Salamanca 1812- Wellington’s Year of Victories

by Peter Edwards

  One more Charge, and then be Done.

  When the Forts of Folly fall,

  May the Victor, when He comes.

  Find my Body near the Wall.

  Introduction

  We have certainly altered the nature of the war in Spain:

  It has become, to a certain degree, an offensive on our part.

  By the end of 1811 Napoleon had a quarter of a million soldiers sprawled across Spain in scattered concentrations, like ill-spread fertiliser on a pasture. The vast lands between lay fallow, never cooperative and grudgingly productive only when force majeure moved in, temporarily asserting rights of conquest. The arrogant imposition of Napoleon’s Corsican brother Joseph as King of the proud Spanish people, the harsh requisitioning of his forage parties and the cruel treatment of the peasantry, guaranteed everywhere a sullen but passionate hostility. Bands of self-seeking guerrillas, partly armed and paid by the British, wrapped in patriotism and clothed in blooded blue French uniforms stripped from the ambushed and mutilated dead, roamed the hillside tracks seeking brutal revenge – and plunder. Always plunder or, more truthfully, secondhand loot. Unlike Napoleon’s other European fiefdoms, the resulting need for strong garrisons, bridge guards, escort parties and reserves, reduced the manpower available to his generals to form the mobile armies necessary to eject Wellington. 1811 was not a good year for the Emperor and his marshals, who already sniffed at their inferior Spanish posting, sensing their master’s grander ambitions to the East, pastures new, beckoning more urgently than their own rather boring Iberian difficulties, and with which they would be expected to cope and solve: a second eleven.

  The Spanish ping-pong of 1811 had left Napoleon nonplussed, as he tried catastrophically to control affairs from Paris – with a reaction time stretching into so many weeks that credibility was removed from his eventual response.

  The importance of the 1811 campaign lay in its pivotal role, its fulcrum position in the shifting British/French balance. Out of Wellington’s strategic masterpiece of ultimate defence – the Lines of Torres Vedras – came the weakening through starvation of Massena’s army, and his subsequent withdrawal, with huge losses, up to and beyond Sabugal. Soult had accordingly moved north to his aid (and in the process, amazingly, snatched Badajoz); to do this he had borrowed much of Victor’s force from around Cadiz, which allowed Graham to earn his reputation at Barrosa – which in turn pulled the elastic on Soult, to drag him back. That in turn allowed Beresford the space for the first attempt at Badajoz, while his master dealt – just – with a resurgent Massena at Fuentes d’Oñoro, that early close-run thing; and so up bounced Soult again, to try to save Badajoz, and to thwart him Beresford committed his command to the bloody confrontation at Albuera. Where my 2nd Battalion got knocked over in the rain, by the Lancers.

  And yet patience is a French marshal’s virtue. Should the Emperor’s growing eastern ambitions reap a rich harvest, surely as in 1809 he would again turn his eyes, feet and resources to Spain? Now that was a thought worth hugging. Until then, his marshals must rub along as best they could, without getting into too many scrapes, particularly those self-inflicted by personal ambitions.

  Apart from Suchet’s 60,000 men in the Army of the Centre, now across in Valencia, and the royal stooge Joseph in Madrid (again hand-held by Jourdan) with some 10,000 effective marching troops, the thirty-eight-year-old Marmont held the pivotal ground with his 52,000 strong Army of Portugal, based on the Tagus with his headquarters in Talavera. Dorsenne’s 48,000 strong Army of the North formed the French right, up beyond the Duoro, with Soult’s 54,000 Army of the South correspondingly way down in Andalucia. Both Dorsenne and Soult had single divisions placed in advance, respectively at Salamanca and at Merida.

  Thus given his strength and long sick list, any combination of two of the four French armies would of course present serious problems for Lord Wellington, as may be seen after the second attempt at Badajoz, when Marmont and Soult concentrated against him some 60,000 strong; and again in September when Marmont with help from the Army of the North re-provisioned Ciudad Rodrigo, defying his Lordship with some 58,000 men (and leading by chance to Picton’s narrow squeak on the ridge at El Bodon). Hence as his army went into winter quarters, the Light Division adjacent to Rodrigo with the rest back around Guarda, consideration in the Peer’s head would concentrate not so much on what his next step should be, but when it would be prudent to take it. That is, when the relative strengths would be favourable. He had had more than enough of rushed sieges, at a time when a quarter of his men were sick in hospital, especially those who had come out from recent service in Walcheren.

