SECTION XXXVI: CHAPTER V
THE OPERATIONS AROUND BURGOS:
JUNE 4-14, 1813
On June 3rd Wellington had halted the infantry of Graham’s column at Toro, in order to allow the whole of Hill’s column to cross the bridge and fords, and to complete the junction of the army. He gave as his reasons that he expected to meet Gazan, D’Erlon, and the King, on the Hormija river, when he should have debouched from Toro, and that he intended to fight them with his whole force, not with the northern column only. ‘I do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that we are so close up or so well concentrated as we ought to be, to meet the enemy in the strength in which he will appear on the Hormija, probably to-morrow; and therefore I propose to halt the heads of the different columns to-morrow, and close up the rear of each, moving Hill in this direction preparatory to our further movement[493].’ Only the cavalry continued to press forward on the 3rd; they found no signs of resistance, but only vedettes, which retired cautiously on their approach. Wellington was so far right in his apprehension, that the idea of fighting in front of Valladolid had been one of the three plans which the French Head-quarters Staff had considered on June 2. But, as we have already seen, that scheme had been rejected as rash, and during Wellington’s halt upon June 3 the enemy were evacuating Valladolid and all its neighbourhood, and commencing their retreat behind the Pisuerga. By eight o’clock on the evening of that day the cavalry reports, all along the front, showed that the enemy was retiring on every road, and it appeared certain that they did not intend to fight; the army therefore advanced in three main columns, Wellington himself with the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 7th Divisions, followed by Hill, by the high road on Valladolid through La Mota: Graham with the 1st and 5th Divisions, Pack and Bradford, by the more northern parallel road, by Villavelid and Villar de Frades, on Medina de Rio Seco. The Galicians were converging on the same point as Graham, by the high road from Villalpando and Villafrechos, but were directed not to approach too close to Medina till further notice. The reason for their delay was a curious one—Giron had just written on the previous day to say that he had no reserve of infantry cartridges, and only 60 rounds a man in the soldiers’ pouches. He wanted to borrow a supply from the British army. Wellington replied in considerable heat: when he was on the move he could not give away his own reserve ammunition: no doubt Giron was not personally to blame—nor his men—but the administration in Galicia. Yet the unfortunate result would be that the Galicians must never be put in a position where there would be a heavy consumption of cartridges, i. e. must be held in reserve, or used for subsidiary operations only. Giron was directed to make small regimental reserves, by taking away a proportion of the cartridges from each man and carrying them on mules. The general got off easily—but Wellington thundered that night on the War Minister O’Donoju, ‘Here is an army which is clothed, armed, and disciplined, but cannot be brought into action with the enemy: I am obliged to keep it in the rear. How can troops march without provisions, or fight without ammunition? The cause of the country may be lost unless the Government establish in the provinces some authority to which the people will pay obedience, and which will insure their resources for the purposes of the war[494].’ It will be noted that all through the rest of the campaign Giron’s corps was used for flanking movements, and never put in the forefront of the fighting—though the other Spanish troops with the army, Morillo’s and later Longa’s divisions, were used freely.
On the 4th June Wellington moved with the ‘Head-Quarters Column’ as far as La Mota, Hill getting no farther than Morales. At La Mota the information received showed that the French were in general retreat—the cavalry advance got into Valladolid and found some undestroyed stores of ammunition there. Julian Sanchez, scouting far towards the south, discovered a considerable magazine of grain at Arevalo, where Gazan’s head-quarters had been. In view of the new situation it was necessary to recast the movements of the army—there was to be no fight on the Hormija, or for the possession of Valladolid. The initial strategical success of the passage of the Esla had settled the event of the first phase of the campaign, and cleared the French not only out of New Castile, but out of the kingdom of Leon and great part of Old Castile. The fact that the enemy had abandoned Valladolid and the lower crossings of the Pisuerga, would seem to show that he intended to fall back on the Burgos country: he could hardly be intending to defend a position behind the middle Pisuerga and the Carrion, since he had surrendered the passages at and about Valladolid, by which the southern flank of such a position could be turned.
