Charles Oman

“ 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. ”

“ There was a vast accumulation of distracted womenfolk—nous étions un bordel ambulant, said one French eye-witness—some crammed together in travelling coaches with children and servants, others riding the spare horses or mules of the men to whom they belonged. When the orders for general retreat were shouted around, among the fields where the multitude had been waiting, three thousand vehicles of one sort and another tried simultaneously to get into one or another of the five field-paths which go east from Vittoria, all of which ultimately debouch into the single narrow Salvatierra road. ”

“ But the end was not yet: when Wellington entered Madrid in triumph on August 12th, the deliverance of the Peninsula was no more certain than was the deliverance of Europe when the French Emperor evacuated Moscow on October 22nd. Vittoria and Leipzig were still a year away, and it was not till they had been fought and won that the victory of the Allies was secure. The resources of the great enemy were so immense that it required more than one disaster to exhaust them. No one was more conscious of this than Wellington. ”

“ For in its essence the widespread battle of the 30th, which extended over ten miles from D’Erlon’s attack on Hill near Lizaso to Wellington’s counter-attack on Reille near Sorauren, was, like Salamanca, the sudden descent of an army in position upon an enemy who has unwisely committed himself to a march right across its front. ”

“ D’Erlon could get at Hill easily enough. But was it certain that the rest of the troops, now in such very close touch with Wellington’s main body—separated from it on one front of two miles by no more than a narrow ravine—would be able to disentangle themselves without risk, and to follow D’Erlon up the valley of the Ulzama? When armies are so near that either can bring on a general action by advancing half a mile, it is not easy for one of them to withdraw, without exposing at least its rearguard or covering troops to the danger of annihilation. ”

“ If the French in Spain had been driven beyond the Ebro, would it not be possible to ‘contain’ them for the future by Spanish and Portuguese armies, and to bring round Wellington himself and the bulk of his British troops to Germany, leaving only a small nucleus to serve as a backbone for the native levies of the Peninsula? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was difficult to feel much personal enthusiasm for a chief so self-centred, so cold and hard in his dealings with subordinates, so ready to shift blame on to other men’s shoulders, so greedy in getting and so mean in spending. But at any rate he would not be weak like Jourdan, or rash like Marmont, or simply incapable like Dorsenne or Caffarelli. ”

“ Having ample spaces of unoccupied border, in which they could take refuge when pursued, and many mountain recesses, even within the zone of French occupation, where they could lie safe against anything less than a considerable flying column, they seemed to defy extermination. Even in King Joseph’s most prosperous days, when the final triumph of the French seemed probable, there had always been guerrilleros; but since Wellington’s march to Madrid and Soult’s evacuation of Andalusia, it no longer looked as if the national cause was hopeless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wellington had railed with almost exaggerated emphasis on the straggling, disorder, and looting which had distinguished the Burgos retreat, and the Duke of York had licensed the formation of this police-cavalry as the best remedy for the disease. They had plenty to do after Vittoria, when the British Army had the greatest orgy of plunder that ever fell to its lot during the war. Wellington’s own view was that the slackness of discipline in certain regiments, rather than privations or casual opportunity, was the main source of all evil. ”

“ The newly arrived half-battalion, drawn up across the path, delivered a very telling salvo against the front immediately opposed to them—the enemy was now in a mixed mass with no trace of formation, acting like a dense swarm of tirailleurs—and brought it to a stop for a moment. ”

“ While Wellington was still with the Light Division, a peasant came up to him with the astounding intelligence that the bridge of Tres Puentes, the one at the extreme point of the ‘hairpin-bend’ of the Zadorra, was not only unoccupied but unwatched by the enemy: he offered to guide any troops sent to it. The Commander-in-Chief made up his mind at once to seize this crossing, which would outflank the French position at Villodas, and told the peasant to lead Kempt’s brigade of the Light Division to the unwatched point, about a mile and a half to the left. ”

