THE END OF THE YEAR 1810
I. Operations in the North and East of Spain (July-Dec.
1810) 482
II. King Joseph, and the Cortes at Cadiz: General Summary 505
APPENDICES
I. The Spanish Forces at the Siege of Gerona 524
II. The French Forces at the Siege of Gerona 525
III. Del Parque’s Army in the Tamames-Alba de Tormes Campaign 526
IV. Losses of the French at Tamames (Oct. 18, 1809) 528
V. The Partition of the Army of Estremadura in September
1809 528
VI. Areizaga’s Army in the Ocaña Campaign 530
VII. The French Army of Spain in January 1810 532
VIII. Muster-roll of Masséna’s Army of Portugal on September
15, 1810, January 1 and March 15, 1811 540
IX. British Losses at the Combat of the Coa 544
X. Wellington’s Army in the Campaign of Bussaco 544
XI. Masséna’s Orders for the Battle of Bussaco 549
XII. British and Portuguese Losses at Bussaco 550
XIII. French Losses at Bussaco 552
XIV. The Anglo-Portuguese Army in the Lines of Torres Vedras 554
XV. The British and Portuguese Artillery in the Campaign
of 1810 558
INDEX 561
MAPS AND PLANS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SIEGE OF GERONA _To face_ 48
II. BATTLE OF TAMAMES ” 78
III. BATTLE OF OCAÑA ” 94
IV. GENERAL MAP OF ANDALUSIA ” 128
V. TOPOGRAPHY OF CADIZ ” 148
VI. CENTRAL PORTUGAL ” 160
VII. PLAN OF ASTORGA ” 224
VIII. PLAN OF CIUDAD RODRIGO ” 240
IX. PLAN OF ALMEIDA AND THE COMBAT OF THE COA ” 272
X. GENERAL MAP OF CATALONIA ” 288
XI. THE MONDEGO VALLEY ” 352
XII. GENERAL PLAN OF BUSSACO ” 368
XIII. DETAILS OF NEY’S AND REYNIER’S ATTACK AT BUSSACO ” 380
XIV. THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS ” 432
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF WELLINGTON _Frontispiece_
SPANISH INFANTRY: UNIFORMS OF 1808 _To face_ 112
PORTRAIT OF MASSÉNA ” 208
SPANISH INFANTRY: UNIFORMS OF 1810 ” 320
COINS CURRENT IN THE PENINSULA 1808-14 ” 496
NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
I. SPANISH INFANTRY 1808
This shows the old uniform of Charles IV. The Line regiments had
white, the Foreign and Light regiments blue, coats. Both wore white
breeches and black gaiters: the plume and facings varied in colour
for each regiment.
II. SPANISH INFANTRY 1810
Under the influence of the immense quantity of British materials
supplied, the uniform has completely changed since 1808. The cut is
assimilated to that of the British army--the narrow-topped shako,
and long trousers have been introduced. The coat is dark-blue, the
trousers grey-blue, the facings red. Grenadiers have the grenade,
light-companies the bugle-horn on their shakos.
ERRATA
Page 264, line 13, _for_ 318 _read_ 333
Page 277, line 20, _for_ 1811 _read_ 1810
Page 335. Lord Blayney’s force had only a half-battalion, not a
whole battalion of the 89th, but contained 4 companies of
foreign chasseurs, not mentioned in the text. [See his
Memoirs, i. pp. 5-6.]
SECTION XVII
FROM TALAVERA TO OCAÑA
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY. THE CENTRAL JUNTA. WELLESLEY AND WELLINGTON
Between the 20th of August, 1809, when Robert Craufurd’s Light
Brigade[1] withdrew from the Bridge of Almaraz, to follow the rest
of the British army across the mountains to the neighbourhood of
Badajoz, and February 27, 1810, when part of that same brigade was
engaged in the first skirmish of Barba del Puerco, not a shot was
fired by any of Wellington’s troops. This gap of over six months in
his active operations may appear extraordinary, and it was bitterly
criticized at the time. Between August and March there was hard
fighting both in the south of Spain and along the north-eastern
frontier of Portugal; but the British army, despite many invitations,
took no part in it. Wellington adhered to his resolve never to commit
himself again to a campaign in company with the Spaniards, unless he
should be placed in a position in which he could be independent of
the freaks of their government and the perversity of their generals.
Two months’ experience of the impracticability of Cuesta, of the
deliberate disobedience of Venegas, of the fruitless promises of
the commissary-general Lozano de Torres, of the insane demands and
advice sent in by the Central Junta, had convinced him that he dare
not risk his army in a second venture such as that which had led
him to Talavera. If he were made commander-in-chief by the Spanish
Government, and granted a free hand in the direction of the Spanish
armies, matters would look different[2]. But there was at present
no chance whatever that he would receive such a mark of confidence.
Only a small minority of the leading men at Seville could endure with
patience the idea of a British commander-in-chief. Wellington himself
had long dismissed the project--which Frère had broached in the
spring[3]--as impracticable.
[1] Not, it must be remembered, to become the Light _Division_
till March 1810.
[2] See Wellington to Canning, Sept. 5, 1800, in _Dispatches_, v.
123-4.
[3] See vol. ii. pp. 465-6.