Now nine months ago Wellington had been in these same regions, with the army of Clausel retreating before him from Valladolid on Burgos. On that occasion he had followed the enemy in a straightforward pursuit along the great high road, by Cabezon and Torquemada. On this occasion his strategy was entirely different. Leaving only a cavalry screen between himself and the enemy, he proceeded to move his whole army towards the north-west by secondary roads, marching in four parallel columns not on Burgos but on the upper Pisuerga north-west of that fortress, so as to turn entirely any position that the enemy might take up on the Hormaza, the Arlanzon, or the Urbel. It can hardly be doubted that he had already in his mind the great manœuvre which he was to accomplish during the next fortnight—that of outflanking the French right wing by a wide sweeping movement, which would not only force Joseph and Jourdan to evacuate Burgos and its neighbourhood, but would cut them off from the royal road to Bayonne and their main communication with France. The first order in his dispatch book which definitely reveals this intention does not appear till June 10[495], but the facts which it contains prove that the plan must have been laid long ere Wellington started from Portugal.
This plan was no less a scheme than the transference of the base of the British army from the port of Lisbon to the Bay of Biscay, so that when, in its wide turning movement, it should have passed the Ebro and neared the Cantabrian coast, it should find stores and munitions awaiting it, and be no longer tied to the long line of communication with Portugal, which it had always used hitherto. It was an astonishing example of the strategical use of sea-power, to which there had hitherto been no parallel in the Napoleonic wars. The only manœuvre at all resembling it was that by which Sir John Moore in December 1808 had changed his line of communication from Lisbon to Corunna. But this was for a sudden hasty retreat, made by a small army—a very different thing from an advance made by a large army. For Moore had only wanted transports on which to abscond from the Peninsula; Wellington had planned the arrival of a fleet of supply vessels, on whose contents he was to rely for the future sustenance of his army during a long campaign.
Their existence was his second great secret in 1813—the first had been his plan for the crossing of the Esla. But the latter might have been guessed at as a possibility by any intelligent French general: the former, it is safe to say, had never been dreamed of as a conceivable move. Santander is so remote from Portugal, and the French were so firmly rooted in Northern Spain in the spring of 1813, that it could never enter into the head of any of Napoleon’s subordinates that the British Commander-in-Chief was planning such an elaborate surprise. They were bound to believe that all Wellington’s operations would be founded on, and circumscribed by, the basic fact that his line of communication was on Lisbon. A manœuvre which presupposed the complete abandonment of that line was not conceivable by officers reared in Continental campaigns, and unused to contemplating the correlation of land operations and naval strategy. Yet the fact that the supply fleet had been gathered at Corunna long weeks before, and kept there till the conquest of Northern Spain was well on its way to completion, is conclusive evidence as to Wellington’s intentions. The crucial dispatch of June 10 ran as follows—it was addressed to Colonel Bourke in charge of the British dépôts in Galicia:
‘There are at Corunna certain ships loaded with biscuit and flour, and certain others loaded with a train of heavy artillery and its ammunition, and some with musket ammunition, and I shall be much obliged if you will request any officer of the navy who may be at Corunna, when you receive this letter, to take under his convoy all the vessels loaded as above mentioned, and to proceed with them to Santander. If he should find Santander occupied by the enemy, I beg him to remain off the port till the operations of this army have obliged the enemy to abandon it.
‘If the enemy is not occupying Santander, I beg him to enter the port, but to be in readiness to quit it again if the enemy should approach the place, until I shall communicate with him[496]’.