  Encouragingly for Lord Wellington, as he pondered his options in the second half of October 1811, his headquarters at Frenada received two supportive pieces of gossip. The first came in the form of the captured governor – no less! – of Ciudad Rodrigo, scooped up by the guerrilla Don Julian Sanchez whilst riding foolishly outside his own walls. General Reynaud in his subsequent cups at Wellington’s table – according to George Scovell, AQMG, and amongst other things the Peer’s decypherer – made various derogatory comments on French morale and the distrust existing between commanders, and in particular that ‘the different Armies in Spain are all independent and only acknowledge the Emperor’s order’. And a week later, Scovell decoded a captured message from Marmont to General Foy (who had earlier incurred King Joseph’s wrath for foraging too close to Madrid), saying, ‘As a general principle you must not obey any order given to you in the name of the King, if it runs counter to my stated aims’. As Wellington commented, ‘[Marmont’s letter] shows how these gentry are going on: in fact each Marshal is the natural enemy of the King and of his neighbouring Marshal.’ These indications that all was not sweetness and light between the French leadership gave his Lordship a superior comfort. And they were promptly followed by proper intelligence of the first grade. For whether he believed it or not, in order to calm his commanders in Spain prior to milking them for his eastern ambitions, Napoleon insisted that the English had been so weakened by sickness that they ‘are unable to undertake anything’ (to Marmont in November); and ‘the English will not undertake anything from now until the month of February, and there is reason to believe they will remain on the defensive’ (to Joseph in mid-December).

  On Christmas Eve 1811 came a reliable report that one of Marmont’s southerly divisions (Brennier’s) had quit its quarters in Plasencia three days earlier and was headed to Navalmoral, near the Tagus. Further astounding reports confirmed the cavalry of Dorsenne’s Imperial Guard had returned to France, and that the infantry of the Guard had left Valladolid northwards towards France. Then on 29 December came news that Clausel’s division near Salamanca had left Marmont for Avila, halfway to Madrid, replacing an unnamed division now moving ever further east.

  So from this patchwork of intelligence it emerged that a general eastwards movement was underway, presumed by Lord Wellington firstly in part to be a search for fresh food supplies, partly to reinforce Suchet, and latterly en route to the snows of Russia. Deduction: Marmont was less and less able to concentrate his army fully or quickly and Ciudad Rodrigo was becoming exposed.

  His moment had come. He wrote to his political boss Liverpool on New Year’s day 1812, ‘I propose therefore to make an attack upon Ciudad Rodrigo’; and to his brother on 3 January ‘I propose to invest Rodrigo on the 6th and to break ground, if possible, on that night. The weather is however now very bad: the whole country now being covered in snow.’

  CHAPTER 1

  Part I – Ciudad Rodrigo The Renaud Redoubt 8 January 1812

  The attack on Rodrigo had been Wellington’s settled strategy for months and like Torres Vedras was another major example of his far-sighted vision. Orders to the trusted gunner Captain Alexander Dickson were given verbally no less than six months earlier, in July 1811: ‘His Lordship informed me that it was his intention to attempt the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo and he wished ... I should superintend the conveyance of the
English battering train up the Douro to Lamego and thence by land ... to its ultimate destination.’ The previous day Lord Wellington had written to the Earl of Liverpool setting out the strengths of the French relative to his own, and discussing briefly

  with this force whether any and what operation should be undertaken ... for with the prospect of the renewal of hostilities in the north of Europe, I am most anxious not to allow this moment of the enemy’s comparative weakness to pass by without making an effort to improve the situation of the allies in the Peninsula.

  Marmont’s Army of Portugal at that stage was thought to comprise up to 40,000 bayonets and 6,000 sabres, the allies some 42,000 and 4,000 respectively. Thus, said his Lordship to Liverpool, ‘you will observe that our numbers are but little superior; and that we are inferior in that principal arm in this open country, cavalry’, and so any success might not be decisive, especially weighed against the inevitable losses due to the heat, the marches, and the lack of water inherent in manoeuvring Marmont to battle on the plains of Estremadura. Similarly, in the summer heat, a third attempt at Badajoz was unappealing, and ‘Soult could without difficulty increase the army in Estremadura from 10,000 to 15,000 men and the enemy would again have the superiority of numbers in the field.’

