SECTION XXXIV: CHAPTER VI
FROM THE TORMES TO THE AGUEDA
The last crisis of the campaign of 1812 was now over, and, but for two unlucky circumstances, the four days of operations which still remained would have required little notice from the annalist. But these two mishaps, the continuance of the exceptionally severe and tempestuous weather which had set in upon the 15th November, and the misdirection of the supply column, which had got completely separated from the marching troops, were to have most disastrous results. They cost the army 3,000 men, much misery, and some humiliation, and Wellington great vexation of spirit, leading to one of his rare outbursts of violent rage—his angry words committed to paper, and published abroad by misadventure, were always remembered with a grudge by his officers and men.
It must be remembered that there was no really dangerous pursuit. Soult was not strong enough to press Wellington to a general action, and knew it. On the 16th he wrote to King Joseph: ‘I think that your Majesty’s intention is that the enemy should only be followed up to the frontier. In two days the campaign will probably be at an end in these parts, for if the enemy’s army goes behind the Agueda, I cannot think that it would be at present possible to pursue it any further. I await your orders for the future destination of the Army of the South, which would be unable to stop two days in position for want of bread and forage. I propose to establish it on the upper Tormes, below Salvatierra and El Barco, where I could rest eight or ten days, to allow the men repose and to collect food[192].’ Clearly there was no offensive spirit in the Marshal, who only wished to see Wellington upon his way to Rodrigo, and then contemplated turning back to the upper Tormes.
On the 16th there was little to record in the way of military operations. The British Army started at dawn from its wet bivouacks behind the Valmusa river, having received no distribution of food. The side roads, on which the larger part of the troops were moving, grew worse and worse as the rain continued. The weakly men began to fall behind, the shirkers to slip away into the woods, to look for peasants to plunder and roofs to shelter them from the drenching rain. After the usual midday halt the bad news went round that the supply column had gone off on the wrong road—via Ledesma—and that there would again be no distribution of rations that evening. All that the troops got was the carrion-like meat of over-driven bullocks hastily slaughtered, and acorns gathered in the oak woods through which the roads ran. These, we are assured, though bitter and hard, were better than nothing. It was only in the evening, after the infantry had encamped behind the brook that gets its name from the village of Matilla, that the pursuing French cavalry came up on the two southern roads, and engaged in a bickering skirmish with the screen of allied horse covering the rear. The Polish Lancers, 2nd Hussars, and 5th and 27th Chasseurs engaged in an interchange of partial charges with the 14th Light Dragoons and K.G.L. Hussars of Victor Alten’s brigade, in front of the camps of the 2nd Division. It was brought to a sudden end by the light company of the 28th and two guns opening fire on the French from under the cover of a woodside, on which the enemy went off, with a loss of some 50 men, mostly wounded prisoners[193]. Alten’s brigade suffered much less. The centre column saw very little of the pursuing French—Digeon’s Dragoons—who made no attempt to press in. The cavalry of the Army of Portugal acted even more feebly on the northernmost of the three parallel roads. Yet the retreating army lost several hundred ‘missing’ this day, all stragglers or weakly men captured singly on the road, or in villages at its sides, whither they had betaken themselves for shelter or marauding. The rearguard cavalry vainly attempted to whip them all into the tail of the retreating column—some were really unable to move—others escaped notice in hiding-places, and were taken by the French when they emerged for a tardy attempt to follow the army. The camp-followers, and the unfortunate women and children whom the evil custom of the time allowed to remain with the regiments, suffered most of all. Soult in his dispatch to King Joseph of the night of the 16th says that he had gathered in 600 prisoners this day, and is very probably correct.
The 17th November was an even worse day—the rain still continued to fall, and stomachs were still more empty than on the preceding morning. The march of the retreating army was still in three columns, but the 2nd Division replaced the 4th as the rearguard of the southern column (2nd, 3rd, 4th Divisions; Hamilton’s Portuguese; Morillo’s Spaniards), which marched unmolested from Matilla by Villalba to Anaya on the Huebra, turning off towards the end of the day from the high road to Tamames[194], in order not to get too far from the central column, which was marching on San Muñoz: for Wellington intended to have his whole army arrayed behind the Huebra, a good fighting position, that evening. This was a most miserable journey. ‘The effects of hunger and fatigue were even more visible than on the preceding day. A savage sort of desperation had taken possession of our minds, and those who lived on the most friendly terms in happier times now quarrelled with each other, using the most frightful imprecations, on the slightest offence. A misanthropic spirit was in possession of every bosom. The streams which fell from the hills were swelled into rivers, which we had to wade, and many fell out, including even officers. It was piteous to see some of the men, who had dragged their limbs after them with determined spirit, fall down at last among the mud, unable to proceed further, and sure of being taken prisoners if they escaped death. Towards night the rain had somewhat abated, but the cold was excessive, and numbers who had resisted the effect of hunger and fatigue with a hardy spirit were now obliged to give way, and sank to the ground praying for death to deliver them from their misery. Some prayed not in vain, for next morning before daylight, in passing from our halting-ground to the road, I stumbled over several who had died in the night[195].’