Meanwhile the French advance had no sooner ceased--after the rather
objectless combat of Arzobispo--than the Junta began to press upon
the British general schemes for a resumption of the offensive and
a second march toward Madrid. The political situation, and not any
military considerations, was the originating cause of their untimely
activity. They felt that their authority was waning, that their
popularity had vanished, that their critics were daily growing more
venomous, and they saw that success in the war would be the only
possible way out of their difficulties. Hence at the very moment
when Wellington was withdrawing his half-starved army from the
Tagus, and impeaching in letters of stinging irony the conduct of
the Junta’s mendacious commissaries, he was being pressed to resume
the offensive. Countless appeals were made to him. Both formal and
argumentative invitations from the ministers at Seville, and private
remonstrances by individuals, Spanish and English, were showered upon
him[4]. The Junta even went so far as to offer him command of the
Spanish troops in Estremadura, though this offer was qualified by
their statement that they intended to reduce those troops to 12,000
men, the larger half of the army being under orders to march eastward
into La Mancha and join the force of Venegas. This proposal did not
in the least meet Wellington’s main objection to resuming active
operations; viz. that he could not trust the Spanish Government to
feed his army, nor the Spanish generals to carry out with punctual
accuracy any scheme for a joint campaign which might be laid before
him. He put the matter very plainly--‘till the evils of which I think
that I have reason to complain are remedied: till I see magazines
established for the supply of the troops, and a regular system
adopted for keeping them filled: till I see an army upon whose
exertions I can depend, commanded by officers capable and willing
to carry into execution the operations which have been planned by
mutual agreement, I cannot enter upon any system of co-operation
with the Spanish armies[5].’ This statement was for publication: in
private correspondence with his brother, the ambassador at Seville,
he added still more cogent reasons for declining to take the field
with Venegas or Eguia. He had witnessed with his own eyes the panic
of Portago’s division on the night before Talavera, ‘when whole corps
threw away their arms and ran off in my presence, while neither
attacked nor threatened with attack, but frightened (I believe) by
their own fire’: he had seen Albuquerque’s cavalry, the day after
the combat of Arzobispo, lurking in every village for twenty miles
round, and ‘had heard Spanish officers telling of nineteen or twenty
actions of the same description as that of Arzobispo, an account of
which (I believe) has never been published.’ The army of Estremadura
consisted, he concluded, ‘of troops by no means to be depended
upon’--on every ground, therefore, he ought to avoid ‘risking the
King’s army again in such company[6].’
[4] See _Dispatches_, v. 168, for an account of an interview
with the Marquis of Malaspina and Lord Macduff, who had come to
Badajoz to make personal representation, which Wellington much
resented.
[5] Wellington to Wellesley, Oct. 30: _Dispatches_, v. 213. For
stronger language about the rash folly of Spanish generals, see
Wellington to Beresford, ibid. 179.
[6] Wellington to Wellesley, Aug. 24, from Merida.
There was no getting over this fundamental objection of Wellington’s,
and his brother, therefore, was placed in a very uncomfortable
position. During all his negotiations with the Central Junta, Lord
Wellesley’s task indeed was a most invidious one. He had been
directed by his government to profess an earnest desire to aid the
Spaniards in bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and to
pledge the aid of Great Britain, yet he was forced to refuse every
definite proposal made to him by the Junta. On the other hand,
there were clauses in his instructions which provoked the most
openly-displayed suspicion and resentment, when he touched upon them
in his conversations with Martin de Garay and the other Spanish
ministers. Such were the proposal to place the whole Spanish army
under a British commander (i.e. Wellington), the attempt to open up
the subject of a certain measure of free trade with Spanish America,
and--most of all--the offer to send British troops to garrison
Cadiz. For despite the fiasco of the preceding winter, the Portland
ministry were still harping on this old string, and allusions to it
occur in nearly every dispatch sent from London to the ambassador at
Seville[7].
[7] See Canning’s instruction to Wellesley of June 27, 1809, on
pages 186-91 of Wellesley’s _Dispatches and Correspondence_,
Lond. 1838.
Wellesley’s position was made even more difficult by the fact
that all the Spanish factions opposed to the Central Junta tried
to draw him into their schemes, by making lavish professions of
what they were ready to do if only the present government were
evicted from office. Of these factions there were many: the old
‘Council of Castile,’ which the Junta had superseded, still clung
together, making protests as to the legality of their successor’s
position. The local assemblies were equally jealous of the central
authority--the Juntas of Estremadura and Valencia, in especial, were
always intriguing behind its back, and the former at least made many
tempting proposals both to Wellesley and to Wellington. But the most
dangerous enemies of the existing government were the malcontents
close at its gates--the Andalusian conspirators, led by the members
of the old Junta of Seville, and by the intriguers like the Conde de
Montijo, the dukes of Infantado and Ossuna, and Francisco Palafox.
The dissatisfaction caused by the incapacity, indecision, and--as
it was openly said--the nepotism and venality of the Junta was so
general, that a plan was formed in Seville to seize them, deport them
all to the Canaries, and proclaim a Regency. The troops in the place
were tampered with, some demagogues were ready to raise the mob, and
Infantado[8], who was in the thick of the plot, came to Wellesley
one night to divulge the arrangements for the ‘Pronunciamento’ and
to bespeak his aid. Much as he disliked the Junta and its methods,
the Ambassador scornfully refused to make himself a member of a
conspiracy, and after warning Infantado of his intention, went
straight to the Secretary Garay and gave him all the information as
to the project, though without divulging any names. Some of the
plotters fled, others were arrested. ‘For the last two days,’ writes
Wellesley to his brother, ‘I have been employed in endeavouring to
save the necks of these caitiffs from the just fury and indignation
of the people and soldiery, and I have succeeded. A regular plot was
formed to seize (and I believe to _hang_) them all. But I could not
suffer such outrages under my nose, so I interfered and saved the
curs from the rope. They were all gratitude _for an hour_ [Wellesley
was offered and refused the Order of the Golden Fleece next morning],
but now that they think themselves secure they have begun to cheat me
again[9].’