“ The days slipped by, and farther East Mina was more active than ever in Navarre. He had at last become the happy possessor of two siege guns, landed at Deba on the Biscay coast, and dragged by incredible exertions across mountain paths to the farthest inland. When they came to hand he set to work to beleaguer the French garrison of Tafalla, an outlying place, but less than thirty miles from Pampeluna. This was a challenge to General Abbé, the Governor of Navarre: a force which has dug trenches and brought up heavy guns is obviously asking for a fight, and not intending to abscond. ”

“ O’Callaghan’s, with Ashworth’s Portuguese in support, crossed the ravine in front of Aniz, and deployed on each side of the road to attack his centre. If Gazan had stood to fight, and brought up all his reserves, it is hard to see how he could have been moved: indeed he ought to have scored a big success if he had dared to counter-attack—for Wellington had no reserves save Da Costa’s Portuguese brigade. But, like Murray at Tarragona, the French general had been making himself dreadful pictures of the strength that might conceivably be in front of him. ”

“ Wellington’s position was decidedly impaired by the change—largely because a new minister-of-war had come into office, General Juan O’Donoju, of whom he had an evil memory as Cuesta’s chief-of-the-staff during the Talavera campaign. This clever, shifty, and contentious Irish-Spanish officer broached the theory that the agreement of December 1812 did not bind the new Regents, because they had never assented to it, and because it was contrary to the spirit of the Constitution that a foreigner should have the power to appoint or dismiss Spanish generals. ”

“ Wellington’s orders are always extremely reticent in stating his final aims, and give a list of things to be done by each division, rather than a general appreciation of what he intends the army to accomplish. But reading his directions to Graham, Hill, and Dalhousie, and looking at the way on which they work out on the map, and the allocation of forces in each column, it would seem that in view of the distribution of the French troops on the afternoon of June 20th, he planned a complete encircling scheme, which should not only accomplish what he actually did accomplish, but much more. ”

“ Cassan’s garrison of 3,000 men was not large enough to furnish men for any large sortie—though he made a vigorous sally against O’Donnell’s blockading division on the 27th, and destroyed some of its trenches [919] . But no army should fight with a hostile fortress less than two miles in its rear, and commanding its line of retreat: it is surprising that such an old soldier as Picton chose this ground—presumably he was seduced by the fine position for both infantry and guns which it shows looking towards the enemy’s road of arrival. ”

“ It would appear that if Wellington had brought 10,000 men more with him from Madrid, and if he had invested Burgos with the Galician Army, and followed hard upon Clausel with all his Anglo-Portuguese, he might have driven the French not only beyond the Ebro, but as much farther as he pleased. For Clausel could not have stood for a moment if Wellington’s power had been a little greater, and Caffarelli was in September so entirely taken up with the operations of Home Popham, Mina, and Mendizabal that he had not a man to spare. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our rapid advance almost cut off four or five French battalions—they made some resistance at first, but soon dissolved and ran pell-mell, like a swarm of bees, up the steep hill, from which they began to fire down on us. We disregarded their fire, and kept on advancing—in order to carry out our main object: broken troops are easy game. When we found the enemy in this second position there was heavy artillery fire. Since his left wing was somewhat refused, we advanced in échelon from the right. When we got within musketry range, we found he had gone off out of sight. ”

“ For the French pursuit was timid and ineffective, and only carried out by a fraction of the enemy’s army—nearly half of it halted at Salamanca, and the remaining part was not strong enough to attack Wellington. As it chanced, Gordon’s errors and the plague of immoderate rains not only cost Wellington several thousand men, but produced an impression of disaster both on the minds of those who took part in the miserable march and on those of the captious critics in London. What should have been ‘a good clean retreat’ became a rather disastrous affair. ”

“ Darmagnac’s division and the Royal Guard had been relieved by Leval, while Cassagne’s first brigade was marching north by Elizondo, though his second was still blocking the Col de Velate till Gazan’s troops should arrive, when Wellington’s attack was delivered—at the most opportune of moments. Nothing could have been better for him than that the enemy should have been caught in the middle of an uncompleted exchange of troops, before the incoming army had gained any knowledge of the ground. ”