William Francis Patrick Napier

“ There is not a man in the division who would not gladly have relinquished his claim to glory, acquired by the action of Barrosa, to have shared, with the Spaniards, the ultimate success that was within our grasp as it were.
The people of Spain, the brave and persevering people, are universally esteemed, respected, and admired by all who value liberty and independence; the hearts and hands of British soldiers will ever be with them; the cause of Spain is felt by all to be a common one. ”

“ The woods seemed alive with troops; and in a few moments thirty thousand men, forming three gorgeous lines of battle, were stretched across the plain; but bending on a gentle curve, and moving majestically onwards, while horsemen and guns, springing forward simultaneously from the centre and from the left wing, charged under a general volley from the French battalions: the latter were instantly hidden by the smoke, and when that cleared away no enemy was to be seen. ”

“ But, notwithstanding the proclamations and the urgent, and even menacing remonstrances of the English general, the Portuguese Regency had not wasted the country behind the Mondego. During the few days that the enemy was stopped at Busaco, only the richest inhabitants had quitted Coimbra; when the allied army retreated, that city was still populous; and when the approach of the enemy left no choice but to fly or to risk the punishment of death and infamy announced in the proclamation, so direful a scene of distress ensued that the most hardened of men could not behold it without emotion. ”

“ On every side unlimited violence, unlimited vengeance! I myself saw a peasant hounding on his dog, to devour the dead and dying; and the spirit of cruelty once unchained smote even the brute creation. On the 15th the French general, to diminish the encumbrances of his march, ordered a number of beasts of burthen to be destroyed; the inhuman fellow, charged with the execution, hamstringed five hundred asses and left them to starve, and thus they were found by the British army on that day. ”

“ This fortress being commanded, at four hundred yards distance, by a hill, on which there was an abandoned horn-work, would have fallen at once, but for the courage and talents of major Tallaia, a Portuguese engineer. With only two hundred men and five mounted guns, he made such skilful dispositions, that the French opened regular trenches, battered the wall in breach with six guns, bombarded the palace with eleven mortars, and pushed a sap to the crest of the glacis. ”

“ The resolution with which he maintained the position notwithstanding, was the strongest indication of military talent he gave during the whole of his operations; had Soult only persisted in holding his position with equal pertinacity, Beresford must have retired. It was a great and decided mistake of the French marshal not to have done so. There is nothing more essential in war than a confident front; a general should never acknowledge himself vanquished, for the front line of an army always looks formidable, and the adversary can seldom see the real state of what is behind. ”

“ Nothing could be more critical than Crawfurd’s position. From the Agueda to the Coa the whole country, although studded with woods and scooped into hollows, was free for cavalry and artillery, and there were at least six thousand horsemen and fifty guns within an hour’s march of his position. His right was at Espeja, where thick woods in front rendered it impossible to discover an enemy until close upon the village; while wide plains behind, almost precluded hope, in a retreat before the multitude of French cavalry and artillery. ”

“ Now the allies could bring into the field more of infantry by ten thousand than the French, but they were of various tongues, and the Spanish part ill armed, starving, and worn out with fatigue, had been repeatedly and recently defeated by the very troops they were going to engage. The French were compact, swift of movement, inured to war, used to act together, and under the command of one able and experienced general. The allied army was unwieldy, each nation mistrusting the other, and the whole without unity of spirit, or of discipline, or of command. ”

“ The peculiar circumstances of the war, had, however, given England a monopoly of the world’s commerce by sea, and the ministers affirming, that, the country, was in a state of unexampled prosperity, began a career of expense, the like of which no age or nation had ever seen; yet without one sound or reasonable ground for expecting ultimate success, save the genius of their general, which they but half appreciated, and which the first bullet might have extinguished for ever. ”

“ Three French generals were wounded, two slain, and eight hundred soldiers so badly hurt as to be left on the field. On Beresford’s side only two thousand Spaniards, and six hundred Germans and Portuguese, were killed or wounded; hence it is plain with what a resolution the pure British fought, for they had only fifteen hundred men left standing out of six thousand! The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he places it on his bleeding front. ”

“ A poor orphan Portuguese girl, about seventeen years of age, and very handsome, was seen coming down the mountain and driving an ass, loaded with all her property, through the midst of the French army. She had abandoned her dwelling in obedience to the proclamation, and now passed over the field of battle with a childish simplicity, totally unconscious of her perilous situation, and scarcely understanding which were the hostile and which the friendly troops, for no man on either side was so brutal as to molest her. ”

“ An open battle a madman only would have ventured. The army, passing over a plain, in the face [283] of nearly three times its own numbers, must have exposed its flanks to the enemy’s bridges on the Agueda, because the fortress was situated in the bottom of a deep bend of the river, and the French were on the convex side. What hope then for twenty thousand mixed soldiers cooped up between two rivers, when eight thousand cavalry and eighty guns should come pouring over the bridges on their flanks, and fifty thousand infantry followed to the attack? ”