[8] See Baumgarten, _Geschichte Spaniens_, i. 408, and Toreno,
vol, ii. p. 72. Wellesley only calls the Duke ‘a person’:
_Dispatches_, p. 160.
[9] Wellesley to Wellington, Sept. 19, 1809. Wellington,
_Supplementary Dispatches_, vi. 372.
Much as every patriot should deprecate the employment of _coups
d’état_ while a foreign war is on hand, there was much to excuse
the conduct of the enemies of the Junta. That body was now more
than a year old; it had been from the first regarded as a stop-gap,
as a provisional government which was destined to give place to
something more regular and constitutional when occasion should serve.
A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ which fails to preserve the state
stands self-condemned, and the history of the Central Junta had been
one record of consistent disaster. A body of over thirty persons is
too large for a ministry, too small for a representative assembly.
Every intelligent Spaniard, whatever his politics, was desirous of
seeing it give place to a regular government. The Conservatives
and bureaucrats would have been contented if it had appointed a
Regency of four or five persons, and then abdicated. The Liberals
demanded that it should summon the national Cortes, and leave to
that body the creation of an executive. Pamphlets were showered by
dozens from the press--now more or less free, for the first time
in Spanish history--to advocate one or other of these courses. The
Junta, however, had no intention of surrendering its power, whatever
pretence of disinterestedness it might assume and proclaim. Its
first attempts to put off the evil day when it must yield to public
opinion were ingeniously absurd. It issued, as early as May 22, a
proclamation acknowledging the advisability of summoning a Cortes,
and then invited all well-thinking Spaniards to send in schemes and
suggestions during the next two months concerning the best way in
which the national assembly could be organized, and the reforms and
constitutional improvements which it should take in hand. These
documents were to be read and pondered over by a Commission, mainly
composed of members of the Junta, which was to issue a report in due
time, embodying the best of the suggestions and the results of its
own discussion[10]. This was an admirable device for wasting time
and putting off the assembly of the Cortes. The Commission finally
decided, on September 19, after many weeks of session, that a supreme
Executive Council of five persons should be appointed, carefully
avoiding the name of Regency. But only existing members of the
Central Junta were to be eligible as Councillors, and the Council
was to be changed at short intervals, till every member of the
Junta had taken a turn in it[11]. The only laudable clause of this
scheme was one providing that Spanish America should be represented
in the Junta, and therefore ultimately in the Executive Council.
The arrangement satisfied nobody--it merely substituted a rapidly
changing committee of the Junta for the whole of that body as the
supreme ruling power: and it was clear that the orders of the Council
would be those of the Junta, though they might be voiced by fewer
mouths. The assembly of the Cortes would be put off _ad infinitum_.
[10] For the text of this wordy proclamation see Wellesley’s
_Spanish Dispatches_, pp. 135-9.
[11] Note the extraordinary similarity of this plan to that
produced by the Athenian oligarchs in 411 B. C. Had some one been
reading Thucydides?
Any effect which the report of the Commission might have had, was
spoilt by the fact that it was followed by a minority report, or
manifesto, drawn up by the Marquis of La Romana, who had been one of
the Commissioners. The Junta had called him back from Galicia, and
compelled him to surrender the army that he had re-formed, under the
pretext that he had been co-opted as a member of their own body. A
death-vacancy had been created in the representation of the kingdom
of Valencia: he had been named to fill it, summoned to Seville,
and placed on the constitutional Commission. Dissenting from every
word of the report of the majority, he published on October 14 a
counter-scheme, in which he declared that the venality, nepotism,
and dilatory incapacity of the Junta made it necessary for Spain
to seek a new executive which should be wholly independent of that
body. Accordingly he suggested that a Regency of five members should
be constituted, as the supreme governing body of the realm. No
member of the Junta was to sit therein. It was to be assisted, for
consultative purposes, by a body of six persons--one of whom was
to be a South American. This second committee, to be called ‘the
Permanent Deputation of the Realm,’ was to be considered to represent
the Cortes till that assembly should meet. It was not to meddle with
executive matters, but was to devote itself to drawing up the details
of the constitution of the future Cortes, and to suggesting practical
reforms.
So far as the declaration in favour of a Regency went, most sensible
Spaniards liked La Romana’s scheme, and it obtained Wellesley’s
approval also. But the idea of the ‘Permanent Deputation’ frightened
the Liberals, who feared that its existence would be made the excuse
for putting off the summoning of the Cortes for an indefinite time.
Moreover it was rumoured that La Romana intended to resign his seat
in the Junta, and to become a candidate for the position of Senior
Regent, so that his proposals must be intended to benefit himself.
The suspicion that his personal ambitions inspired his patriotic
denunciation of the Junta’s misdoings was made the more likely by
events that occurred at the same moment in Valencia. There the
leading personage of the moment was the governor, General José Caro,
the younger brother of La Romana, who had complete control of the
local Junta, and exercised what his enemies called a tyranny in the
province. He and his following were already on the worst terms with
the Seville Government, and now took the opportunity of bursting
out into open rebellion. They issued a sounding manifesto against
the Supreme Junta, declared their intention of refusing to obey it
any longer, and republished and sent in all directions to the other
local Juntas La Romana’s report in favour of a Regency, of which Caro
had struck off 6,000 copies. They threatened to turn back by force
General Castro whom the Supreme Junta had sent to supersede Caro,
and declared their second representative in that body, the Conde de
Contamina, deposed for ‘disobedience to the will of the people.’ It
looked as if La Romana might be intending to overthrow the central
government by means of his brother’s Valencian army. Apparently he
must be acquitted of this charge, his fiery and ambitious kinsman
having gone far beyond his intentions.
