SECTION XXXVII
EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH FROM SPAIN
CHAPTER I
THE PURSUIT OF CLAUSEL
At ten o’clock on the morning of June 22nd Wellington moved out from Vittoria in pursuit of the French. Touch with them had been lost on the preceding night, as the divisions which had fought the battle had ceased to move on after dark, and had settled into bivouacs four or five miles beyond the city. The enemy, on the other hand, had continued his flight in the darkness, till sheer exhaustion compelled each man to throw himself down where he was, all order having been lost in most units, and only Reille’s rearguard of the Army of Portugal having kept its ranks. About midnight the majority had run to a standstill, and the hills along the Salvatierra road began to be covered with thousands of little fires, round which small groups were cooking the scanty rations that they had saved in their haversacks. ‘The impromptu illumination had a very pretty effect: if the enemy had seen it he might have thought that we had rallied and were in order. But it was only next morning that the regiments began to coalesce, and reorganization was not complete till we got back to France. Generals were seeking their divisions, colonels their regiments, officers their companies. They found them later—but one thing was never found again—the crown of Spain, fallen for ever from the brow on which it was not to be replaced[618].’ King Joseph himself, pushing on ahead of the rout, reached Salvatierra, sixteen miles from the field, before he dismounted, and shared a meagre and melancholy supper with D’Erlon and two ministers, the Irish-Spaniard O’Farrill and the Frenchman Miot de Melito. To them entered later Jourdan, who had been separated from the rest of the staff in the flight. He flung himself down to the table, saying, ‘Well, gentlemen, they would have a battle, and it is a lost battle,’ after which no one said anything more. This was the old marshal’s reflection on the generals who, all through the retreat, had been urging that it was shameful to evacuate Spain without risking a general action. After three hours’ halt, sleep for some, but the wakefulness of exhaustion for others, the King’s party got to horse at dawn, and rode on toward Pampeluna, the army straggling behind them. It was a miserable rainy day with occasional thunderstorms: every one, from Joseph to the meanest camp-follower, was in the same state of mental and physical exhaustion. But the one thing which should have finished the whole game was wanting—there was practically no pursuit.
Of Wellington’s nine brigades of cavalry only two, those of Grant and Anson, had been seriously engaged on the 21st, and had suffered appreciable losses. The other seven were intact, and had not been in action. It is obvious that they could not have been used to effect in the darkness of the night, and over rough ground and an unknown track. But why an early pursuit at dawn was not taken in hand it is difficult to make out. Even the same promptness which had been shown after Salamanca, and which had been rewarded by the lucky gleanings of Garcia Hernandez, was wanting on this occasion. There was no excuse for the late start of the cavalry, and in consequence it rode as far as Salvatierra without picking up more than a few wounded stragglers and worn-out horses and mules. The French had gone off at dawn, and were many miles ahead.
The infantry followed slowly; not only were the men tired by the late marches and their legitimate exertions in the battle, but many thousands had spent the hours of darkness in a surreptitious visit to the field of the convoy, and had come back to the regimental bivouac with plunder of all kinds bought at the cost of a sleepless night. Many had not come back at all, but were lying drunk or snoring among the débris of the French camps. Wellington wrote in high wrath to Bathurst, the Minister for War: ‘We started with the army in the highest order, and up to the day of the battle nothing could get on better. But that event has (as usual)[619] annihilated all discipline. The soldiers of the army have got among them about a million sterling in money, with the exception of about 100,000 dollars, which were got for the military chest. They are incapable of marching in pursuit of the enemy, and are totally knocked up. Rain has come and increased the fatigue, and I am quite sure that we have now out of the ranks double the amount of our loss in the battle, and that we have more stragglers in the pursuit than the enemy have, and never in one day make more than an ordinary march. This is the consequence of the state of discipline in the British army. We may gain the greatest victories, but we shall do no good till we so far alter our system as to force all ranks to do their duty. The new regiments are as usual worst of all. The —— are a disgrace to the name of soldier, in action as elsewhere: I shall take their horses from them, and send the men back to England, if I cannot get the better of them in any other manner[620].’