“ Portugal has far greater claims to that glory. Spain furnished the opportunity; but it was England, Austria, Russia, or rather fortune, that struck down that wonderful man. The English, more powerful, more rich, more profuse, perhaps more brave than the ancient Romans; the English, with a fleet, for grandeur and real force, never matched, with a general equal to any emergency, fought as if for their own existence. The Austrians brought four hundred thousand good troops to arrest the conqueror’s progress, the snows of Russia destroyed three hundred thousand of his best soldiers ”

“ The Portuguese nation are involved in a war not of aggression, or even defence on their parts, not of alliance, not in consequence of their adherence to any political system, for they abandoned all alliances and all political systems in order to propitiate the enemy. The inhabitants of Portugal made war purely and simply to get rid of the yoke of the tyrant whose government was established in Portugal, and to save their lives and properties ”

“ The battalion, at Villa Franca, was put to the sword; Swartz only saved a remnant of his brigade by a timely flight; the divisions at Reus with difficulty made good their retreat; and O’Donnel, who, one month before, had retired from the battle of Vich, broken and discomfited by only five thousand French, now, with that very beaten army, baffled Augereau, and obliged him, although at the head of more than twenty thousand men, to abandon Lower Catalonia, and retire to Gerona with disgrace: a surprising change, yet one in which fortune had no share. ”

“ A campaign is like other works of art; accessaries, however splendid, must be rejected when not conducive to the main object. That judgement, which duly classes the value of every feasible operation, is the best quality of a general, and lord Wellington possessed it in a remarkable degree; to it, his genius and his courage were both subservient; without it he might have performed many brilliant exploits in the Peninsula, but could never have conducted the war to a successful end. ”

“ A Monsieur le maréchal duc d’Istrie, Salamanque, le 24 Avril, 1811.
MON CHER MARECHAL,
Je me rends demain à Ciudad Rodrigo, où toute l’armée sera réunie le 26. Le ravitaillement de la place d’Almeida est du plus haut intérêt pour les armes de S. M; et il eut été bien à désirer que les secours que j’ai en l’honneur de vous demander nous eussent été envoyés. L’ennemi parait avoir de 20 à 29 mille hommes autour de cette place. ”

“ Truly, it would be a strange thing, to use so noble and costly a machine, as a British army, with all its national reputation to support, as lightly as those Spanish multitudes, collected in a day, dispersed in an hour, reassembled again without difficulty, incapable of attaining, and consequently, incapable of losing, any military reputation. ”

“ They fought bravely; they endured unheard of sufferings with constancy; and their refusal to accept the armistice offered by Augereau, is as noble and affecting an instance of virtue as any that history has recorded. Yet how mixed are good and evil principles in man; how dependent upon accidental circumstances is the development of his noble or base qualities! Alvarez, so magnanimous, so firm, so brave, so patriotic at Gerona, was the same Alvarez who, one year before, surrendered the Barcelona Montjouic, on the insolent summons of Duhesme! ”

“ At eight o’clock the fog cleared away, and the first beams of the sun and the certainty of victory, flashed together on the French soldiers; for the horsemen were already surrounding the Spanish left; and in the centre, infantry, cavalry, and guns, heaped together, were waving to and fro in disorder; while the right having fallen away from San Christoval was unsupported. In one moment, Girard, with three battalions, stood between the Spaniards and the fort; the artillery roared on both sides; and the French bore forward as one man to the attack: six battalions pressed the centre ”

“ But it appears that the government have lately discovered [590] that we are all wrong; they have become impatient for the defeat of the enemy, and, in imitation of the Central Junta, call out for a battle and early success. If I had had the power I would have prevented the Spanish armies from attending to this call; and if I had, the cause would now have been safe; and, having the power now in my hands, I will not lose the only chance which remains of saving the cause, by paying the smallest attention to the senseless suggestions of the Portuguese government. ”

“ If money be the sinew of war, it is the vital stream of peace, and there is nothing more remarkable in Napoleon’s policy, than the care with which he handled financial matters; avoiding as he would the plague, that fictitious system of public credit, so fatuitously cherished in England. He could not without hurting France, transmit large quantities of gold to Spain, and the only resource left was to make “the war maintain the war.” ”

“ But in the centre, the Sierra de Estrella, lifting its snowy peaks to the clouds and stretching out its gigantic arms, would seem to grasp and claim the whole space; the summit is impassable, and streaming down on either hand, numerous rivers cleaving deeply, amidst ravines and bristled ridges, continually oppose the progress of an army. ”

“ The proposed operation of the duke Del Parque was not the mode to save Ciudad Rodrigo. The only effectual one was to post himself in such a situation as that the enemy could not attack and defeat him without a long previous preparation, which would give time for aid to arrive, and a march, in which the enemy himself might be exposed to defeat. To expose those troops to defeat which were ultimately to co-operate in defence of Ciudad Rodrigo, was not the way of preventing the success of an attempt of that fortress. ”