The only food that the southern marching column got this day was procured from the celebrated raid upon the swine, which so much enraged Wellington. It is recorded in many 3rd and 4th Division diaries. The main wealth of the peasantry of this forest region lay in their pigs, which had been driven into the heart of the woods, to hide them from the passing armies. From some unknown cause a stampede broke out in one vast herd of the creatures, which ran across the road cutting through the middle of the 3rd Division. The starving soldiers opened up a lively fusillade upon them, and whole battalions broke their ranks and pursued them with the bayonet, cutting up the creatures before they were dead, each man going off with a gory limb or rib. Many officers farther to the rear thought from the firing that the French had cut into the head of the column. Later in the day the same or another herd charged the camp of a brigade of the 2nd Division, and gave many a hungry man an unexpected meal[196].
The southern column had no enemy but hunger and cold on the 17th, but the experiences of the centre column were more military. This corps, consisting of the 1st, 6th, 5th, 7th, Light Divisions, moving in that order, had a tiresome alarm before the rearguard had started in the morning from behind the Matilla brook. By some blunder—on the part of Gordon the Quartermaster-General as was said[197]—the covering cavalry marched off before the Light Division, the rear of the infantry column, had left its ground. There was nothing but the picquets from the 95th Rifles between the camp, where the battalions were just getting under arms, and two divisions of French Dragoons, cautiously advancing along the road and with their flanking parties out in the woods. There was barely time to form close column and start off before the enemy were riding in from all sides. They did not attempt to close, but while keeping their main body on the road, at a safe distance, sent out many detached squadrons, along by-paths in the woods, which from time to time came out unexpectedly not only upon the flank of the Light Division, acting as rearguard, but much farther up the line, where the 7th Division, and the 5th in front of them, were moving along the road to San Muñoz. Hardly any of the allied cavalry appeared to curb these incursions—the main body appears to have gone off too much to the south, in the direction of Hill’s column. Hence came the extraordinary chance that small bodies of the French got into the interval between the Light Division and the 7th, and even into that between the 7th Division and the 5th, though the troops themselves were all closed up and perfectly safe in their dense columns. Great part of the baggage of the 7th Division was intercepted and plundered by one party. But the most tiresome incident was that a patrol of three men from Vinot’s light cavalry captured the one-armed General Edward Paget, the newly-arrived second-in-command of the Army, as he was riding—accompanied by his Spanish servant alone—from the rear brigade of the 5th Division to the front brigade of the 7th, in order to bid the latter close up rapidly. The French pounced on him out of a corner of the wood, and as he could not defend himself, and had no escort, he was hurried off a prisoner, and it was some time before his absence was noted[198]. A good many isolated soldiers were picked up in the same fashion by the French cavalry, before the central column emerged from the woods and found itself above the broad ravine of the Huebra river, and the town of San Muñoz, in the late afternoon[199].
The whole column had been ordered to encamp on the farther side of the Huebra, on the plateau in front of Boadilla and Cabrillas, and each division as it passed the river made its way to the ground allotted to it. There was wood to be had in abundance, and fires were lit—the rain had abated in the afternoon—but there was little to cook. Again there was no distribution save of beef from the droves of half-starved oxen which accompanied the divisions, and acorns which turned out more palatable when roasted than when eaten raw.
The 7th Division had just crossed the Huebra, and the Light Division and a few squadrons of cavalry alone were on the farther bank, when a new turn was given to the day by the appearance of infantry behind the French Dragoons, who had been following the retreating centre column since dawn. Soult had at last succeeded in getting his leading division, that of Daricau, to the front. Hitherto the bad roads and the fatigue of the long marches had prevented them from picking up the cavalry of the advanced guard. The Marshal by no means intended to commit himself to a general action, but thought that he had the chance of falling upon the rear of Wellington’s retreating central column, as it passed the defile of the Huebra. ‘I thought,’ he wrote that evening to King Joseph, ‘that I might bring off a combat of infantry, and a cavalry affair, to advantage, but had to give up the idea, and to limit my efforts to cannonading the masses of the English Army across the Huebra. The enemy showed us 20,000 men in position, including 3,000 horse, and more than 20 guns—we could see other masses debouching across the bridge of Castillejo de Huebra, and the glare of camp fires announced the presence of more divisions on the plateau of Cabrillas[200].’