It should be noted that Wellington had carefully avoided calling attention to the accumulation of ships and stores at Corunna, even in his letters to the ministers at home[497]. Their existence there was plausibly explained by the need for supplying the Spanish army of Galicia—which had indeed received much material during the spring. The provision of heavy artillery shows that he was contemplating as a probability the siege of San Sebastian and the other northern fortresses. He had failed at Burgos in 1812 for lack of the 24-pounders which Home Popham had vainly offered to send him from Santander: now he was quite ready to receive them from that port. As things stood on the Pisuerga, at the moment that he sent this prescient dispatch to Bourke, it was certainly a bold prophecy to write that he was about to clear the Cantabrian coast by his next move. The French were still unbeaten, and he was more than a hundred miles from the Bay of Biscay, from which he was separated by a most rough and complicated land of mountains. But he had already taken his measure of the capacity of the hostile commanders, and his hopes were high.
The great flank movement’s initial stages can be best traced by following on the map Wellington’s nightly head-quarters. They were La Mota on the 4th, Castromonte on the 5th, Ampudia on the 6th—all these carefully avoid the neighbourhood of the Pisuerga, though the cavalry pushed on to feel the lines of the French along the river. But the army, instead of making for the crossings at Valladolid, Cabezon, or Dueñas, kept steadily on in four parallel columns, on roads far from the river. Hill, still as always on the right, went by Torrelobaton, Mucientes, and Dueñas; Graham, on the left, by Medina de Rio Seco and Grixota; ‘the Head-Quarters Column’ under Wellington himself, by Castromonte and Ampudia—while, far off, the Galician army on the north moved by Villaramiel and Villoldo on Aguilar de Campos. The flanking cavalry kept up a continual bickering along the Pisuerga with French outposts; on the 6th those at the head of the advance had a distant glimpse of a great review of the Army of the Centre, which King Joseph was holding outside Palencia, from the heights which overlook that city from the west. In front of Dueñas there was an exchange of letters under a flag of truce between Wellington and Gazan—a most odd proceeding at such a moment—from which both parties thought they had derived useful information[498]. The British parlementaire reported to the Commander-in-Chief that Dueñas was still held by French infantry—which was good to know: the French, on the other hand, got a reply to Gazan’s letter to Wellington within four hours—which proved that British Head-Quarters must be a very short way from them—which was equally a valuable scrap of knowledge.
The King had now waited three days in the temporary position behind the Pisuerga, without being attacked, though he was in the close neighbourhood of the enemy. The quiescence of such an adversary made him uncomfortable, and at last he guessed part of what was going on opposite him. The British must be pushing up northward parallel to his line, and preparing to turn his right flank (which extended no farther than Palencia) by way of Amusco and the upper Carrion. Whereupon Joseph on the 7th hastily resumed his retreat, and got behind the defile of Torquemada. There was danger in waiting—nothing had been heard of Clausel, but news were to hand that Lamartinière, with one of the missing divisions of the Army of Portugal, was nearing Burgos from the north. The main body took post on the Arlanzon—but Reille with his two divisions at Castroxeriz on the Odra. Jourdan went forward to report on the condition of Burgos, where important new works had been commenced in the spring, and to choose good defensible positions in its neighbourhood. It was expected that the British army would follow in pursuit, up the great chaussée from Palencia to Torquemada.
And at first it looked as if this might be the case: entering Palencia on the same day that the King had left it, Wellington pushed up the chaussée part of Hill’s column—Grant’s and Ponsonby’s cavalry brigades and the Light Division, which kept in touch with the enemy’s rear. The rest of the right column had got no farther forward than Palencia. But the main body of the army continued its north-westerly turning movement, Graham’s infantry that day reached Grixota, five miles north of Palencia; the Galicians were up parallel with Graham farther west, somewhere near Becceril. The movements of June 8 and 9, however, were the decisive revelations of Wellington’s intentions. He moved his head-quarters not up the Torquemada road, but to Amusco on the Carrion river, and continued to urge his columns straight northward—Graham to San Cebrian and Peña on the 8th and Osorno on the 9th, the main body of Hill’s column to Amusco and Tamara, the Galicians to Carrion. He was thus getting his army well north of any positions which the enemy would be likely to take up in the neighbourhood of Burgos, giving it very long marches, but still keeping it closely concentrated.