This, of course, is one of Wellington’s periodical explosions of general indiscriminating rage against the army which, as he confessed on other occasions, had brought him out of many a dangerous scrape by its sheer hard fighting. He went on a few days later with language that can hardly be forgiven: ‘We have in the Service the scum of the earth as common soldiers, and of late years have been doing everything in our power, both by law and by publication, to relax the discipline by which alone such men can be kept in order. The officers of the lower ranks will not perform the duty required from them to keep the soldiers in order. The non-commissioned officers are (as I have repeatedly stated) as bad as the men. It is really a disgrace to have anything to say to such men as some of our soldiers are[621].’ The Commander-in-Chief’s own panacea was more shooting, and much more flogging. All this language is comprehensible in a moment of irritation, but was cruelly unjust to many corps which kept their discipline intact, never straggled, and needed no cat-o’-nine-tails: there were battalions where the lash was unknown for months at a time. But Wellington usually ignored the moral side of things: he seldom spoke to his men about honour or patriotism or esprit de corps, and long years afterwards officially informed a Royal Commission on the Army that ‘he had no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers by anything but the immediate fear of corporal punishment.’ It is sad to find such mentality in a man of strict honour and high military genius. On this particular occasion he, no doubt, did well to be angry: but were there no regiments which could have marched at dawn to keep up the pursuit? Undoubtedly there were many: Ponsonby’s heavy dragoons had ridden through the chaos of plunder without a man leaving the ranks, and had bivouacked five miles to the front of Vittoria. There were several infantry brigades which had been so far to the left or the right in the action that they never came near the temptation, and only remembered the night of the 21st as one of short commons and hard lying[622]. Perhaps the sight of the disgraceful confusion in and about Vittoria gave the Commander-in-Chief an exaggerated impression of the general condition of the army. And undoubtedly he had an absorbing night’s task before him, when he sat down to work out the entire recasting of his operations which the victory had made necessary.
His main design, as expressed in the order for the 22nd, was to send Giron and Longa into Biscay by the great Bayonne chaussée, to pursue Maucune’s convoy and to cut off, if possible, Foy and the garrison of Bilbao, while the Anglo-Portuguese army marched in pursuit of the French main army on Pampeluna. Clausel had been heard of in the direction of Logroño; a zealous and patriotic innkeeper had ridden 40 miles on the night of the 20th to report to Wellington the position of the head of his column; and it was the knowledge that he was more than a full day’s march from Vittoria which had enabled the arrangements for the battle to be made with complete security against any intervention on his part[623]. But, though it was most probable that he would have heard of the disaster to the King’s army, and have turned back to Pampeluna or Saragossa, there was a chance that the news might not have reached him. If so, he could be at Vittoria by the afternoon of the 22nd, and his appearance there might prove very tiresome, as the British hospitals and the whole spoil of the battle would have been at his mercy. Wherefore Wellington, who somewhat underrated Clausel’s strength[624], left behind at Vittoria the 5th Division and R. Hill’s cavalry brigade to guard the place: the 6th Division was due to arrive at noon, or not much later, from Medina de Pomar, so that 12,000 men would be available if the possible but improbable event of a raid on Vittoria should come to pass.
These precautions having been taken, the army marched off at ten o’clock, in three columns, the ‘Centre Column’ of previous days with head-quarters and the bulk of the cavalry sticking to the main Salvatierra-Pampeluna road, while Hill and Graham kept to side-tracks[625], which were available so long as the march lay in the plain of Vittoria, but converged on Salvatierra, where the watershed comes, and the mountains of Navarre block the way. Here all the roads met, and there was a steep rise and a defile, before the head-waters of the Araquil, the main river of north-western Navarre, were reached.