In the midst of all these intrigues, plots, and manifestos the
Central Junta had only one hope--to rehabilitate themselves by means
of a great military success. With ruinous consequences they tried to
direct the course of the war with political rather than strategical
ends in view. Of the unhappy autumn campaign which their rashness
precipitated we shall speak in its proper place; but before narrating
the disasters of Ocaña and Alba de Tormes, we must turn back for
some months to consider the situation of Eastern Spain, where the
continuous chronicle of events has been conducted no further than
Blake’s rout at Belchite in June, and St. Cyr’s victory of Valls
in February 1809. Much had happened in Catalonia and Aragon even
before the day of Talavera. Much more was to take place before the
ill-judged November campaign of the Junta’s armies in New Castile and
Leon had begun.
N.B.--This is a military history: for the war of pamphlets and
manifestos, plots and intrigues, between the Seville Government
and its adversaries, the reader who is anxious to master the
disheartening details may consult Toreno’s Tenth Book; Schepeler,
iii. 460-86; Baumgarten, vol. i. chapter viii; Arteche, vol. vii.
chapter vi, and above all the volume of the Marquis of Wellesley’s
_Spanish Dispatches_ (London, 1838). There is a good and lively
description of the chief members of the Junta and the ministry, and
of the intrigues against them, in William Jacob’s _Travels in the
South of Spain_ (London, 1811).
SECTION XVII: CHAPTER II
EVENTS IN EASTERN SPAIN DURING THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF 1809. THE
SIEGE OF GERONA BEGUN
In the spring of 1809 the theatres of operations of the two French
army-corps entrusted with the reduction of Aragon and of Catalonia
were still divided by a broad belt of territory which was in the
hands of the Spaniards, around the fortresses of Lerida, Mequinenza,
and Tortosa. Only once had communication been opened between Suchet
and St. Cyr, and then the force which had crossed from Aragon into
Catalonia found itself unable to return. The only way of getting a
dispatch from Saragossa to Barcelona was to send it by the circuitous
road through France. Co-operation between the 3rd and the 7th Corps
would have been difficult in any case; but since each of the two
corps-commanders was interested in his own problems alone, and found
them all-absorbing, the war in Catalonia and the war in Aragon went
on during 1809 and the first half of 1810 as separate affairs from
the French point of view. It was otherwise with the Spaniards: Blake
had been placed in command of the whole of the _Coronilla_, the
three provinces of Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia which had formed
the ancient kingdom of Aragon[12]. He had Suchet on his left and
St. Cyr on his right, was equally interested in the operations of
each, and might, so far as the rules of strategy go, have turned his
main force against whichever of the two he might please, leaving a
comparatively small force to ‘contain’ the other. Unfortunately he
proved unable to make head against either of his adversaries. We
have already seen how, in the early summer, he threw himself upon
Suchet, and was beaten off at Maria and routed at Belchite. In the
later months of the year it was mainly with St. Cyr that he had to
deal, and his efforts were equally unsuccessful. It would seem that
he found it very difficult to concentrate any preponderant portion
of his troops for a blow to either side: very few battalions from
Catalonia accompanied his Valencians and Aragonese to Maria: very
few Valencians were brought up to aid the Catalans in the operations
about Gerona. The problems of food and transport had something to
do with this, but the main difficulty was that the armies of both
provinces, more especially the Catalans, were essentially local
levies, and disliked being drawn far from their homes. There was
always some threatening danger in their own district which made
them loath to leave it unguarded, while they were taken off on some
distant expedition. The complaints and arguments of the Juntas,
the manifest unwillingness of the officers and men, fettered the
hands of the commander-in-chief, whenever he strove to accomplish a
general concentration. Hence it came to pass that for the most part
St. Cyr was opposed by Catalan troops only, Suchet by Valencians and
Aragonese only, during the campaigns of 1809.
[12] Catalonia had been added to his command after Reding died of
wounds received at the battle of Valls.
The tasks of the commander of the 3rd Corps in the months that
followed his victories over Blake were both less interesting and
less important than those imposed upon his colleague in Catalonia.
They were however laborious enough; after having driven the
Spanish regular armies out of Aragon, Suchet had now to tame the
country-side. For even after Belchite he held little more than the
towns of Saragossa and Jaca, and the ground on which his camps were
pitched from day to day. When he had concentrated his corps to fight
Blake, the rest of the province had slipped out of his hands. Its
reconquest was a tedious matter, even though he had only to contend
with scattered bands of peasants, stiffened by stragglers from the
army that had dispersed after Belchite. The plain of the Ebro, which
forms the central strip of Aragon, was easily subdued, but the
mountains to the north and south were well fitted to be the refuge of
insurgents. The Aragonese, along with the Galicians, were the first
of the Spaniards to take to systematic guerrilla warfare. Undismayed
by the fate of Blake’s army, they had resolved to defend themselves
to the last. There was more than one focus of resistance: a colonel
Renovales, who had been one of the defenders of Saragossa, and had
escaped after the capitulation, was at the head of the bands of the
north-western mountains, in the vale of Roncal and on the borders
of Navarre. In the north-eastern region, about the upper waters of
the Cinca and the hills beyond Jaca, two local chiefs named Perena
and Sarasa kept the war on foot, getting their stores and ammunition
from the Catalans on the side of Lerida. In an entirely distinct
part of the province, south of the Ebro, lay Gayan and Villacampa,
whose centres of activity were Daroca and Molina, mountain towns from
which they were often driven up into that central ganglion of all
the ranges of Spain, the Sierra de Albaracin, from which descend in
diverging directions the sources of the Tagus, the Guadalaviar, and
the Xucar. Both Gayan and Villacampa were officers of the regular
army, holding commissions under Blake: the band of the former had as
its nucleus the regiment of La Princesa, whose extraordinary escape
across northern Spain after the combat of Santander has been told in
another place[13].