On the 10th he judged that he had got sufficiently round the enemy, and turned all his columns due east towards the upper Pisuerga—Graham’s and Wellington’s own divisions crossing it at Zarzosa and Melgar, Hill at Astudillo, some miles farther south. Head-quarters were fixed that night at Melgar. With the passage of the Pisuerga ended the long march through the great flat corn-bearing plainland of Northern Spain, the Tierra de Campos. The next ten days were to be spent among rougher paths. The triumphant and almost unopposed advance from the Esla to the Pisuerga, executed in one sweep and at high speed, was an episode which those who were engaged in it never forgot.
‘From the time of our crossing the Esla up to this period,’ wrote one diarist, ‘we have been marching through one continuous cornfield. The land is of the richest quality, and produces the finest crops with the least possible labour. It is generally wheat, with a fair proportion of barley, and now and then a crop of vetches or clover. The horses fed on green barley nearly the whole march, and got fat. The army has trampled down twenty yards of corn on each side of the roads by which the several columns have passed—in many places much more, from the baggage going on the side of the columns, and so spreading farther into the wheat. But they must not mind their corn if we get the enemy out of their country!... The country gives bread and corn, and hitherto these have not failed, and this is a region that has been plundered and devastated for five years by the enemy! It was said before our march that until the harvest came in, not a pound of bread by way of supplies for the army could be procured[499].’
A Light Division diarist writes in a more romantic frame of mind: ‘The country was beautifully diversified, studded with castles of Moorish architecture, recalling the chivalric days of Ferdinand and Isabella. The sun shone brilliantly, the sky was heavenly blue, and clouds of dust marked the line of march of the glittering columns. The joyous peasantry hailed our approach and came dancing to meet us, singing, and beating time on their small tambourines; and when we passed through the principal street of Palencia, the nuns, from the upper windows of a convent, showered down rose-leaves upon our dusty heads[500].’
The dry comment of the Commander-in-chief, in his report to the War Minister at home, contrasts oddly with this enthusiasm: ‘I enclose the last weekly and daily states. We keep up our strength, and the army are very healthy and in better order than I have ever known them. God knows how long that will last. It depends entirely upon the officers[501].’
While Wellington’s columns were hurrying northward, the French remained for two days (June 7-9) in position behind the Pisuerga—Reille on the right at Castroxeriz, the rest of the army holding the heights down to Villadiego and the Arlanza river. Only British cavalry scouts appeared in front of them. ‘The position was excellent,’ says Jourdan, ‘and it was hoped to hold it for some days. But the generals commanding the armies represented to the King that the troops lacked bread, and that they dared not send out large detachments far afield to requisition food from the peasantry, wherefore the whole force retired on Burgos.’ No doubt the country was bare; and, when the enemy is known to be near, it is unsafe to make large detachments: but it may be suspected that the real cause for retreat was the continuous uncertainty as to Wellington’s northward movement. Yet it is clear that the French Head-Quarters had no suspicion how far that movement was going.
For on the 9th, when they retreated, they took up position on a very short line north and south of Burgos. Reille’s two divisions lay behind the Hormaza river, ten miles west of the fortress—with the right opposite Hormaza village, the left at Estepar—forming a front line. The Army of the South was on both banks of the Arlanzon, five miles behind Reille—right wing behind the Urbel river, left wing behind the Arcos river. The Army of the Centre and the King’s Guards were in reserve, billeted in Burgos itself. But already Wellington’s columns were aiming at points far north of Reille’s position. That day the northernmost divisions of Graham’s infantry[502] were at Osorno, next day (June 10th) at Zarzosa, beyond the Pisuerga, a point from which they could easily march round the Hormaza position, and on June 11th, at Sotresgudo, where they halted for a day[503]. The centre[504], with Wellington himself, on the same day had reached Castroxeriz on the Odra river, while Hill was close by at Barrio de Santa Maria and Valbases. Nothing had been sent south of the Arlanzon save Julian Sanchez’s lancers, who were scouring the country in the direction of Lerma, on the look-out for belated French convoys or detachments. The Galician army, keeping (as always) far out on the left wing, had reached the Pisuerga at Herrera, ten miles north of Graham’s extreme flank. They were now within two marches of the upper Ebro, and there was absolutely no enemy in front of them for scores of miles—the nearest Frenchmen in that direction were the columns with which Foy was scouring the roads of Biscay, after his capture of Castro-Urdiales.