  Nor could he turn south against Soult directly, for any attempt to relieve Cadiz would see the Army of Portugal descend upon his rear and his communications: ‘We should meet in Andalucia the whole force which lately obliged us to raise the siege of Badajoz, with the addition to it of the force which was left before Cadiz.’

  Hence Rodrigo beckoned. Wellington’s 1811 experiences before Badajoz ensured that this next siege should of course be conducted with proper artillery, and since it would take two months or so for the battering train to conclude its snail-pace journey, the summer’s heat would by then be passing. Further, the Army of Portugal, ‘which was destined to oppose us in whatever point we should direct our operations, was not likely to be so strongly supported in the north as in the south’. The train would then be safely and conveniently in a restored Almeida; the long umbilical cord of support to Lisbon could increasingly switch to Oporto, via a Douro to be made more navigable by Dickson’s passage of the train; Rodrigo was but weakly garrisoned. Lastly Marmont might well be kept as ignorant of his Lordship’s plans as his predecessor the previous year was ignorant of the Lines.

  The British battering train was simply enormous when assembled on dry land: guns, howitzers, mortars, shot and shell, powder, carts, limbers, bullocks, mules and men. It had been sitting in the Navy’s transports for the past two years, too big a task to get quickly to Badajoz for the first attempts, but clearly already in the Tagus at that time. (His Lordship had written to Admiral Berkeley on 20 March expressing his wish ‘to disembark the ordnance store-ships (with the exception of the battering train) ... I am keeping the battering train on board because, whenever we may need it, it will be convenient to transport it part of the way by sea.’) The Peer judged there was insufficient time to allow such a tardy convoy to be committed in 1811 to such a journey; nor had he then the confidence in Alexander Dickson he was later to enjoy. The train comprised thirty-four iron 24-pounders, four 18-pounders, eight 10-inch howitzers, two 8-inch howitzers, and twenty of the more conventional 5½-inch howitzers. The ammunition comprised 800 rounds per gun and 400 rounds per howitzer and mortar (including reserves), some 42,400 rounds in all, with 1,600 barrels of powder. The whole was transferred into 160 flat-bottomed boats at Oporto by two companies of English artillerymen and 300 Portugese gunners, and reached Lamego fifty miles up the Douro where it was met by 1,000 carts and 8,000 bullocks, who then hauled the forty miles to Villa da Ponte, arriving by divisions during the first week of September. Captain Dickson faced and solved many difficulties during this period, such as the construction of 700 timber crates to take the shot and shell on the country carts; the replacement on eighty limbers of the horse shafts for bullock poles; the construction of sledges for the mortars; the making of 4,000 extra cartridges for the 24-pounders etc. etc., all at a time when he personally suffered recurring fevers and ill health generally. Much of his constant travelling was in a litter – a sort of large two-man sedan chair slung between two mules.

  As the train began to arrive at Villa da Ponte, he wrote, ‘About the middle of September I expect the first great convoy with all the heavy guns, will be at Ciudad Rodrigo’ and so too hoped his Lordship. But Dickson was wrong. He was to be stuck where he was until the middle of November, and it would be 1812 before the first 24-pounder ball crashed into the fortress of Rodrigo. As the engineer John Jones put it in his Journal, ‘Just as the garrison of Rodrigo having become much distressed for supplies, and it was intended to try some immediate enterprise against it, the French made a great effort for its relief: on 28 September Marmont crossed the Agueda with an overpowering force.’

  Wellington heard of Marmont’s intentions to replenish Rodrigo on the last day of August but, with 14,000 sick, his 46,000 strength could not prevent the re-victualling – indeed, at El Bodon, it was all he could do to prevent Marmont’s cavalry cutting up one of Picton’s brigades. When the French eventually withdrew on 1 October, the deadlock on relative strengths continued, until ended by the need for dispersed winter quarters on both sides. Then the Emperor intervened in November with his orders to Marmont and to Joseph, to despatch troops to aid Suchet in Valencia and, a little later, the withdrawal of the unfortunate Guard regiments for Russia. There was now presented to his Lordship the opportunity for the attack on the fortress of Rodrigo that had long been in contemplation.

