Peninsula War

“ Yet these are the soldiers who are to beat the French out of the Peninsula!!!!
‘There is no remedy for these evils excepting a vigorous system of government, by which a revenue of some kind or other can be raised to pay and find resources for an army in which discipline can be established. It is nonsense to talk of rooting out the French, or of carrying on the war in any other manner. ”

“ The late war in the Peninsula will be memorable above all of modern times. It stands alone for the perfidiousness with which the French commenced it, and the atrocious system upon which they carried it on. The circumstances of the resistance are not less extraordinary than those of the aggression, whether we consider the total disorganization to which the kingdom of Spain was reduced; the inveterate abuses which had been entailed upon it by the imbecility, misrule, and dotage, of its old despotism ”

“ I entreat the government to advert to the circumstances of the commencement and of the different stages of this eventful contest, and to the numerous occasions in which all men must have imagined that it was impossible for the powers of the Peninsula, although aided by Great Britain, to withstand the colossal power by which they were assailed and nearly overcome. ”

“ We might leave the country of our ally with the spirit of friendship and the purity of honour. It was of great moment to us, in even that meanest and lowest view of policy, to leave the people of the Peninsula our friends; but we must be actuated by a higher principle, and be regretted and revered by those whom we were forced to abandon. He could not expect this from his majesty’s ministers, and therefore could not think their hands fit to wield the resources, or sustain the character of the British empire. ”

“ Money, arms, and troops, were withdrawn from the Peninsula, to subdue the so-called rebellious colonists; nor was any reflection made on the inconsistency, of expecting Napoleon’s innumerable hosts to be beaten close to their own doors, by Guerilla operations, and yet attempting, with a few divisions, [246] to crush whole nations, acting in the same manner, at three thousand miles distance. Such being the state of French and Spanish affairs, it remains to examine the condition of England and Portugal, as affecting the war in the Peninsula. ”

“ My lord, you only fatigue yourself and your readers by your unwieldy floundering, you are heavy and throw much mud about; like one of those fine Andalusian horses so much admired in the Peninsula, you prance and curvet and foam and labour in your paces but you never get on. At Campo Mayor you had an enormous superiority of troops, the enemy were taken by surprize, they were in a plain, their cavalry were beaten, their artillery-drivers cut down, their infantry, hemmed in by your horsemen and under the play of your guns, were ready to surrender ”

“ Upon this beautiful ground it was that the British troops were first to be tried against the soldiers of Buonaparte in the Peninsula. The strength of the enemy’s position fully compensated for their inferiority in numbers. The way by which the assailants had to ascend was up ravines, rather than paths, more practicable for goats than men, so steep, that in many parts a slip of the foot would have been fatal, in some parts overgrown with briars, and in others impeded by fragments of rock. ”

“ Every treasury newspaper teemed with accounts of battles which were never fought, plans which were never arranged, places taken which were never attacked, and victories gained where no armies were. The plains of the Peninsula could scarcely contain the innumerable forces of the Spaniards and Portuguese ”

“ This general comparative statement, so favourable to France, would however be a false criterion of the relative strength of the belligerents, with regard to the approaching struggle in the Peninsula. A cause manifestly unjust is a heavy weight upon the operations of a general: it reconciles men to desertion—it sanctifies want of zeal—is a pretext for cowardice—renders hardships more irksome, dangers more obnoxious, and glory less satisfactory to the mind of the soldier. ”

“ That a kingdom would be liberated, with all its fortresses, arsenals, &c., and that the excited population of the Peninsula might then be pushed forward in the career of opposition to France, under the most favourable circumstances. ”

“ The French, indeed, as soon as they apprehended that their own country must soon become the seat of war, spoke with horror of what might be expected from the Portugueze and Spaniards, remembering then with uneasiness, if not with shame and remorse, the atrocities which they themselves had committed. Their hope was that the peasantry would rise, and carry on that kind of war which within the Peninsula had been found so destructive to the invaders ”

“ Six months had now elapsed, since the French resuming the plan of conquest interrupted by the Austrian war and by the operations of sir Arthur Wellesley, had retaken the offensive. Battle after battle they had gained, fortress after fortress they had taken, and sent the Spanish forces, broken and scattered, to seek for refuge in the most obscure parts: solid resistance there was none; and the only hope of deliverance for the Peninsula rested upon the British general. ”

“ It was not a very promising instrument with which to achieve the liberation of the Peninsula, or to resist the greatest general in Europe. Considered as a government of national defence, it had far too little military knowledge: a haphazard assembly of priests, politicians, and grandees is not adapted for the conduct of a war of independence. Hence came the incredible blindness which led it to refuse to appoint a single commander-in-chief, and the obstinacy with which it buried itself in constitutional debates of the most futile sort when Napoleon was thundering at the gates of Spain. ”

“ I believe we may consider the inhabitants of the Peninsula, first, as a multitude of hardy and patient peasantry, buried in ignorance and superstition, and accustomed from their cradles, by the traditions and the songs of their ancestors, to consider the sword as the natural companion of the cross; and almost inseparably to connect in idea the defence of their religion with the slaughter of their enemies ”

“ To me the aspect of the Peninsula appears an enigma, which it is no reflection on any ministers not perfectly to have understood; a revolution bursting out at a period the least expected, exhibiting events in its progress the most singularly contradictory, and pregnant with results which I still think no man living can foresee. ”