The halt of the French army in the neighbourhood of Burgos was not to mark the end of its retreat, and the commencement of offensive operations, as King Joseph had hoped. The only cheering features in the general outlook were that Lamartinière’s division of the Army of Portugal was now in touch—it was reported coming up from Briviesca—and that a bulletin of the Grand Army was received from Germany, telling of the victory of the Emperor at Bautzen. But the discouraging news was appalling—the first instalment of it was that Jourdan reported, after investigating the fortifications of Burgos, that he considered the place untenable. During the spring building and demolition had been taken in hand, for the purpose of linking up the old castle, which had given so much trouble to Wellington in 1812, with the high-lying ‘Hornwork of St. Miguel’ on the rising ground above. The scheme was wholly unfinished—the only result achieved was that St. Miguel, as reconstructed, commanded the castle, and that the alterations started in the enceinte of the latter, with the object of linking it up with the former, had rendered it, in the marshal’s opinion, incapable of holding out for a day. Yet this would not have mattered so much if the army had been about to resume the offensive, or to put up a stable defence in the Burgos region.
But it was declared that this was impossible—the governor reported that the immense convoys which had been passing through Burgos of late, and the recent stay of considerable bodies of troops in the place[505], had brought his magazines to such a low ebb that he could not feed an army of 50,000 men for more than a few days. The town was still crammed with the last great horde of Spanish and French refugees, who had come on from Madrid, Segovia, and Valladolid, and all the King’s private train. They were sent on at once towards Vittoria, under escort of Lamartinière’s division—which thus no sooner became available than it was lost again. No news had arrived either from Foy or from Clausel: but Sarrut’s division of the Army of Portugal had been located north of the Ebro, and would be coming in ere very long. The news that Clausel was undiscoverable brought King Joseph to such a pitch of excitement that he took, on June 9th, a step which he should have taken a fortnight before, and threw over all his fears of offending the minister at Paris or the Emperor in Saxony. He sent direct peremptory orders to Clausel to join him at once, and told off a column of 1,500 men to escort the aide-de-camp who bore them: it went off by Domingo Calzada and Logroño. As a matter of fact the order reached the general in six days—but it might have taken longer for all that Joseph could guess. And the King came to the conclusion that if he were at all pushed by Wellington within the next few days, he must abandon Burgos and retire behind the Ebro. He might even have to go without hostile persuasion, on the mere question of food-supplies.
But on June 12 the pressure was applied. Wellington had now got all his forces over the Pisuerga, and his two southern columns were concentrated between Castroxeriz and Villadiego: Graham was farther off, but not out of reach. Having reconnoitred the advanced position of Reille on the Hormaza river, and found that his supports were far behind, he resolved to attack him in front and flank that morning. Only the southern column—Hill’s troops—was employed, the centre divisions being halted in a position from which they might be brought in on the enemy’s rear, if the King reinforced Reille, but not if the French showed no signs of standing. But the push against the Army of Portugal, made by the 2nd Division, Silveira’s Portuguese, and Morillo’s Spaniards, was sufficient to dislodge the enemy: for while they were deploying against the French front, the cavalry brigades of Grant and Ponsonby, supported by the Light Division, appeared behind Reille’s right flank. The enemy at once gave way, before infantry fighting had begun, and retreating hastily southward got behind the Urbel river, where the Army of the South was already in line. Reille then crossed the Arlanzon by the bridge of Buniel and took post south of Burgos. The French loss was small—the retreat was made in good order and with great speed, before the British infantry could arrive. Grant’s and Ponsonby’s horse, already outflanking the rearguard, got in close, but did not deliver a general attack—by Wellington’s own orders as it is said[506]: for (despite of Garcia Hernandez) he held to his firm belief that cavalry cannot break intact infantry. A half troop of the 14th Light Dragoons, under Lieut. Southwell, charged and captured an isolated French gun, which had fallen behind the rearguard; but this was the only contact between the armies that day. Jourdan says that Reille lost about fifteen men only—an exaggeration no doubt, but not a very great one.