That afternoon Wellington’s quartermaster-general, George Murray—about the only man who ever dared to make a suggestion to his chief—asked him whether it might not be worth while to send a detachment northward, by the mountain road which goes from Salvatierra to Villafranca on the great Bayonne chaussée. For Giron and Longa might have been detained by the French forts at the defile of Salinas, at Mondragon and elsewhere, and so have failed to get forward in their pursuit of Maucune’s convoy and the Bilbao garrison. But a force sent across the hills from Salvatierra would cut in to the chaussée behind the fortified posts; and, if the convoy were moving slowly, might catch it as it passed through Villafranca, or at any rate intercept other stray bodies of French troops[626]. Wellington approved the idea at once, and ordered Graham to take the greater part of his own column—the 1st Division, Pack’s, and Bradford’s Portuguese, and Anson’s cavalry brigade,—to leave the pursuit of the King’s army, and to march to co-operate with the Spanish troops who had already been detached to press the retreat of the French garrisons of Biscay. The road Salvatierra-Villafranca turned out practicable for all arms, but very trying both to cavalry and artillery, its first stage being a long uphill pull, over a road of the most stony kind—on the watershed at the Puerto de San Adrian it was taken through a tunnel cut in the solid rock. The diversion of Graham’s column being an afterthought—the orders for it were only issued at 3 p.m.—there was some delay in finding the troops in an afternoon of blinding rain, and turning them on to the new direction. The general himself, as his dispatch shows, was not reached by Wellington’s orders till next morning[627]. Only the light brigade of the German Legion got well forward on the 22nd,—the rest of the 1st Division and Bradford’s Portuguese hardly got started. Anson’s Light Dragoons and Pack’s Portuguese, like Graham himself, never received their orders at all that night, having pushed on beyond Salvatierra for two leagues or more, where the officers sent in search of them failed to catch them up. They had actually gone forward some miles farther towards Navarre, on the morning of the 23rd, before they were found and set right. This caused a tiresome counter-march of some miles to get back to Salvatierra and the cross-roads. Wellington was much vexed with the bad staff-work, but vented his wrath, unfortunately, not on his own aides-de-camp but on a meritorious officer whom they had failed to find or warn. Captain Norman Ramsay, the hero of the ‘artillery charge’ at Fuentes de Oñoro[628], was attached with his battery to Anson’s cavalry brigade. He was still moving eastward, on the night of the 22nd, when the Commander-in-Chief chanced to come upon him. Wellington at once ordered him to halt, billet his men in a neighbouring village, and wait for new directions. According to Ramsay’s version of the words used, they were that ‘if there were any orders for the troop in the course of the night, he would send them[629].’ But Wellington was under the impression that the phrase used was that Ramsay was not to move until he had direct orders from Head-Quarters as to his route. Next morning about 6 a.m. an assistant quartermaster-general (Captain Campbell) came to the village, and asked Ramsay if he had yet received his directions. On hearing that he had not, the staff-officer told him to follow Anson’s brigade, who (as Ramsay supposed) were still moving eastward; for no hint of the change of route had been given him on the previous night. The battery was started off again on the road towards Pampeluna, and its commander rode on ahead to seek for the cavalry to whom he was attached. At this moment Wellington came up, expressed high wrath at finding the guns on the move in the wrong direction, and asked for Ramsay, who was not forthcoming for some time. Whereupon the angry general ordered him to be put under arrest for flagrant disobedience, and spoke of trying him by court martial. His version of the offence was that ‘Captain Ramsay disobeyed a positive order given him verbally by me, in expectation of a circumstance which occurred, namely that he might receive orders, from someone else to move as I did not wish him to move[630].’ It is easy to see how the vagueness in the wording of the order, or even a misconception of the stress laid upon one of its clauses, brought about Ramsay’s mistake. He understood that he was to halt till he got orders, and took Campbell’s message to be the orders meant. It is pretty clear from Wellington’s own language that Ramsay was not warned that he might receive orders not directly proceeding from G.H.Q., which he was to disregard entirely. Explanation of that kind would not have been in the Wellingtonian manner.