[13] See vol. ii. p. 387.
Suchet’s work, during the later summer and the autumn of 1809, was
to break up and as far as possible to destroy these bands. His
success was considerable but not complete: in July he stormed Gayan’s
stronghold, the mountain sanctuary of Nuestra Señora del Aguila,
captured his magazines, and drove him up into the mountains of
Molina. Continuing his campaign south of the Ebro, he sent the Pole
Chlopiski against Villacampa, who abandoned Calatayud, Daroca, and
the other hill towns, and retired into the Sierra de Albaracin, where
he took refuge at the remote convent of El Tremendal, one of the most
out-of-the-way spots in the whole Peninsula. Here, nevertheless,
the partisan was followed up on Nov. 23-4 by a column under Colonel
Henriot, who manœuvred him out of his position, surprised him by a
night attack, and drove him over the Valencian border. The convent
was blown up, the dependent village of Orihuela sacked, and the
French withdrew[14].
[14] For an excellent personal diary of all these operations see
General Von Brandt’s _Aus meinem Leben_, pp. 100-12. He accuses
Suchet of grossly exaggerating, both in his dispatches and his
memoirs, the difficulty and importance of these mountain raids
(see Suchet’s _Memoirs_, i. pp. 40-74, for a highly picturesque
narrative). The insurgents were still unskilled in arms, shot
very poorly, kept bad watch, and were given to panic. That there
is something in Brandt’s criticism seems to be shown by the fact
that the whole division of Musnier lost between July 1 and Dec.
31, 1809, only three officers killed and eight wounded out of
200 present with the eagles in six months of incessant raids and
skirmishes (see Martinien’s _Liste des officiers_, often quoted
before).
These operations had been carried out by Musnier’s division; but
meanwhile movements of a very similar sort were being undertaken by
another division, that of Laval, on the other side of Aragon, along
the slopes and gorges of the Pyrenees[15]. In the end of August a
column of 3,000 men stormed the convent of San Juan de la Peña, close
to Jaca, which Sarasa and Renovales were wont to make their head
quarters. It was an ancient building containing the tombs of the
early kings of Aragon, who reigned in the mountains before Saragossa
had been recovered from the Moor; it had never seen an enemy for
eight hundred years, and was reputed holy and impregnable. Hence its
capture dealt a severe blow to the confidence of the insurgents.
Renovales, however, held out in the western upland, continuing to
defend himself in the valley of Roncal, till he was beset on all
sides, for Suchet had obtained leave from Paris to call up the
National Guards of the Ariége, Basses Pyrénées and Haute Garonne, and
their _bataillons d’élite_ attacked the insurgents in the rear from
across the high mountains, while the 3rd Corps advanced against them
from the front. After much scattered fighting Renovales capitulated,
on condition that he should be allowed a free departure. He retired
to Catalonia with some of his men: the rest dispersed for the moment,
but only to reassemble a few weeks later, under another and a more
wary and obstinate chief, the younger Mina, who commenced in this
same autumn to make the borders of Aragon and Navarre the theatre
of his hazardous exploits. But the region was comparatively quiet
in September and October, and Suchet transferred the activity of
his movable column further to the eastward, where he drove some
_partidas_ out of the valleys of the Cinca and Essera, and tried to
open up a new line of communication with France by way of the valley
of Venasque. This was accomplished, for a moment, by the aid of
national guards from beyond the Pyrenees, who entered the valley from
the north while the troops of Suchet were operating from the south.
But the road remained unsafe, and could only be used for the passage
of very large bodies of troops, so that it was practically of little
importance.
[15] Suchet’s third division, that of Habert, was lying out in
the direction of the Cinca and the Guadalupe, watching lest Blake
might make a new sally from Tortosa or Lerida.
In December Suchet completed the formal conquest of Aragon, by
moving up the whole of Laval’s division into the high-lying district
of Teruel, in the extreme south-east of the province, the only
part of it that had never yet seen the French eagles. The Junta of
Aragon fled from thence over the border of the kingdom of Valencia,
but Villacampa and his bands remained in the mountains unsubdued,
and while they continued to exist the conquest of the upland was
incomplete. The moment that its towns ceased to be held by large
garrisons, it was clear that the insurgents would descend to reoccupy
them. Nevertheless Suchet had done much in this year: besides the
crushing of Blake he had accomplished the complete subjection of
the plains of Central Aragon, and had obtained a grip upon its two
mountain regions. He had fortified Monzon, Fraga, Alcañiz, and Caspe
as outposts against the Catalans, and, having received large drafts
from France in the autumn, was on the last day of the year at the
head of a fine corps of 26,000 men, from which he might hope to
produce in the next spring a field army sufficient for offensive
operations against Catalonia or Valencia, after providing garrisons
for his various posts of strength[16]. The weak point of his
position was that the guerrilleros had learned caution, refused for
the future to fight save under the most favourable conditions, and
devoted themselves to the safe and vexatious policy of intercepting
communications and cutting up small parties and stragglers. They were
much harder to deal with, when once they had learnt that not even in
fastnesses like El Tremendal or San Juan de la Peña was it wise to
offer the French battle. Unless Suchet left a garrison in every town,
nay, in every considerable village, of the sierras, the insurgents
dominated the whole region. If he did take such measures for holding
down the upland, he was forced to immobilize a very large proportion
of his army. We shall note that in 1810 he was only able to draw out
12,000 of his 26,000 men for the invasion of Western Catalonia.