The result, however, was to determine King Joseph to retreat at once, and to abandon Burgos, before his obviously outflanked right wing should be entirely circumvented. That night desperate measures were taken—everything that could travel on wheels was sent off by the high road towards the Ebro: the infantry followed, using such side roads as were available. At dawn only cavalry rearguards were covering Burgos. Jourdan explains the haste of the retreat as follows. ‘It was easy to foresee that next morning that part of the Army of the South which lay behind the Urbel river would be attacked, and that being separated by the Arlanzon from the bulk of the army, which lay on the south bank, it would be compromised. Three choices lay open—first, to bring the whole army across the Arlanzon and to fight on the Urbel; but this would have brought on the general action which it had been determined to avoid, ever since the King had made up his mind to call in Clausel. Second—to bring the whole army across to the south bank of the Arlanzon, where there was a good position: but this move would have allowed the enemy to cut the great road and our communications with France—and the same motives which had caused the rejection of the scheme to retire south of the Douro on June 2 caused this alternative to be disapproved on June 12. Third—to fall back by the great road to the Ebro, and so secure the earliest possible concentration of all the armies of Spain. This was the scheme adopted[507].’
It is said that Gazan was for fighting on the Urbel[508], while Reille and D’Erlon opted for the second choice—that of abandoning the high road to France, going south of the Arlanzon, and retreating by the bad track to Domingo Calzada and Logroño, because Clausel, being certainly somewhere in Navarre, would be picked up much sooner at Logroño than at Miranda or other points higher up the Ebro. But the Emperor’s orders that the direct communication with France must be kept up at all costs, were adduced against them, and settled the question.
Before leaving, the French made arrangements to blow up the castle which had served them so well in the preceding October, and to destroy a great store of powder and munitions for which no transport could be procured. According to Jourdan the disaster which followed was due to the professional ignorance of General d’Aboville, the director-general of artillery, who maintained that shells would do no great harm if they were exploded, not in a great mass but placed in small groups, at distances one from another. He had 6,000 of them laid in parcels on the ground in the castle square, and connected with the mines which were placed under the donjon keep. Orders were given that the fuses were only to be lit when the last troops should have left, and the inhabitants were told that if they would keep to their houses they would incur no danger. But the mines by some error were fired before seven o’clock in the morning, and the effects of the explosion had been so badly calculated, that not only were many houses in the city injured, all the glass blown out of the splendid cathedral, and its roof broken in several places, but a hail of shells fell all over the surrounding quarter, and killed 100 men of Villatte’s division, who were halted in the Plaza Mayor, and a few of Digeon’s dragoons who were crossing the bridge[509]. There were casualties also, of course, among the unfortunate citizens. When the smoke cleared away, and the fire had gone out, it was found that the destruction of the donjon keep and upper works of the castle had been complete, but that most of the outer wall was standing—as indeed it is to this day. Wellington remarked that it was quite capable of restoration, if the fortunes of the war made it necessary[510]. They did not; and the skeleton of the castle still remains ruined and riven on its mound, to surprise the observer by its moderate size. Those who go round it can only marvel that such a small fortress should have held all Wellington’s army at bay during so many eventful days in 1812.