The unfortunate battery-commander, who had done splendid service on the 21st, and had a brilliant record behind him, gained the sympathy of the whole army, and such senior officers as dared continued to make intercession for his pardon. After keeping him for some weeks under arrest, Wellington resolved not to try him, and to send him back to his battery. But he was cut out of the reward which he had earned at Vittoria, and did not receive the brevet advance in rank or the decorations given to the other battery-commanders, so that he practically lost ground in comparison with his equals and fell to the bottom of the list. This was a deadly blow to Ramsay, who was sensitive and full of professional pride: he kept silence—not so his comrades, who filed the incident as another flagrant example of Wellington’s dislike for and injustice to the artillery arm[631]. He fell, still only a battery-commander, at Waterloo.
The result of the miscarriage of orders on the night of the 22nd and the morning of the 23rd was that Graham’s turning column was late in its movement. The general himself was one of the last to get the new direction—the cavalry which should have been at the head of the march was at its tail. The German Light Battalions were very far ahead of all the other units, and had to hold back in order to let the rest come up. Hence the attack on Villafranca was not delivered on the evening of the 23rd, as it might have been, but on the afternoon of the 24th, and in the intervening twenty-four hours the greater part of the French troops whom Graham might have cut off filed through Villafranca on their way to Tolosa and the frontier, and only a flank-guard was brought to action. Of this more in its proper place.
The rest of the troops under Wellington’s immediate eye, the ‘Centre Column’ and Hill’s corps, pursued their way on the 23rd along the Salvatierra-Pampeluna road—only Victor Alten’s hussars got in touch with the tail of King Joseph’s fugitive host, which was moving at a great pace and had a long start. There was now a proper rearguard—Cassagne’s division of the Army of the Centre, which had lost only 250 men at Vittoria, and had been more shaken than hurt, having replaced the much-tried Army of Portugal as the covering force. King Joseph halted for some hours at Yrurzun, and there gave orders for Reille to diverge from the main line of retreat, and to take his two divisions, a cavalry brigade, and all the teams of his lost artillery by the route of Santesteban and the valley of the Bastan, back to the French frontier on the lower Bidassoa[632]. Finding himself so feebly pursued, he had jumped to the conclusion that Wellington might have marched with the bulk of his force on the great chaussée, making directly for Irun and Bayonne. There being nothing to stop him save the scattered detachments under Foy, an invasion of France was possible. Hence Reille was directed to join Foy in haste, and cover the line of the Bidassoa. Thus Graham and Reille were now moving parallel to each other, both in a direct northerly direction, but separated by many a mile of impracticable mountains. The Armies of the South and Centre continued their retreat on Pampeluna.
Meanwhile Wellington on the morning of the 23rd received some important news from Vittoria. The unexpected had happened: Clausel having failed to hear of the King’s defeat—as chance would have it—was marching on the city by the Trevino road. Pakenham had already arrived there, but the 5th Division had gone forward to join the tail of Graham’s column on being relieved by the 6th, nothing having yet been heard of the French till midday. The force on the spot, therefore, was rather weak, if Clausel had meant mischief. But he did not, and was becoming aware of the danger of his own position. He had heard on the 20th, when he was in march along the Ebro from Logroño on Haro, that the King had evacuated Miranda that day, and was drawing back to Vittoria. It was obviously dangerous to seek to join him by the road near the river, and Clausel on the 21st, the day of the battle, was trying to recover touch with the main army by taking the route La Guardia-Trevino. This détour removed him out of striking distance during all the critical hours. By some strange chance he neither met any of the King’s aides-de-camp, who were hunting for him on all sides, nor fell in with any of the fugitives from the routed army either on the night of the 21st nor on the morning of the 22nd. He resumed his march from La Guardia, and reached Trevino in the afternoon. There he heard from afrancesados the news that there had been a disastrous battle on the previous day, but could get no details. He therefore detached some squadrons to explore along the mountain road from Trevino to Vittoria—they made their way as far as the crest of the heights of Puebla, above Berostigueta, driving in first some Spanish irregulars, and then picquets of British cavalry; from the watershed they could see allied troops getting into order, but not their numbers. Pakenham, on being warned by the guerrilleros, had occupied Vittoria town with two Portuguese battalions, drawn up the rest of his troops for a fight, and sent to warn Oswald and the 5th Division, as well as Giron’s Spaniards, who had not gone many miles yet, that trouble was at hand. Both of these forces halted and prepared to turn back.