What happened at this rearguard action, whose details Soult slurs over, was that the Light Division, suddenly attacked by the French infantry as it was about to cross the Huebra, had to throw out a strong skirmishing line to its rear, while the main column plunged down the ravine and over the fords. Three companies of the 43rd and one of the 95th[201] held back Daricau’s voltigeurs till their comrades had waded across the water, and then had the dangerous task of withdrawing from the woodside and rushing down to the fords sharply pursued. Soult showed at first every sign of desiring to cross the Huebra in their wake, brought up four batteries to his side of the ravine, and began to play upon the Light and 7th Divisions, which had formed up to defend the passage. His skirmishers swarmed down to the river bank, under cover of the fire of the guns, engaged in a lively tiraillade across the rapid stream, and would certainly have attempted to cross if the return fire had not been as strong and rapid as their own. The 7th Division, drawn up in three lines of brigades on the higher slopes, was much shelled by the French artillery, and would have suffered severely but for the fact that the rain-sodden ground ‘swallowed the shot and smothered the shells[202].’ It is an extraordinary fact that after ‘four hours of standing up to the ankles in mud and water, completely exposed, having nothing to shelter us[203]’ the regiments in the front brigade were hardly touched at all: the 68th had no loss whatever, the 51st had one officer killed and eight men wounded, and the total casualties in the division were under 30. Soult’s report that ‘notre feu d’artillerie a été très meurtrier pour l’ennemi’ was plausible enough to any French officer watching the artillery practice, which was good—but happened to be incorrect.
At dusk the firing ceased, and the French drew off from the river and encamped in the woods behind them, as did the Light and 7th Divisions on the opposite bank. The losses on both sides in this skirmish—sometimes called the combat of San Muñoz, sometimes the combat of the Huebra—were very moderate. Daricau’s division had 226 casualties (mostly in the 21st Léger and 100th Line), and the French cavalry a few more. On the British side the Light and 7th Divisions and the cavalry of the rearguard lost 365 men—but this included 178 prisoners not taken in action but individually as stragglers during the long retreat through the woods since dawn[204]. In the actual fighting the loss was only 2 officers and 9 men killed, and 4 officers and 90 men wounded in the British brigades, with 1 officer and 36 men killed and 2 officers and 43 men wounded in the Portuguese—a total of 187. Next morning it was expected that the French, having now several more infantry divisions at the front, would make an attempt to force the line of the Huebra at dawn. Nothing of the kind happened. ‘Daylight came at last,’ writes the cavalry officer in charge of the line of vedettes along the river, ‘the French drums beat, and the troops stood to arms. I took my place to observe their movements, and expected every moment to see the columns leaving the camp for the different fords. But no! after having had a good opportunity to observe their strength, and to see their cavalry water their horses, I witnessed with no small satisfaction the whole, after remaining under arms about two hours, disperse to their respective bivouacks[205].’ The pursuit was over.
Wellington, in short, had offered battle on the Huebra, on the evening of the 17th, and Soult had refused it, seeing that the bulk of the allied army was concentrated close behind that river, while his own infantry divisions were still straggling up from the rear. Nor had he any intention of following next day—he wrote to King Joseph that ‘I told your Majesty that seeing the retreat of the enemy upon the Agueda well pronounced, and having no hope of being able to engage him in a general action before he has terminated his movement, I should put a limit to my pursuit after passing the Huebra, and should move off towards the upper Tormes, to enable the army to collect the food which it lacks.’ The regret expressed at being unable to force on a battle was of course insincere. All that Soult did was to wait till the British rearguard had abandoned the line of the Huebra, and then move his advanced cavalry to Cabrillas, from which some small reconnoitring parties pushed as far as the Yeltes river[206], and then came back, reporting that it was impossible to pass that flooded stream without bridges, and that the British were all across it. On the morning of the 19th the whole French army retired eastward, marching by Tamames and Linares towards Salvatierra. The truth was that the French were by now suffering almost as much from fatigue and want of food as the British. They could not ‘live on the country’, and the diet of acorns, of which several diarists speak, was as repugnant to the pursuers as to the pursued.
On the 18th the British Army had an unmolested retreat. This did not prevent many losses of men who dropped to the rear and died of fatigue and starvation. The carcasses of dead horses all along the road had been hacked up for food. One observer saw thirteen corpses lying round a single fire: another counted so many as fifty men sitting in a clump, who declared their absolute incapacity to march a foot farther, and could not be induced to move. But the stragglers who did not perish hobbled on to the camps in the evening for the most part. The cavalry swept up large numbers of them into safety. That night the column of Hill reached Tenebron and Moras Verdes: the centre column lodged about Santi Espiritus and Alba de Yeltes. The Galicians, forming the northern column, were about Castillo de Yeltes and Fuenteroble. The march of the centre column was accompanied by the curious case of insubordination by three divisional generals (those commanding the 1st, 5th, and 7th Divisions[207]) of which Napier makes such scathing notice. Their orders gave an itinerary involving a march over fords in flooded fields; they consulted together, judged the route hopeless, and turned off towards the bridge of Castillo de Yeltes, which they found blocked by the Army of Galicia. Wellington, failing to find them on the prescribed path, set out to seek them, and came upon them waiting miserably in the mud. He is said to have given them no more rebuke than a sarcastic ‘You see, gentlemen, I know my own business best’ and allowed them to cross after the Spaniards, many hours late[208]. The insubordination was inexcusable—yet perhaps it would not have been beneath Wellington’s dignity to have prefaced his original order with an explanatory note such as ‘the main road by Castillo bridge being reserved for the Spanish divisions.’ But this would not have been in his normal style. Like Stonewall Jackson fifty years after, he was not prone to give his reasons to subordinates, even when his orders would appear to them very inexplicable.