The British general, hearing at Castroxeriz, on the early morning of June 13, that the French had evacuated Burgos and blown up its works, did not even enter the town, and sent nothing more than cavalry scouts to follow the retreating enemy, but ordered the instant resumption of the north-westward march of the whole army. It was now his intention to turn the line of the Ebro, in the same fashion that he had turned the line of the Douro on May 31—by passing it so far to the westward that any position which the enemy might adopt would be outflanked, even before it was fully taken up. And he was aiming not only at turning the Ebro line, but at cutting Joseph’s communication with France: he was already taking Vittoria, far behind the Ebro, as the goal for which he was making.
We have Wellington’s own word for the fact that it was the collapse of the French opposition in front of Burgos which finally induced him to develop his original plan of campaign, spoken of above, into the more ambitious scheme for driving the French completely out of the Peninsula, which he now took in hand. Unfortunately his statement was taken down many years after the event, and his memory of details was not all that it might have been in his old age. But the story is so interesting and fits into the psychology of the moment so well that it must not be omitted.
‘When I heard and saw the explosion (I was within a few miles, and the effect was tremendous) I made a sudden resolution forthwith—to cross the Ebro instanter, and to endeavour to push the French to the Pyrenees. We had heard of the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, and of the Armistice, and the affairs of the Allies looked very ill. Some of my officers remonstrated with me about the imprudence of crossing the Ebro, and advised me to “take up the line of the Ebro”, &c. I asked them what they meant by “taking up the line of the Ebro”,—a river 300 miles long, and what good I was to do along that line? In short I would not listen to that advice, and that evening (or the very next morning) I crossed the river and pushed the French till I afterwards beat them at Vittoria. And lucky it was that I did! For the battle of Vittoria induced the Allies to denounce the Armistice—then followed Leipzig and all the rest.
‘All my staff were against my crossing the Ebro: they represented that we had done enough, that we ought not to risk the army and all that we had obtained, that the Armistice would enable Bonaparte to reinforce his army in Spain, and we therefore should look for a defensive system. I thought differently—I knew that the Armistice could not affect in the way of quick reinforcement so distant an army as that of Spain. I thought that if I could not hustle them out of Spain before they were reinforced, I should not be able to hold any position in Spain after they should be. Above all I calculated on the effect that a victory might have on the Armistice itself, so I crossed the Ebro and fought the battle of Vittoria.’
How far is this curious confidence, made to Croker in January 1837, and taken down by him in two separate drafts (Croker Papers, ii. p. 309, and iii. pp. 336-7), a blurred impression, coloured by after events? It is quite true that the Burgos explosion took place early on the morning of June 13, that the orders dictated at Villadiego that day (Suppl. Disp. vii, p. 637) give a sudden new direction to the army, and that next evening (June 14) the heads of the columns were over the Ebro. But Wellington’s own dispatches seem to show that he did not know anything of the Armistice on June 13, for he wrote to his brother Henry that day, ‘I have no news from England. The French have a bulletin of May 24th, when Napoleon was at Dresden—they talk of successes, but as he was still at Dresden on the 24th, having arrived there on the 8th, they cannot have been very important.’ Now the Armistice of Plässwitz was signed on June 4, and on the 13th Wellington’s latest news was of May 24. But on the 17th, when he had been two days across the Ebro, he did at last hear something. Again he writes to his brother:
‘I have got, by Corunna, English papers of the 3rd. There were several actions in the neighbourhood of Bautzen on the 20th-22nd May.... Bonaparte turned then, and they retired. The Allies have lost ground but are unhurt. He has offered (before the battle) to consent to a congress at Prague.... An armistice is to commence when the ministers shall arrive at Prague.... I do not think that the Russians and Prussians can agree to the armistice, unless they submit entirely’ (Disp. x. p. 443).