But on hearing the report of his horsemen Clausel had no thought of a raid on Vittoria: his only idea was to get out of danger, and rejoin the main army as quickly as possible. That Joseph and Jourdan had been beaten, he was now aware; but details were wanting: he did not know whether the rout had been complete, or whether the King’s army was capable of rallying and making head at Pampeluna. If he had understood that all the artillery had been lost, and that a retreat into France was imminent, he might probably have given up the idea of a junction, and have set out in haste to retire on Saragossa, by way of the main road down the Ebro by Logroño and Tudela. But not knowing this, his first plan was to march for Salvatierra by the mountainous road which goes from Viana on the Ebro to the upper valley of the Ega. On the 23rd he marched from Trevino to Viana, on the 24th he started out from that place and went 20 miles as far as Santa Cruz de Campero, where he heard that Mina and all his bands were on his flank, and that an English column was coming down upon him from Salvatierra. The latter rumour was false, but induced Clausel to abandon any idea of taking a short cut to join the King. It would seem also that he had picked up some news as to the crushing effect of Vittoria on the French army, and knew that it must have fallen back on Pampeluna. He hurriedly retraced his steps, picked up the garrison of Logroño and set out to move on Pampeluna by the Mendavia-Puente la Reyna road late on the 25th. His vanguard had got as far as Sesma when he heard that Mina had dropped down from Estella to Lerin, blocking this road also. It might have been possible to attack and beat him, but renewed reports that the British were also approaching disturbed Clausel, and he swerved back to the Ebro by cross-roads and crossed it at Lodosa on the 26th.
This move, which placed him on the high road from Logroño to Saragossa, implied the abandonment of all hope of reaching Pampeluna and joining the King. He had resolved to fall back on Aragon and seek refuge with Suchet’s troops in that direction. But he had lost much time in his counter-marches, and was on the 27th in greater danger than he knew, since Wellington was now coming down from the north, in the hope of heading him off and cutting his line of retreat. And if Clausel had lost as much time in the next five days as he had in the last, his position would have been most desperate, for Wellington had ascertained his whereabouts, and was marching upon him in great strength, with a good hope of intercepting him, if he were still adhering to his original plan of making for Pampeluna and rejoining the King.
The idea that Clausel might be caught and destroyed had come to the British general’s mind on the 26th, when he had reached the environs of Pampeluna, and had made sure that the whole of King Joseph’s armies were well on the road for France. The pursuit had been little more fruitful on the 24th-25th than it had been on the 22nd-23rd. But at least closer contact had been secured with the enemy: on the afternoon of the 24th the leading British troops had brought D’Erlon’s rearguard to action at the passage of the Araquil, in front of the cross-roads at Yrurzun. This combat, in which the 1st German Hussars, the 1st and 3rd battalions of the 95th, and Ross’s battery were engaged against Darmagnac’s division of the Army of the Centre[633] cost the enemy about 100 casualties[634], and one of the only two guns which he had brought off from Vittoria. It was a running fight, in which the rearguard all the way from Yrurzun to Berrioplano was being turned and driven in. But no large captures were made.
While this skirmish was in progress, on the afternoon of the 24th, the main body of the French army was already on the march past Pampeluna towards France. The troops were not allowed to enter the fortress, where only the King, his General Staff, and his courtiers lodged on the night of the 24th. It was feared that the famished soldiery might plunder the stores if they got access to them, so they were taken round by suburban roads, which did not pass through the city. Gazan with the Army of the South started on the evening of the 24th, taking the route by Zubiri and the Pass of Roncesvalles to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port. D’Erlon set out nine hours later, at dawn on the 25th, using the better road by the Col de Velate and the Pass of Maya, which took him to the Bastan, whither Reille had gone before him. But while the Army of Portugal passed on to the lower Bidassoa, the Army of the Centre was ordered to halt in the Bastan and hold its ground if possible.