On the 19th a march of a few miles brought all the columns within a short distance of Ciudad Rodrigo, and the commissariat transport having reached that place on the preceding day, quite unmolested, arrangements had already been made to send out food to meet the approaching columns. ‘About dusk we took up our ground on the face of the hill near Rodrigo—the weather now changing to a severe frost was intensely cold. We had not long been halted when the well-known summons of “turn out for biscuit” rang in our ears. The strongest went for it, and received two days’ rations for every man. It was customary to make an orderly division, but that night it was dispensed with, each man eagerly seized what he could get, and endeavoured to allay the dreadful gnawing which had tormented us during four days of unexampled cold and fatigue. In a short time two more rations were delivered, and the inordinate eating that ensued threatened to do more mischief than the former want[209].’
On the 20th the army was distributed in quarters around and behind Rodrigo—Hill’s column about Martiago, Zamorra, Robledo, Cespedosa, and other villages on the Upper Agueda; the centre column about Gallegos, Carpio, Pastores, El Bodon, Campillo, and other cantonments well known from the long tarrying of the army there in 1811. The Galicians were left out in the direction of San Felices and the Lower Agueda. Every one was now under cover, and food was abundant—almost too abundant at first. Rest, warmth, and regular rations were indeed necessary. ‘Scarcely a man had shoes—not that they had not been properly supplied with them before the retreat began, but the state of the roads had been such that as soon as a shoe fell off or stuck in the mud, in place of picking it up, the man kicked its fellow-companion after it. Yet the infantry was still efficient and fit to do its duty. But the cavalry and artillery were in a wretched state: the batteries of the 3rd, 6th, and 7th Divisions, the heavy cavalry, with the 11th and 12th Light Dragoons were nearly a wreck—the artillery of the 3rd Division lost 70 horses between Salamanca and Rodrigo.... The cavalry was half dismounted, the artillery without the proper number of horses to draw the guns, much less the ammunition cars—many died from cold and famine under the harness of the artillery and the saddles of the dragoons.... The batteries could with difficulty show three horses in place of eight to a gun[210].’
Stragglers continued to come in for several days. Julian Sanchez was sent out with his lancers to search the woods for them, and brought in 800 mounted on the horses of his men. But when the divisional returns were prepared on November 29th, it was found that besides killed and wounded in action and sick in hospital, there was a melancholy deficit of 4921 ‘missing’ since October 23rd. The killed and wounded in action, as opposed to the missing, were very few considering the dangers which the Army had gone through: some 160 at Villadrigo, 440 at Villamuriel and Palencia, 70 at the Puente Larga, 113 at Alba de Tormes, 187 at the combat of the Huebra—smaller fights such as the skirmishes at Tordesillas, Aldea Lengua, and Matilla can hardly account for 200 more between them—the total cannot have exceeded 1,200 casualties in action. But nearly 5,000 missing was a sad record. How many of them were dead, how many had deserted, and how many were prisoners in the hands of the French, it is hard to determine. The losses in missing before Salamanca had been insignificant—perhaps 500 in each of the two columns of Wellington and Hill—there had been many drunkards and malingerers taken both at Torquemada and at Valdemoro. But the main loss was suffered between the 16th and the 18th of November, in the woods and mires between Salamanca and the Yeltes river. Soult, in his daily letters to King Joseph, claims to have taken 600 prisoners on the 16th, 1,000 to 1,200 on the 17th, and 100 on the 18th. These figures do not appear incredible, and would allow in addition for well over a thousand men dead, and some hundreds of deserters. The latter were certainly numerous in the foreign corps—the Brunswick-Oels and Chasseurs Britanniques show losses in ‘missing’ out of proportion to all the other regiments[211]. It is noteworthy, when comparing the lists of the ‘missing’ in the various divisions, to see that the Portuguese units suffered far more severely in proportion to their numbers than the British. They showed the total of 2,469 as against 2,477, but this was out of 22,000 men only, while the similar British figure was out of a total of 32,000 or thereabouts—i. e. their loss was about 10·8 per cent. as against about 8 per cent. Several observers of the retreat note that the cold and perpetual rain told much more heavily upon the stamina of the Portuguese, whose native climate is far more mild than that of the plateaux of Leon. They simply sank by the wayside, and died, or suffered themselves to be taken prisoners without attempting to get away. The unit in the whole army which suffered most heavily in the way of ‘missing’ was Bradford’s Portuguese brigade, which lost 514 men out of 1,645. In the Light and 3rd Divisions the Portuguese battalions were little more than a third of the British in numbers, but had more missing than their comrades in the proportion of 163 to 92 in one case and 230 to 184 in the other. The worst divisional records were those of the 5th and 7th Divisions, which lost 800 and 600 men respectively: the best those of the 1st, 6th, and Light Divisions with only 283, 170, and 255. Individual British regiments differed much: the most unsatisfactory figures were those of a battalion which had only landed at Lisbon that summer, and had not been present at Salamanca. The 1/82nd distinguished itself by leaving more drunken stragglers at Valdemoro than any other corps, and had dropped a terrible proportion of its men between Salamanca and Rodrigo. Wellington put the colonel under arrest, and proposed to try him before a court martial for ‘gross neglect of duty,’ but in the end did not press matters to a formal prosecution[212].