[16] The 3rd Corps which had gone down to little over 10,000 men
in May 1809, counted on Jan. 1, 1810, the following force:
Division Laval 5,348
” Musnier 8,465
” Habert 4,757
Cavalry Brigade 2,172
Artillery and Engineers 928
Garrisons of Alcañiz, Jaca,
Monzon, Saragossa, Tudela 3,110
‘Chasseurs des Montagnes’
[permanently embodied Pyrenean
National Guards] 1,425
------
Total 26,205
------
Of these 23,074 were effectives present with colours, the
remainder were in hospital or detached.
While the commander of the 3rd Corps was making steady progress with
the conquest of Aragon, the fortunes of his colleague of the 7th
Corps had been far more chequered. Indeed for the greater part of
1809 St. Cyr was brought to a complete standstill by the unexpected
obstinacy of the gallant garrison of Gerona, who for no less than
eight months kept the main body of the army of Catalonia detained in
front of their walls.
When last we dealt with the operations in this region we left St.
Cyr victorious at the well-contested battle of Valls, after which
he advanced into the plain of Tarragona, made some demonstrations
against that fortress, but returned after a few weeks to Barcelona
(March 18) without having made any serious attempt to turn his
victory to practical account. This retreat after a brilliant
success may be compared to Victor’s similar evacuation of Southern
Estremadura after Medellin, and was brought about, in the main,
by the same cause, want of supplies. For when he had consumed the
resources of the newly-subdued district between Valls and Tarragona,
St. Cyr had no means of providing his army with further subsistence.
Barcelona, his base, could not feed him, for the city was itself
on the edge of famine: it was still beset to north and west by the
local miqueletes, who had returned to their old haunts when the main
French army had gone off southward on the campaign of Valls. It was
stringently blockaded on the sea side by the British Mediterranean
fleet, and it could not draw food from France by land, because
the high-road to Perpignan passed through the fortress of Gerona,
which was still in Spanish hands. St. Cyr himself, it will be
remembered, had only reached Barcelona by turning off on to side
tracks through the mountain, and winning his way down to the shore by
the hard-fought battle of Cardadeu. Till Gerona should fall, and the
garrison of Barcelona be placed in direct communication with France,
there was little use in making ambitious offensive movements against
Tarragona or any other point in Southern or Central Catalonia. It was
absolutely necessary to reduce Gerona, and so to bring the division
left behind under Reille, in the Ampurdam and on the frontier of
Roussillon, into free communication with the remainder of the 7th
Corps. From the moment when St. Cyr passed the mountains during
the winter Reille had been fighting out a petty campaign against
the northern Catalans, which had no connexion whatever with his
superior’s operations at Molins de Rey and Valls, and had little
definite result of any kind.
No one saw more clearly than Napoleon the need for the reduction of
Gerona: as early as January he had issued orders both to St. Cyr and
to Reille to prepare for the enterprise. But St. Cyr was now out of
touch, and Reille was far too weak in the early spring to dream of
any such an adventure: he had been left no more than seven depleted
battalions to maintain his hold on Northern Catalonia, when St. Cyr
took the rest of the army across the hills to Barcelona. The Emperor
was not slow to realize that the 7th Corps must be reinforced on a
large scale. He did so by sending thither in the spring of 1809 a
brigade of Berg troops (four battalions), the regiment of Würzburg
(two battalions), and a division (seven battalions) of Westphalians:
it will be noted that now, as always, he was most chary of drafting
native French troops to Catalonia, and always fed the war in that
direction with auxiliaries in whose fate he was little interested:
the campaign in eastern Spain was, after all, but a side issue in the
main struggle[17]. When these reinforcements had arrived Reille began
to collect material at Bascara on the Fluvia, to which siege-guns
laboriously dragged across the Pyrenees were added: several companies
of heavy artillery and sappers were brought up from France.
[17] Cette portion de l’Espagne reste, d’ailleurs, isolée, et
sans influence sur le reste de la Péninsule. Imperial Minute of
Dec. 1, 1809.
St. Cyr meanwhile, four weeks after his retreat from the plain of
Tarragona, moved on to Vich upon April 18, with the divisions of
Souham, Pino, Lecchi, and Chabot, leaving Duhesme with his original
French division, which had held Barcelona since the outbreak of the
war, in charge of his base of operations. His departure was partly
designed to spare the stores of Barcelona, where the pinch of famine
was beginning to be felt; for he intended to subsist his army on the
upland plain of Vich, a rich corn-bearing district hitherto untouched
by the war. But a few days after he had marched forth Barcelona
was freed from privation, by the lucky arrival of a squadron of
victuallers from Toulon, convoyed by Admiral Cosmao, which had put to
sea in a storm and eluded the British blockading squadron (April 27).