Only three or four hours after D’Erlon’s column had left the suburbs of Pampeluna the first English vedettes showed themselves on the Salvatierra road. These came from Victor Alten’s light cavalry; they coasted round the city on the south, and picqueted the Puente la Reyna and Tafalla roads, by either of which Clausel might conceivably be on the move to join the King. But no trace of the French could be found, save that of the retiring rearguard of the Army of the Centre. Of British infantry only the Light Division appeared in front of the fortress, on the side of Berrioplano, though the 4th and Grant’s hussars were close behind it. Picton and Dalhousie with the 3rd and 7th Divisions were still farther back on the Salvatierra road, and Hill’s whole corps was told to halt until their predecessors should have cleared the way in front of them. The 5th Division, having received the alarm about Clausel’s raid on Vittoria, had turned back on the 23rd and was a full march behind Hill. The 6th Division had now passed out of Pakenham’s hands into those of Clinton, its normal commander, who had just come up from Lisbon[635]. It remained at Vittoria when all danger from Clausel was over, and had originally been intended to come in on the rear of the 5th Division at Salvatierra, leaving the hospitals and spoils under the guard of some details[636]. But other orders were soon to reach it.
During the night of the 25th Wellington got the news from Mina that Clausel’s column, which he had supposed to be making a hasty retreat down the Ebro, ever since its vain appearance in front of Vittoria on the evening of the 22nd, was much less far off than he had supposed. Owing to its counter-marches on the 23rd-24th it had only just got back to Logroño, and had started off from that town on the 25th by the road north of the Ebro via Mendavia and Sesma, apparently heading for Pampeluna. If this were Clausel’s game, he might be intercepted and caught, and allied columns might thrust themselves between him and his escape towards Saragossa or Jaca. The nearer he got to Pampeluna the better, since the French main army was no longer there, but in rapid march for its native soil.
The orders which Wellington had issued upon the afternoon of the 25th for the movements of the army on the 26th, had contemplated nothing more than the investment of Pampeluna by the 3rd and 7th Divisions on the north side, and the Light and 4th Divisions on the south side of the Arga. But the news which had come in from Mina caused a complete change in his plans: the morning orders of the 26th direct Cole, with the 4th and Light Divisions, not to linger near Pampeluna, but to move off as far as the men could go on the Tudela road—to Mendavil, half-way to Tafalla, if possible: Grant’s hussar brigade was to push ahead in front of the infantry, and discover whether Clausel was to be heard of on this road, or perhaps on the Estella-Puente la Reyna road, which was an alternative (if less likely) track for him to take if marching on Pampeluna. Hill was ordered to hurry up from the rear, and replace in the blockade not only the troops of Cole, but those of Picton and Dalhousie. For the 3rd and 7th Divisions were to get ready to follow Cole’s column the moment that they were relieved: they were to concentrate meanwhile at the village of Sielvas, south of the Arga, and to march southward as soon as Hill came up. But it was calculated that they would not be able to move till dawn on the 27th, as Hill had a long way to come. Ponsonby’s cavalry brigade would attach itself to them when the move should begin. Meanwhile, four divisions being set in motion to head off Clausel from this side, another column was ordered to strike across the mountains and fall in on his rear if possible. The 6th Division was still at Vittoria on the 25th, as was R. Hill’s brigade of heavy cavalry. Clinton (now commanding his old division in lieu of Pakenham) received orders to start off with all speed on the Logroño road, taking the Household Cavalry with him, and to endeavour to catch up the retreating French. He made forced marches via Trevino and Peñacerrada, and reached Logroño on the 27th, where he picked up six abandoned French guns, but learned that Clausel had been gone for two days, and had crossed the Ebro at Lodosa instead of continuing on the Pampeluna road. There was little chance of catching him up, when he had a start of two marches, but Clinton continued the pursuit as far as Lerin on the Miranda-de-Arga road, where he gave it up. The Household Cavalry returned to Logroño, where it was directed to go into billets, as horsemen would not be wanted in the Pyrenees, while the 6th Division marched at leisure from Lerin to Pampeluna[637].