For the first few days after the arrival of the army at Ciudad Rodrigo Wellington was not quite certain that the enemy, after resting on the Tormes for a few days, might not resume his advance[213]. This was unlikely, owing to the weather and the obvious difficulty of finding food for 90,000 men in a devastated countryside. Still, it was conceivable, and a further advance on Soult’s part would have been very tiresome, when the allied troops so much required rest, and when some dangerous cracks seemed to threaten the stability of parts of the newly repaired sections of the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo[214]. For six days the army was held together, till on November 26th arrived certain news that Soult was on his way to the province of Avila, and that the greater part of the Army of Portugal was leaving Salamanca for the rear, and distributing itself in its old cantonments in the direction of Toro and Valladolid[215], while King Joseph with the Army of the Centre was on his march for Madrid. Since the French were certainly dispersing, there was no longer any necessity for keeping the allied army concentrated. On the 27th Wellington ordered a general dislocation of the divisions into winter quarters. Only the Light Division and Victor Alten’s cavalry remained about Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. Of the rest of the army, Hill, with his old corps—the 2nd Division, Hamilton’s Portuguese and Erskine’s cavalry—marched for Coria and Zarza, being directed to canton themselves in the valley of the Alagon with an advanced post at Bejar. Campbell’s Portuguese cavalry went to their old haunts about Elvas in the Alemtejo, and Penne Villemur and Morillo, with the Estremaduran Divisions, returned to their native regions. Castaños and the Galician army retired also to their own province, marching through the Tras-os-Montes by way of Braganza. D’Urban’s Portuguese horse were cantoned for the winter north of the Douro, but the rest of the allied cavalry (Bock, Ponsonby, and Anson) were sent far to the rear, to look for comfortable quarters in the Mondego valley and the villages south of Oporto. The remaining British infantry divisions (the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th) were distributed about the province of Beira, in various quarters from Lamego to Guarda, at distances of thirty or fifty miles from the frontier[216]. The general disposition of the cantonments of the army was not much different from what it had been in the first days of 1812, before the long eleven months’ campaign began. Only Hill was no longer on the Guadiana, but north of the Tagus, since there was no enemy left in Andalusia to require his attention.
While the dispersion was in progress Wellington issued (November 28) the Memorandum to Officers commanding Divisions and Brigades which caused so many heart-burnings among his subordinates. It was intended to go no further than those officers; but some of them dispatched copies to the colonels of the regiments under their charge, and so it became public property. Written in a moment of intense irritation, it contained much rebuke that was merited, but was unjust from the sweeping and general character of the blame that it distributed to the whole army, and most certainly failed to take account of the exceptional conditions of the 15th to the 19th of November. Wellington wrote:
‘I am concerned to have to observe that the army under my command has fallen off in the respect of discipline in the late campaign, to a greater degree than any army with which I have ever served, or of which I have ever read. Yet this army has met with no disaster: it has suffered no privations which but trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented, and for which there existed no reason in the nature of the service. Nor has it suffered any hardships, excepting those resulting from the necessity of being exposed to the inclemencies of the weather at a time when they were most severe. It must be obvious to every officer that from the moment the troops commenced their retreat from the neighbourhood of Burgos on the one hand, and of Madrid on the other, the officers lost all control over their men. Irregularities and outrages were committed with impunity. Yet the necessity for retreat existing, none was ever made on which the troops had such short marches; none on which they made such long and repeated halts; and none on which the retreating army was so little pressed on their rear by the enemy.... I have no hesitation in attributing these evils to the habitual inattention of the officers of the regiments to their duty, as prescribed by the standing regulations of the service, and the orders of this army.... The commanding officers of regiments must enforce the order of the army regarding the constant inspection and superintendence of the officers over the conduct of the men in their companies, and they must endeavour to inspire the non-commissioned officers with a sense of their situation and authority. By these means the frequent and discreditable resort to the authority of the Provost, and to punishments by courts martial, will be prevented, and the soldiers will not dare to commit the offences and outrages of which there are so many complaints, when they well know that their officers and non-commissioned officers have their eyes on them.
‘In regard to the food of the soldier, I have frequently observed and lamented in the late campaign the facility and celerity with which the French cooked in comparison with our army. The cause of this disadvantage is the same with that of every other—want of attention of the officers to the orders of the army and the conduct of their men.... Generals and field officers must get the captains and subalterns of their regiments to understand and perform the duties required of them, as the only mode by which the discipline and efficiency of the army can be restored and maintained during the next campaign.’