  Ciudad Rodrigo’s river Agueda was found by the Roman army to be easily fordable – except when the rains came down – and the adjacent slight hill, some 150 feet above the river level, neatly provided a defensible camp site. One guesses this was so in the time of Augustus, who turned the Mediterranean into a Roman lake. The Vandals, the Visigoths, the Arabs and the Crusaders were but a few of the many to have contributed to the construction and deconstruction of this town upon a hill. The true founding of the town came in the twelfth century, when it was repopulated by Ferdinand II, and the walls date from this period. The castle is thought to have been built by Henry II in 1372, and would therefore be medieval rather than Moorish. Yet the Moors mainly built castles with square towers, as at Rodrigo, whereas castles built by the Crusaders had round towers – so no-one can be too sure. The bridge is thought to have been constructed in the sixteenth century. The outer town wall was in a rough oval, some half mile by a quarter, of a plain perimeter construction, without bastions or angles, with a poor parapet. The masonry was now old, narrow and nowhere higher than thirty feet – all quite adequate for medieval defence but not against the subsequent invention of large calibre siege cannon. Thus there occurred the construction of a second, outer wall and the cutting of gun embrasures on the ramparts of the main wall. The outer was of faced packed earth, taken from without, thus creating a ditch-wall-ditch-wall sequence to test the attacker. The garrison’s weakness, however, lay less than two football pitches to the north, a gentle ridge (the Lesser Teson) of stony soil which rose nearly to the height of the ramparts; and behind it by another 400 yards there was another slightly higher feature (the Upper Teson) which over-topped the ramparts by a significant thirteen feet or so. Hence the glacis and the first wall (which was set somewhat away from the main rampart wall) could not prevent aimed cannonfire being effective down onto the foot of the ramparts – the key ‘open sesame’ to any breaching operation.

  The Tesons had two further attractions for the besiegers: they provided covered approaches via their dead ground; and the surfaces were diggable, unlike the western and eastern approaches which were not only open and rocky, but because of the slope of the land the guns would have to be much closer in to breach effectively. ‘This would have been a tedious process,’ Napier said, and any infantryman who has wielded a pick or, worse, a shovel on hard wintry ground will testify to that.

  In
1810 Ney had made a lengthy and expensive meal of overcoming the Spanish garrison, and Lord Wellington knew he would be expected to choose the same route: for it was a proven key to the town and anyway re-opening old trenches and breaches is both hard to resist and quick to do. Accordingly the French had added fortified posts out beyond the town walls, to complicate and slow his efforts. These comprised the Renaud Redoubt (named after the recently captured Governor, but also known in some accounts as Fort Francisco) on the forward slope of the Upper Teson, and the Convents of Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Domingo and of the Trinity in the eastern suburbs, and finally that of Santa Cruz on the west. The Renaud Redoubt with its three guns, a dozen gunners and sixty bayonets, stood directly in the intended path, and was supported by another two guns and a howitzer on the flat roof of the Francisco convent just 400 yards away. The Redoubt had a palisaded ditch to the fore and plain palisades to the rear.

  The town garrison comprised a battalion each of the 34th Léger and of the 113th Ligne, both from Thiebault’s Division in Salamanca, together with two companies of artillery and some sappers – less than 2,000 all ranks – and was reluctantly commanded as a last-minute replacement by Brigadier General Barrié. Under his care he also had the battering train of Marmont’s Army of Portugal, some 153 heavy guns complete with powder, shot and transport (but not the gunners). This was clearly a huge added bonus prize for the besiegers.

  Lord Wellington’s plan was to move up the undefended reverse slopes of the Upper Teson, taking the Redoubt at last light, sap forward to the Lesser and start constructing batteries on the forward slopes of both features. Those closest to the town would be a mere 200 yards from the walls. The Convents would also be dealt with. Unlike the previous year’s abortive attempt at Badajoz, however, where once the breaches at Fort Christobal were considered (wrongly) to be practicable, and he had assaulted with just two grenadier companies, here for the Renaud Redoubt – like Christobal garrisoned by a weak company – he was to use eight British companies and two Portuguese.