The position of Vich, however, had been chosen by St. Cyr not only
for reasons of supply, but because the place was happily situated
for covering the projected siege of Gerona against any interruption
by Blake. If the Spanish commander-in-chief brought up the wrecks
of the old Catalan army from Tarragona, with his Valencian levies
added, he would almost certainly take the inland road by Manresa
and Vich, since the coast-road was practically barred to him by the
French occupation of Barcelona. As a matter of fact the commencement
of the leaguer of Gerona was not vexed by any such interruption, for
Blake had his eyes fixed on Saragossa in May and June, and was so
far from dreaming of an assault on St. Cyr, that he drew off part of
the Catalan army for his unhappy invasion of Aragon, which finished
with the disaster of Belchite. During the early months of this long
siege the only external helpers of the garrison of Gerona were the
small force of regulars under the Swiss Wimpfen, and the miqueletes
of Claros and Rovira from the Ampurdam, Reille’s opponents during the
spring. At Tarragona the Marquis of Coupigny, the senior officer now
in Catalonia, had no more than 6,000 men left of Reding’s old army,
and was helpless to interfere with St. Cyr who had some 20,000 men
concentrated at Vich.
The preparations for the siege therefore went on in the end of
April and the beginning of May without any hindrance, save from
the normal bickerings of the French outlying detachments with the
local _somatenes_, which never ceased. Around Vich matters were
particularly lively, for the whole population of the town and the
surrounding plains had gone up into the hills, where they wandered
miserably for three months, much hunted by French foraging parties,
which they occasionally succeeded in destroying. St. Cyr opened up
his communications with Reille by sending to him Lecchi’s Italian
division, which cut its way amid constant skirmishes along the banks
of the Ter to Gerona, and met the troops from the Ampurdam under
its walls. Reille had moved forth from Bascara on May 4, and on the
eighth expelled the Spanish outposts from all the villages round the
fortress, not without some lively skirmishing. He had brought up some
10,000 infantry--including his own old division and all the newly
arrived Germans--with some 1,300 artillerymen and engineers. Almost
at the same moment arrived dispatches from Paris, announcing that the
Emperor, just before departing for the Austrian war, had superseded
both St. Cyr and Reille, being discontented with their handling of
affairs in Catalonia. It is unfortunate that no statement in detail
of his reasons appears in the _Correspondance_[18], but it would
seem that he thought that the victories of Molins de Rey and Valls
should have had greater results, disapproved of St. Cyr’s retreat
from in front of Tarragona, and thought that Reille had shown great
weakness in dealing with the insurgents of the Ampurdam. He ignored
the special difficulties of the war in Catalonia, thinking that the
30,000 men of the 7th Corps ought to have sufficed for its complete
conquest. Indeed he showed his conception of the general state of
affairs by recommending St. Cyr in March to undertake simultaneously
the sieges of Gerona, Tarragona, and Tortosa[19]. The leaguer of one,
and that the smallest, of these places was destined to occupy the
whole army of Catalonia, when largely reinforced, for eight months.
If it had been cut up according to the imperial mandate, it is
probable that at least one of its sections would have been destroyed.
St. Cyr wrote in his memoirs that his master was jealous of him, and
wished to see him fail, even at the cost of wrecking the 7th Corps.
This is of course absurd; but there can be no doubt that the Emperor
disliked his lieutenant, all the more because of the long string of
complaints, and of demands for more men, money, and stores, which he
was now receiving week by week from Catalonia. He loved generals who
achieved the impossible, and hated grumblers and _frondeurs_, a class
to which St. Cyr, despite all his talents, undoubtedly belonged. It
is possible that Napoleon’s determination to replace him may have
been fostered by intrigues on the part of the officer to whom the 7th
Corps was now turned over. Marshal Augereau had served with great
credit in the old republican campaign in Catalonia during 1793 and
1794, imagined himself to have a profound knowledge of the country,
and was anxious to try his hand in it. It was many years since he had
been trusted with an independent command; both in the wars of 1806-7
and in that of 1809 he had been lost in the ranks of the Grand Army.
His nomination to supersede St. Cyr was made early in May, but on his
way to the seat of war he was seized with a fit of the gout, and was
detained in bed at Perpignan for many weeks. Thus his predecessor,
though apprised of his disgrace, was obliged to continue in command,
and to commence the operations of which the Marshal, as he well knew,
would take all the credit. At the same moment Reille was displaced
by Verdier, the general who had conducted the first unlucky siege of
Saragossa--an experience which seems to have made him very cautious
when dealing with Spaniards behind walls.
[18] There is only a short note in Dispatch no. 16,004. See p. 63
of this vol.
[19] See St. Cyr to Berthier, March 6, 1809, and St. Cyr’s
_Memoirs_, p. 130.
Lecchi’s division forced its way back to St. Cyr on May 18, bringing
him the intelligence of his supersession, but at the same time
apprising him that Augereau would not arrive as yet, and that the
duty of commencing the siege of Gerona would still fall to his lot.
At the same time Verdier sent letters urging that his 10,000 infantry
formed too small a force to surround such a large fortress, and
that he must ask for reinforcements from the covering army. If they
were denied him, he should refuse to begin the siege, throwing the
responsibility for this disobedience of the Emperor’s commands on
his superior: he had reported the situation to Paris. St. Cyr was
incensed at the tone of this dispatch[20], above all at the fact
that Verdier was appealing straight to the Emperor, instead of
corresponding through his hierarchical superior, according to the
rules of military etiquette. But he saw that Verdier had a good case,
and he had just learnt that Blake had turned off against Aragon,
so that no trouble from that quarter need be feared. Accordingly
he, very grudgingly, sent back Lecchi’s division to Gerona. It was
the worst that he possessed, being composed of no more than four
Neapolitan and three Italian battalions, with a strength of little
over 3,000 bayonets[21]. He added to it a regiment of Italian light
horse, several of his own batteries, and nearly all the engineers and
sappers of his corps, so that the total reinforcement sent to Verdier
consisted of more than 4,000 men.