There was undoubtedly much to justify the strong language which Wellington used as to the grievous relaxation of discipline in some of the regiments. Unfortunately he made no exceptions to his general statement, and wrote as if the whole army had been guilty of straggling, drunkenness, and marauding in the same degree. There was not the slightest hint that there were many corps which had gone through the retreat with small loss of men and none of credit. But Wellington had seen with his own eyes the disgraceful scenes at Torquemada, had been roused from his uneasy slumbers by the sound of the pig-shooting on the night of November 17, and he had witnessed the devastation of San Muñoz and other villages by men who were tearing whole houses to pieces to get firewood. He had ordered the Provost-Marshal to hang on the spot two soldiers caught red-handed in plunder, and sent three officers whose men had pulled down cottages, when collecting fuel, to be court-martialled[217]. The figures of the ‘missing’ in some regiments had rightly provoked his indignation. But he might at the same time have noticed that there were not only battalions but whole brigades where their number was insignificant. In one division of 5,000 men there were but 170—in the five British battalions of the Light Division no more than 96. In both these cases the deficiency represented only weakly men who had fallen by the way from fatigue and disease, and cannot afford any margin for stragglers and marauders.
The general feeling in the army was that nearly all the loss and mischief had happened in the inclement days of November 15-18, previous disorders having been comparatively insignificant; and as regards those days they questioned the justice of Wellington’s indictment of the troops. To say that ‘the army had suffered no privations which but trifling attention on the part of the officers could not have prevented’ was simply not true. What ‘trifling attention’ on the part of the regimental officers could have made up for the fact that some divisions had received absolutely no distribution of food of any sort for four continuous days, and others in the same four days nothing but two rations of beef, and no biscuit or other food at all?[218] It was useless to tell them that they had suffered no privations, or that they could by care have avoided them. As an intelligent general officer wrote on November 20: ‘During the whole of this retreat from the 15th inclusive, not only has the weather been dreadfully severe, but the commissariat arrangements having failed, the troops have been mostly without any issue of rations, and have suffered the extremity of privation, having lived upon acorns and hogs killed occasionally in the woods. The natural result of this has been great disorder and confusion, and the roads in the rear of the columns of march are covered with exhausted stragglers left to the enemy. In fact, by some inconceivable blunder, which the Quartermaster-General’s department attribute to that of the Commissary-General, and which the latter throw back on the former, the supplies of the army, which were adequate for much larger numbers, on the morning that we broke up from the Arapiles were sent down the Tormes, by Ledesma toward Almeida, while the army marched on Ciudad Rodrigo—hinc illae lachrymae[219].’
There is no doubt that sheer lack of food during inclement weather, and in a desolate and thinly peopled forest-country did most of the mischief. As an indignant subaltern writes: ‘The officers asked each other, and asked themselves, how or in what manner they were to blame for the privations of the retreat. The answer uniformly was—in no way whatever. Their business was to keep the men together, and if possible to keep up with their men themselves—and this was the most difficult duty—many of these officers were young lads badly clothed, with scarcely a shoe or a boot left—some attacked with dysentery, others with ague, more with a burning fever raging through their system; they had scarce strength to hobble along in company with their more hardy comrades, the rank and file[220].’
Wellington’s memorandum stated that the marches were short in miles, and this was generally true, though on October 23 the infantry had to do 29 miles. But mileage is not the only thing to be considered in calculating the day’s work—the time spent on the miry roads, where every step was ankle deep in slime that tore the shoes from the feet, was inordinate: several of the marches were from 4 o’clock, before dawn, to the same hour in the afternoon. This on an empty stomach and with the regulation 60 lb. of weight on the soldier’s back was no mean task. And sometimes the journey ended, as for the Light and 7th Divisions on November 17th, in the troops being deployed in battle order in the drifting rain, and kept for some hours more under arms, to resist a possible advance of the French. The strain was too much for many willing men whose constitution was not over robust. It was not only shirkers who fell out and collapsed.
As to the matter of the cooking, one capable subaltern remarked in his diary, ‘if we were allowed to tear down doors, &c., in every village, as the enemy do, without having to go miles for wood, we could cook in as short a time as they[221].’ And another remarks with justice that when the companies had to prepare their food in the vast Flanders cauldrons, carried on mules which dragged at the tail of the regimental baggage train, they could never be sure of getting them up to their bivouacs in good time. There was an immense improvement in 1813, when light tin camp-kettles carried alternately by the men of each squad, were introduced. These were always at hand, and could be got to boil ‘without needing a whole tree or half a church door to warm them.’ Wellington might have spared this criticism on his soldiers’ cooking when he had already, as his dispatches show, asked for the small kettles to be made, precisely because the cauldrons were too heavy, and seldom got up in good time[222]. He did well to lament the slow cooking, but knowing its cause, and having been in command of the army since April 1809, might he not have indented for portable kettles before May 1812?
