormed the outlying
1 Barnard Letters, 196. See also Simmons, 5. "It is curious," recorded Kincaid, "that I never yet asked a nun or an attendant of a nunnery if she would elope with me that she did not immediately consent—and that, too, unconditionally."—Random Shots, 224. In his humbler sphere Rifleman Harris noted the same phenomenon.—Harris, 14.
2 Smith, I, 55; Kincaid, 101-3; Tomkinson, 122.
redoubt of San Francisco without a preliminary bombardment. Within twenty minutes they captured or slew the entire garrison for a loss of six killed and twenty wounded. So carefully had Colborne rehearsed his men and so swift and sustained was the covering fire from the edge of the glacis, that they were through the ditch and half-way up their scaling ladders before the French had time to fire a shot. In Napier's phrase the assailants appeared to be at one and the same time in the ditch, mounting the parapets, fighting on the top of the rampart and forcing the gorge of the redoubt.
Wellington did not waste an hour. That same night his engineers broke ground and commenced the first parallel. For the next five days the work was pressed on under a tempest of grape-shot and mortar shells, each division taking its turn with the spade in the trenches for twenty-four hours at a time. It was bitterly cold at night, but the fine, clear, frosty days aided rather than retarded operations, for, while it made the rocky, snow-covered ground harder, it forced the men to work to keep warm. The enemy, who had plenty of ammunition, soon had their range, and no one could move without provoking the deadly blast of the howitzers. But though casualties were high—nearly 500 fell in just over a week— the attackers closed steadily in. By the 14th January all the outlying suburbs and convents were in their hands.
On the same day Wellington, hearing that Marmont was hastily assembling his army fifty miles away, decided to carry the fortress by assault and not to wait till his heavy guns—many of them still moving up from Almeida—had completed the reduction of the walls. That night the first batteries opened fire, and for the next few days the earth shook and the far mountain valleys echoed with the roar of artillery. By the morning of the 19th, the eleventh day of the siege, two passable breaches had been made on the opposite side of the town to the Agueda river. Picton's 3rd Division was thereupon appointed to storm the greater breach on the right, and the smaller Light Division the lesser one on the left. Pack's Portuguese were to make a feint against the walls at another point, while the rest of the army was to stand by in support.
By all the accepted rules of war th
e decision to carry the fortress by storm before the counterscarp had been blown in was wrong. But Wellington had weighed the odds more carefully than he had done at Badajoz in the summer. Not only, were his engineers and gunners more efficient, but the garrison—less than 3000—was too small to hold such extensive fortifications. The price of a frontal attack on narrow breaches might be high, but it was not likely to be greater than that of a sustained siege and was almost certain to be less costly than a prolongation of the stalemate on the frontier. It was a time for boldness, and, like Napoleon sixteen years before, Wellington had made up his mind to be bold. The fate of Europe depended on it.
His orders were laconic: "Ciudad Rodrigo must be stormed this evening." The troops received them with enthusiasm: it was death or glory this time, wrote Lieutenant Simmons; a golden chain or a wooden leg. They had boundless confidence in their chief and complete assurance in themselves. "Give me sixty scaling ladders and two hundred volunteers with a supporting column," Charles Napier had pleaded nine months earlier, "and the British standard should fly in Almeida in two hours."1 Now his brother George to his unspeakable joy was given three hundred volunteers from the Light Division and told to crack a far harder nut.
Grattan of the 88th saw them a few hours later marching at the head of the Light Division to their action stations while the band of the 43rd played the march that was sweeping England, "The Downfall of Paris." "They were in the highest spirits, but without the slightest appearance of levity in their demeanour—on the contrary, there was a cast of determined severity thrown over their countenances that expressed in legible characters that they knew the sort of service they were about to perform, and had made up their minds to the issue. They had no knapsacks—their firelocks were slung over their shoulders—their shirt-collars were open, and there was an indescribable something about them. In passing us each officer and soldier stepped out of the ranks for an instant as he recognised a friend to press his hand—many for the last time. Yet, notwithstanding this animating scene, there was no shouting or huzzaing, no boisterous bravadoing, no unbecoming language; in short, every one seemed to be impressed with the seriousness of the affair entrusted to his charge, and any interchange of words was to this effect: ' Well, lads, mind what you're about to-night'; or, 'We'll meet in the town by and by'; and other little familiar phrases, all expressive of confidence. The regiment at length passed us? and we stood gazing after it as long as the rear platoon continued in sight; the music grew fainter every moment, until at last it died away altogether. They had no drums, and there was a melting sweetness in the sounds that touched the heart."1
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 64