“ The leading people amongst them have invariably deceived the lower orders; and instead of making them acquainted with their real situation, and calling upon them to make the exertions and sacrifices which were necessary even for their defence, they have amused them with idle stories of imaginary successes, with visionary plans of offensive operations which those who offer them for consideration know that they have not the means of executing, and with hopes of driving the French out of the Peninsula by some unlooked-for good. ”

“ The consequence is therefore that a foreign regiment cannot be placed in a situation in which the soldiers can desert from it, that they do not go off in hundreds; and in the Peninsula they convey to the enemy the only intelligence which he can acquire. ”

“ England was the real deliverer of the Peninsula. It was her succours thrown into Biscay that had excited the new insurrection in the northern provinces, and enabled Mina and the other chiefs to enter Aragon, while Wellington drew the great masses of the French towards Portugal. It was that insurrection, so forced on, which, notwithstanding the cessation of the regular warfare in Catalonia, gave life and activity to the partidas of the south. ”

“ The resolution of the besieged seemed in no manner abated, and their communication with the sea, although partially under the French fire, was still free; the sea itself was covered with ships of war, overwhelming reinforcements might arrive at any moment, and Campo Verde with ten thousand men was daily menacing his rear. ”

“ NOTICE. In this publication, the combats of Roriça, Vimiero, and Coruña, and the character of Sir John Moore, have been entirely recomposed. The other battles and sieges are, with more or less compression of details, transcripts from the History of the Peninsula War. Thus arranged they will perhaps most effectually exhibit the constant energy of the British soldier, and draw attention in their neighbourhoods to the veterans who still survive. Few of those brave men have more than a scanty provision, many have none ”

“ When victory actually sprung from the bosom of retreat, why was the glorious victor compelled to relapse into his retrogression? Why has it happened that we have seen the great conqueror who chased the French armies from130 the plains of Salamanca, pursued in his turn, by those whom he had conquered, over those plains which had been the scene of his former triumphs? Why, in conclusion, has a system of offence shrunk into a system of defence, and what is the reason that our military operations in the Peninsula have ended where they began? ”

“ To prevent so much disgrace and misfortune, two millions of brave men were ready to scale the Pyrenees, and chase the English from the peninsula. If the French fought for the liberty of the seas, they must begin by wresting Spain from the influence of the tyrant of the ocean. If they fought for peace, they could not obtain it till they had driven the enemies of peace from Spain. If they fought for honour, they must promptly inflict vengeance for the outrages committed against the French name in Spain. ”

“ Sir Arthur Wellesley might have had above eighty thousand British troops on the frontiers of Portugal, and he was a general capable of wielding them. He was forced to commence a campaign, upon which the fate of the Peninsula, a quick triumph or a long-protracted agony of twelve millions of people depended, with only twenty-two thousand; while sixty thousand fighting men, and ships numerous enough to darken all the coasts of Spain, were waiting, in Sicily and England, for orders which were to doom them, one part to scorn, and the other to an inglorious and miserable fate. ”

“ Spain wishes to invade Portugal and reduce it to a province, that she may again make herself mistress of the Peninsula. And England would domineer over you for the purpose of destroying your port and your navy, and impeding the progress of industry among you. The English regard the magnificence of your port with envy; they will not suffer it to exist so near them, and they have no hope of preserving it. They know that a new French army has already passed your frontiers, and that if this should not be sufficient, another will come after it ”

“ Let any man observe the wide extent of country he had to maintain; the frontiers fringed as it were with hostile armies, the interior suffering under war requisitions, the people secretly hating the French, a constant insurrection in the Ronda, and a national government and a powerful army in the Isla de Leon. Innumerable English and Spanish agents prodigal of money, and of arms, continually instigating the people of Andalusia to revolt; the coast covered with hostile vessels, Gibraltar sheltering beaten armies on one side, Cadiz on another, Portugal on a third, Murcia on a fourth ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that nearly every one of our chief battles in the Peninsula was heralded by a storm, as if Nature sympathized in the contest. That of Salamanca was fought upon a plain surrounded by ranges of hills—one of the few open and level tracts upon which the rival armies met in the Peninsula, which seemed peculiarly adapted for such a struggle, bearing at opposite and distant points two striking rocky eminences, steep and rugged, called the Arapiles (cut out, as it were, for rival generals) on which the left of the French and the right of the Allies were posted. ”

“ On the other hand, the Peninsulars were cheered by seeing so powerful a monarch, as the czar, rise in opposition to Napoleon, and the English general found the principal basis of his calculations realized by this diversion. He had never yet been strong enough to meet eighty thousand French troops in battle, even under a common general; but his hopes rose when he saw the great warrior of the age, not only turning himself from the contest, but withdrawing from it a reserve of four hundred thousand veterans, whose might the whole world seemed hardly able to withstand. ”

“ 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? ”

“ No anxiety to ameliorate the moral or physical condition of the people in the Peninsula was evinced by the ruling men of England, and if any existed amongst those of Spain, it evaporated in puerile abstract speculations. Napoleon indeed offered the blessing of regeneration in exchange for submission, but in that revolting form accompanied by the evils of war, it was rejected; and amidst the clamorous pursuit of national independence, the independence of man was trampled under foot. ”

“ Captain Codrington to sir E. Pellew.
“Arens de Mar, August 23, 1811.
“I have numberless complaints of the Spanish privateers that come upon the coast, and I am sure it would be a benefit to the country if they were all deprived of their commission. They do nothing but plunder the inhabitants of those places which are occasionally overrun by the French armies, and who embrace the opportunity of their absence to carry on a little trade with other parts of the Peninsula.” ”