The real truth with regard to much of the objurgatory language of the ‘Memorandum’ is that, loth though one may be to confess it, the staff officer—commander-in-chief or whatever his rank—who has slept under cover and had adequate food during such awful days as those of November 15 to November 19, 1812, may easily underrate the privations of the man in the ranks, who has faced the weather unsheltered and with no rations at all. This observation does not in the least affect the points on which Wellington did well to be angry—the disgraceful scenes of drunkenness at Torquemada and Valdemoro, the plundering of villages at more points than one, and the excessive straggling from some ill-commanded battalions. And, as we have had occasion to point out before, there was a residuum of bad soldiers in well-nigh every regiment—Colborne estimates it at 50 or 100 men on the average—and exceptional circumstances like the storm of Badajoz or the hardships of the Salamanca retreat brought this ruffianly element to the surface, and led to deplorable incidents. Presumably many corps got rid of the majority of their mauvais sujets by straggling and desertion on those wretched November days upon the Valmusa, the Huebra, and the Yeltes.
Here we may leave the main armies at the end of the campaign. It remains only to speak of Suchet and his opponents on the coast of the Mediterranean. After the departure of Soult and King Joseph from Valencia in the middle of October, it might have been supposed that the Duke of Albufera, now left to his own resources, would have been in some danger. For not only had he in front of him the Anglo-Sicilian troops who had landed under Maitland at Alicante, and his old adversaries of Joseph O’Donnell’s Army, but—since there were now no French left in Andalusia—all the Spanish detachments which had formerly watched the eastern flank of that kingdom were available against him. After Soult had occupied Madrid, Elio, Freire, and Bassecourt all came down to Albacete and Chinchilla, to link themselves with the Alicante troops. Leaving out the Empecinado and Duran, who did not move southward from their mountains on the borders of Aragon and Castile, there were still 25,000 Spanish troops of the ‘second’ and ‘third’ armies—the old Valencian and Murcian corps, disposable for use against Suchet in November[223]. And what was still more ominous for the French on the East Coast, a second reinforcement was getting together at Palermo to strengthen the Anglo-Sicilian corps at Alicante. General Campbell with about 4,000 men sailed on November 14th; this force consisted of two British battalions[224], a foreign battalion of light companies, 1,500 Italians, and some miscellaneous details. Though the Italians (as their conduct proved next spring[225]) were eminently untrustworthy material, the rest were an appreciable addition to the strength of the expeditionary force, which was now swelled to an army corps rather than a large division. They only came to hand on December 2, however, and the best opportunity for attacking Suchet had passed before their landing, since obviously he was most vulnerable when all the rest of the French armies had passed on to Salamanca, after November 6th, and before King Joseph had come back to Madrid and Soult to Toledo in the early days of December. The four weeks between those dates, however, were wasted by the British and Spanish generals on the East Coast.
Suchet had recognized his danger, and had taken up a defensive position in front of the Xucar, with Harispe’s division at Almanza, Fuente la Higuera, and Moxente, Habert’s at Albayda across the high-road from Valencia to Alicante, and Musnier’s in reserve, at Alcira and Xativa. Here he waited on events, having lost touch completely with Soult and the King, from whom he received no dispatch for eighty days after their departure from Albacete and Cuenca in October. It was only by way of Saragossa that he learnt, some weeks later, that they had recaptured Madrid and then marched for the Tormes[226]. He had only 15,000 men in line beyond the Xucar, and knew that in front of him there were 7,000 Anglo-Sicilians, 8,000 of Roche and Whittingham’s men, and more than that number of the Murcians, all grouped round Alicante, while Elio, Freire, and Bassecourt, with 8,000 or 9,000 men, were coming in from the direction of Madrid, and Villacampa with 3,000 more might appear from Southern Aragon. This was a formidable combination, though the Spanish troops were badly organized, and had a long record of defeat behind them. The disaster of Castalla had shown a few months before the incapacity of the leaders and the unsteadiness of the men of the Murcian army. Yet the number of troops available was large, and the 5,000 English and German Legionary infantry of the Alicante Army provided a nucleus of trustworthy material, such as in firm hands might have accomplished much.
Unity and continuity of command, however, was completely wanting. On September 25th Maitland had fallen sick, and the charge of the troops at Alicante passed to his second-in-command, General Mackenzie. This officer showed signs of wishing to adopt a timid offensive attitude against Suchet. He pushed his own and Whittingham’s divisions out as far as Alcoy, opposite Habert’s position at Albayda, and contrived some petty naval demonstration against the Valencian coast. Of these the most important was an expedition which tried on October 5th to capture the town of Denia, the southernmost place in the possession of the French. It was composed of a wing of the 1/81st, and a company each of De Roll’s regiment and of marines—about 600 men—under General Donkin. These troops, carried on the Fame and Cephalus, landed near Denia, and drove the small French garrison into the castle. This was found to be a more formidable work than had been expected, and to require battering by heavy guns. Some cannons were, with difficulty, landed from the ships, and a siege would have been commenced but for the news that Habert was sending up a relieving force. Whereupon the little expedition re-embarked, men and guns being reshipped with much difficulty under the fire of the French on a rocky beach[227]. The loss was trifling, but the whole plan was obviously feeble and useless. To have turned Suchet’s sea-ward flank with 5,000 men, while threatening his front with the rest of the British and Spanish troops available might have been a conceivable operation. But what could 600 men, entirely isolated, hope to accomplish?