The only real chance of catching Clausel was to head him off at Tudela, by means of the four divisions which were descending upon him down the Tafalla road. But a glance at the map will show that he could only have been intercepted if he had displayed uncommon torpidity. For having crossed the Ebro at Lodosa on the 26th he was only 35 miles from Tudela on a good road: and marching hard he reached the town on the afternoon of the 27th, when the advanced cavalry of the column sent to intercept him had only got to Olite, 25 miles to the north, and the Light Division at the head of the infantry column was 10 miles behind at Barasoain. Clausel did not halt more than a few hours at Tudela: there was no need for the intervention of the treacherous alcalde—who figures in legends of the time—to bid him press on hard for Saragossa. For the design, attributed to him by some of the contemporary British diarists, of marching up from Tudela along the Aragon river, with the object of reaching France and joining the King by way of Sanguesa was never really in his mind. Ever since he had crossed the bridge of Lodosa his only desire was to get to Saragossa in the shortest possible time. Starting off again at dawn on the 28th, with his force increased by the garrison of Tudela, he marched that day twenty miles to Mallen, and on the 29th a similar distance to Alagon. On the 30th a shorter stage of 15 miles brought him to Saragossa, where he found General Paris, the Governor of Aragon, still completely ignorant of the battle of Vittoria, though it had taken place nine days back.
Since the 26th Clausel had been practically out of danger, for he had the Ebro, whose bridges at Lodosa and Tudela he had destroyed, between him and Wellington’s columns. There was no force which could have stopped him, for there are 20 miles less of road between Lodosa and Tudela than between Pampeluna and Tudela. Wellington had hoped for a moment that Mina might have intercepted the French column at Tudela, and have held it in check long enough to allow the British to come up. But though Mina was, so far as mere distances went, capable of striking at Tudela, two things prevented him from being able to do so—the first was the obstacle of the Ebro, the second the fact that Tudela was a fortified place with a competent garrison. Even if the great guerrillero had got his men across the river, he certainly could not have captured Tudela, and equally certainly would have been beaten by Clausel, when the French column—double his available force in numbers—came up, if he had dared to offer battle in the open near the town.
During the night of the 27th Wellington heard that Clausel had slipped past Tudela in haste, and that Mina, quite unable to stop him, was only able to follow him with his cavalry—to which Julian Sanchez’s Lancers had joined themselves. At a very early hour on the 28th—before 5 o’clock in the morning—the British Commander-in-Chief issued a fresh set of orders in view of this untoward news[638]. They are a little difficult to understand, but internal evidence seems to show that Wellington must have received some sort of report tending to make him think it possible that Clausel, instead of falling back on Saragossa and joining Suchet’s army, might march across country by the road Tauste-Exea-Un Castillo-Jaca, or the alternative road Exea-Luna-Murillo-Jaca, in order to cross the Pyrenees by the pass of Canfranc and join the King’s army in Bearn. Or he might march through Saragossa in haste, and make for Jaca by the Gallego river[639]. There was a bare possibility of intercepting him by turning the whole pursuing column eastward, and taking it into the valley of the river Aragon, from which it would march by Sanguesa and Berdun on Jaca. The weak point of the scheme was that there was no certainty that Clausel would march on Jaca at all: he might stop in Aragon and combine his operations with those of Suchet. Or even if he did start for Jaca, when he heard that his road was intercepted by British troops, he would naturally turn back and cast in his lot with the French Army of Aragon, rather than with the King.
It is therefore rather surprising to find that Wellington imposed two days of heavy marching on his left wing, on the bare possibility that Clausel might be intercepted at or near Jaca. The orders for the 28th June were for the cavalry at the head of the column to make the long march Olite-Caparrosa-Caseda, by the good but circuitous road along the valley of the Aragon, taking in charge the artillery belonging to the infantry divisions. The latter were to cut across from the Pampeluna to the Sanguesa roads by country tracks in the hills—the Light Division by Olite-Beyre-Gallipienzo, the 4th Division by Tafalla-St. Martin de Unx-Gallipienzo. The 3rd and 7th Divisions, farther behind, went from Mendavil by Olleta to Caseda. This move concentrated 30,000 men in a solid body on a decent road—but left a very long gap between them and the troops blockading Pampeluna—and the gap would grow longer each day that the marching force pushed north-eastward up the course of the Aragon on its way to Jaca[640].