Clearly, then, Wellington on the 13th knew nothing of any armistice, since he introduces the proposal, not the accomplishment, of it to his most trusted correspondent on the 17th, as the last news to hand. He was committed to the advance on Vittoria long before he could know of its subsequent political effects. And thus in his old age he underrated his own prescience. But the fact that his officers doubted the wisdom of the advance, and that he swept their objections away, is probably correct. That he had considered the possibility of an advance far beyond the Ebro seems, as has been said before (pp. 301-3), to be proved by orders given in the spring, before the campaign began.
On the evening of the 13th head-quarters were at Villadiego, while the columns were all heading northward on parallel routes. The Galicians were moving from Aguilar on the bridge of Rocamonde[511], the highest on the Ebro save that at its source near Reynosa. The bulk of Graham’s column was marching by La Piedra on the bridge of San Martin, a few miles lower down than Rocamonde, though some of its flanking cavalry crossed at the latter passage, ahead of the Galicians. The Head-Quarters divisions and Hill’s column moved, using all available secondary roads, from their position opposite the lower Urbel, by Villadiego and Montorio respectively, on the bridge of Puente Arenas, some fifteen miles below that of San Martin. All three columns had on the 13th-14th-15th very hard marches, of four long Spanish leagues on three successive days, across upland roads where artillery had never been seen before. The move would only have been practicable at midsummer. But the columns were absolutely unopposed, and the upper Ebro country had been entirely neglected by the French, as Wellington had foreseen. ‘One division could have stopped the whole column at the bridge of San Martin,’ wrote an intelligent observer, ‘or the other at Rocamonde, where some of our column likewise crossed—the enemy cannot be aware of our movement[512].’ Graham was all across the Ebro by noon on the 14th, Hill by the morning of the 16th. Wellington who had fixed his head-quarters at the lost village of Masa in the hills, was able to declare with confidence that the whole army would be over the river by the night—‘and then the French must either fight, or retire out of Spain altogether.’
The Ebro country was a surprise to the British observers who had spent so many years in the uplands of Portugal or the rolling plains of the Tierra de Campos. ‘Winding suddenly out of a narrow pass, we found ourselves in the river valley, which extended some distance on our right. The beauty of the scenery was beyond description: the rocks rose perpendicularly on every side, without any visible opening to convey an idea of an outlet. This enchanting valley is studded with picturesque hamlets and fruitful gardens producing every description of vegetation. At the Puente Arenas we met a number of sturdy women loaded with fresh butter from the mountains of the Asturias. We had not tasted that commodity for two years, therefore it will be unnecessary to describe how readily we made a purchase, nibbling by the way at such a luxury[513].’ Northern or Pyrenean Spain is a very different country from the dusty wind-swept central plateaux: above all the lack of water, which is the curse of Castile, ceased at last to be the bane of marching columns.
After crossing the Ebro on the 14th Graham’s column made another four-league march on the 15th to the large town of Villarcayo, while the Galicians got to Soncillo on the main road from Santander to Burgos; thus Wellington was certain of the new naval base to which he had bid the Corunna transports sail only five days before. Hill’s troops, who had a longer march during the last two days than the other columns, were not so far forward, but nearing the river had occupied the heights on the southern side of the Puente de Arenas. The three columns forming the Anglo-Portuguese army were, as a glance at the map shows, in close touch with each other, and in a position where the whole 80,000 men could be concentrated by a single march. Undoubtedly the most surprising features of the advance is that Wellington’s commissariat was able to feed such a mass of troops in such a limited area, after they had left the plains of Castile and plunged into the thinly inhabited mountains. The local supplies obtainable must have been very limited. Several diarists speak of biscuit being short[514], though meat was not. But somehow or other the commissaries generally contrived to find more or less food for the army—the well-organized mule trains were not far behind the infantry columns, and the long and difficult movement was never checked—as earlier marches had been in 1809 and 1811[515]—by the mere question of provisions, though many brigades got but scanty meals.