It must have been long after this fruitless demonstration that Mackenzie received a formal order from Wellington dated from before Burgos on October 13th[228], bidding him attack Valencia, either by land or by sea, if Soult and King Joseph should have marched their armies against Madrid. He was instructed not to accept a general action with Suchet, unless he was very superior in numbers, and to beware of fighting in ground favourable to cavalry. His own mounted force consisted only of 230 sabres[229], and 500 belonging to Whittingham and to the Murcian army were of doubtful efficiency. But it was thought that Suchet was very weak, and a little while later Wellington received false information that the Marshal had lent a considerable part of his army to King Joseph for the march on Madrid[230]. He therefore hoped that a bold advance against Valencia might shake the hold of the French on the Mediterranean coast.
The letter directed to Mackenzie was received not by him but by General William Clinton (the brother of H. Clinton of the 6th Division), who had arrived at Alicante and taken command—superseding Mackenzie—on October 25th. Lord William Bentinck had sent him out from Palermo on hearing of Maitland’s illness. The change of generals had no good results—Clinton fell at once into a fierce quarrel with Cruz the Spanish governor of Alicante. He opined that he ought not to start to attack Suchet without receiving over control of the Alicante forts, and placing them in the charge of a British garrison. The Governor refused to give up the keys, and much friction ensued, causing an angry interchange of letters which wasted many days. Wellington, when he heard of it, declared that Clinton seemed to have been wholly unreasonable in his demand[231]. Meanwhile Clinton drew in Mackenzie’s troops from the front, instead of making an advance toward Valencia. Suchet, hearing that there were no red-coated battalions left opposite Habert, resolved to try the effect of a reconnaissance in force, and moved forward against Roche and Whittingham, who still lay at Alcoy. The English and Spanish divisions at once drew back to Xixona, twenty miles nearer to Alicante. Impressed by this activity on the part of the enemy, Clinton wrote to Wellington that Suchet was too strong to be meddled with, and that he dared attempt no offensive move toward Valencia[232]. Yet counting Roche, Whittingham, and the Murcian troops at Alicante, he must have outnumbered the French by nearly two to one. And on November 22 the Governor of Alicante actually surrendered the keys of the citadel—the point on which Clinton had insisted as the necessary preliminary for active operations.
Nothing had yet been done on the East Coast when on December 2 General Campbell landed at Alicante with the 4,000 Sicilian troops already mentioned a few pages back. He was senior to Clinton, and relieved him of the command. Thus in the 70 days since September 23rd there had been four general officers in successive charge of the force which was intended to keep Suchet in check. It would have been difficult to contrive a more inconvenient arrangement—both Clinton and Campbell were new to the army and the district, and each took many days to make out his situation, and arrive at a conclusion as to what could and what could not be done. Campbell, immediately on his arrival, was solicited by Elio to attack Suchet, in combination with his own army, which should strike in from Albacete on the Marshal’s flank. He offered to bring up 10,000 men of his own (Freire, Bassecourt, and Villacampa) and said—apparently without authorization—that Del Parque would assist, at the head of the Army of Andalusia. But Campbell refused to stir, and possibly was right, when such cases as Barrosa and Talavera are taken into consideration. Yet Wellington, his commander-in-chief, had ordered the offensive to be taken in no hesitating terms, and the force available was undoubtedly too large to be wasted. As Wellington himself remarked, most British generals of that day, though bold enough in action, and capable of acting as efficient lieutenants, seemed stricken with a mental paralysis when placed in an independent position, where the responsibility of taking the initiative was thrown upon them. It was only exceptional men like Craufurd and Graham who welcomed it. The general effect of the Anglo-Sicilian expedition was disappointing in the extreme. Suchet had thought, and with reason, that it would be ruinous to him, both in July and again in November. It turned out to be a negligible quantity in the game, except so far as it prevented the French Army of Valencia from moving any of its 15,000 men to co-operate with Soult or King Joseph. Wellington had hoped for much greater profit from the diversion.
After all, a much larger body of French troops than Suchet’s field force in front of Valencia was being at this time kept completely employed, by enemies who owned a far less numerous following than Campbell or Elio. The little Army of Catalonia, not 8,000 strong, was finding employment all through the autumn and winter for Decaen’s 20,000 men; and Duran and Villacampa in Aragon—aided occasionally by Mina from the side of Navarre, and Sarsfield from the side of Catalonia—were keeping the strong force under Reille, Severoli, and Caffarelli in constant movement, and occasionally inflicting severe loss on its flying columns. Their co-operation in the general cause was useful and effective—that of the Alicante Army was not. To sum up all the operations on the eastern side of Spain we may say that there had been practically no change in the situation of the adversaries since February. The amount of territory occupied by the French was unchanged—they had made no progress in the pacification of Aragon or Catalonia; but on the other hand Suchet’s hold on Valencia still remained entirely unshaken.