On the following day (June 29th) the column, now with the 3rd Division at its head and the 4th Division at its tail, had moved along the river till its head reached Sanguesa, when Wellington suddenly made up his mind to relinquish the scheme, which (as he himself owned) had never been a very promising one. He wrote to Castaños that Clausel, having passed Tudela marching hard for Saragossa, had got too long a start, and could not be caught. The plan of intercepting him at Jaca had been given up, firstly because it would probably have failed, and secondly because, if it had succeeded, it would only have forced Clausel to join Suchet—which was not a thing to be desired[641]. A third reason, which he did not cite to Castaños but reserved for Lord Bathurst’s private eye, was that the Army was marching very badly, with many stragglers, and many marauders. ‘The British on the 17th June were 41,547 rank and file: on the 29th, 35,650 rank and file—diminution, 5,897. Now the loss in the battle was 3,164—so that the diminution from irregularities, straggling, &c., for plunder, is 2,733.’ The Portuguese before the battle were 25,489—their present strength is 23,044. As they lost only 1,022 in the battle, they show an extra diminution of another 1,423 rank and file, from the same causes as the British. ‘There are only 160 men in the hospital which I established—the others are plundering the country in different directions.’ The truth was, that the Army was sulky—the men had not got over the effects of the looting at Vittoria, the weather had been bad, and the hunt after Clausel had been regarded by officers and men alike as a wild-goose chase.
The French General gave his men three days’ rest at Saragossa (June 30-July 2) and then started to march up the Gallego river to Jaca, where the head of his column arrived on July 6th: he then halted his divisions for some days, stopping in a position where he could either cross the pass of Canfranc into France, for he had no field-guns or wheeled transport with him, to impede his passage by that steep defile, or else return into the plains of Aragon. If Suchet should come to Saragossa with the Army of Valencia, he could drop back to meet him. But on the 11th arrived the news that Saragossa had been evacuated on the preceding day, after some indecisive fighting between General Paris’s garrison and the bands of Mina and Duran, who had beset the city on both sides of the Ebro. All chance of a junction with Suchet having vanished, Clausel crossed the Pyrenees next day, after leaving a garrison in Jaca. He came down into the Val d’Aspe on the French side, with 11,000 infantry, 500 horse, and six mountain guns packed on mules—his sole artillery. He had lost somewhere about 1,500 men in his long march—some broken-down stragglers, others sick left in hospital at Tudela and Saragossa. All these fell into the hands of Mina, but the casualties in actual fighting had been practically nil. By July 15th the whole column, marching over the Pyrenean foot-hills, had reached St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, and come into touch with the Armies of the South and Centre, who had so long and vainly desired to see Clausel.
Meanwhile Wellington, having stopped his eastward march on June 29th, had given his troops one day’s rest, and then drawn them back toward Pampeluna by the road through Monreal. He was now about to take up the pursuit of the King’s troops, which had been abandoned on the 25th while he went off on his fruitless hunt after Clausel—an enterprise which would have been far better left to Mina and the guerrilleros, for there never had been much probability of its succeeding. But the new move required several days of preparation, since four divisions had to be brought back from the valley of the Aragon, and one more, the 6th, to come up from Lerin via Puente La Reyna. And it was necessary to provide a considerable force for the blockade of Pampeluna. The instructions for July 1 were that Hill was to make the first move, by marching northward with the 2nd Division, handing over the investment of Pampeluna to Silveira’s Portuguese and Morillo’s Spaniards[642], to whose assistance there would come up in 24 hours the 7th Division, and a little later the 3rd Division. Hill was to march by the Col de Velate and Santesteban into the Bastan, from which it was intended that he should drive out D’Erlon’s divisions.
But these operations belong to the fighting of July, and before dealing with them it is necessary to go back to June 22nd, in order to follow the fortunes of the other large French force, which might have been present at the battle of Vittoria, but was not.