[20] It may be found printed in full in the Appendix to the
narrative of the siege of Gerona in Belmas’s _Sieges_, vol. ii.
pp. 660-1.
[21] 3,116 bayonets and two squadrons of Italian light horse by
the return of May 15. The Neapolitans were bad troops, deserting
whenever it was safe to do so.
Having received these succours, which brought up his total force to
14,000 infantry and cavalry, and 2,200 artillerymen, sappers and
engineers, Verdier commenced on May 24 his operations against Gerona:
on that day Lecchi’s division took its post in the plain of Salt,
on the west of the town, while the French and Westphalian divisions
were already close to the place on its eastern and northern sides.
The head quarters and the French brigades of Joba and Guillot lay
by Sarria and the bridge of Pont-Mayor, where the magazines were
established, while the Germans had been sent up on to the heights
east of the fortress and held the plateaux of Campdura, San Medir,
and Domeny. The rocky southern side of Gerona, in the direction of
the gorge of the Oña, was not yet properly invested.
Something has already been said, in an earlier volume of this work,
concerning the situation of Gerona, when its two earlier sieges by
Duhesme were narrated[22]. It must suffice to repeat here that the
town is built on the steep down-slope of two lofty heights, with the
river Oña at its foot: the stream is crossed by two bridges, but is
fordable everywhere save in times of spate. Beyond it lies the suburb
of the Mercadal, surrounded by fortifications which form an integral
part of the defences of the city. The river Ter, coming from the
west, joins the Oña at the north side of the Mercadal and washes the
extreme north-western corner of the walls of the city proper. The two
heights upon whose lower slopes Gerona is built are separated from
each other by a deep ravine, called the Galligan, down which run an
intermittent watercourse and a road, the only one by which approach
to the city from the east is possible. The northern height is crowned
by the strong fort of Monjuich, the most formidable part of the city
defences, with its three outlying redoubts called San Narciso, San
Luis and San Daniel. The crest of the southern height is covered in a
similar fashion by the three forts of the Capuchins, Queen Anne, and
the Constable, with the Calvary redoubt lower down the slope above
the Galligan, facing San Daniel on the other side of the ravine. Two
other small fortifications, the redoubts of the ‘Chapter’ and the
‘City,’ cover the path which leads down from the forts to Gerona.
Neither the Monjuich nor the Capuchin heights are isolated hills;
each is the end of a spur running down from the higher mountains.
But while the southern summit rises high above the hilly reach which
joins it to the mountain of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles, the
northern summit (where lies Monjuich) is at the end of a plateau
extending far to the north. The Capuchin heights, therefore, can
only be attacked uphill, while Monjuich can be assailed from ground
of a level little inferior to itself. But except on this point both
heights are very strong, their slopes being in many places absolutely
precipitous, especially towards the Galligan, and everywhere steep.
Nevertheless there are winding paths leading up both, from Sarria
and Pont-Mayor in the case of Monjuich, from Casa de Selva and other
villages towards the east and the sea in the case of the Capuchin
heights. All the ground is bare rock, with no superincumbent soil.
[22] See vol. i. pp. 317-29.
All the fortifications were somewhat antiquated in type, nothing
having been done to modernize the defences since the war of the
Spanish Succession[23]. Ferdinand VI and Charles III had neglected
Gerona in favour of the new fortress of Figueras, nearer to the
frontier, on which large sums had been expended--for the benefit of
the French who seized it by treachery in 1808, and were now using it
as their base of operations. The actual wall of enceinte of the city
was mediaeval--a plain rampart twenty-five feet high, too narrow for
artillery and set thickly with small towers; only at its two ends,
on the Oña and the Ter, two bastions (called those of La Merced and
Santa Maria) had been inserted, and properly armed. This weakness
of the walls went for little so long as Monjuich, the Capuchins,
and the other forts held firm, since the enemy could only approach
the town-enceinte at its two ends, where the bastions lay. Far more
dangerous was the feebleness of the Mercadal, whose ramparts formed
the southern section of the exterior defences of the place. Its
circuit had five plain bastions, but no demi-lunes or other outer
defences, no covered way nor counterscarp: its profile, only some
eighteen or twenty feet high, was visible, across the flat ground
which surrounds it, from the foot to the summit of the wall, for
want of ditch or glacis. The ground leading up to it was favourable
for siege approaches, since the soil was soft and easy to dig, and
was seamed with hollow roads and stone walls, giving much cover to
an assailant. Aware of the defects of the fortifications of the
Mercadal, the Spaniards had prepared a line of defence behind it,
along the further bank of the Oña. They had made the river-front of
the city proper defensible to a certain extent, by building up the
doors and windows of all the houses which abut upon the water, mining
the two bridges, and fixing a stockade and entanglements in the bed
of the Oña, along the considerable space, where it is fordable in
dry weather[24]. They had indeed repaired the whole circuit of the
defences since Duhesme’s sieges of 1808, having cleared out the
ditches of Monjuich and of the bastions of La Merced and Santa Maria,
walled up many posterns, and repaired with new and solid masonry all
the parts of the walls that had been dilapidated at the moment of the
first siege. They had also pulled down many isolated houses outside
the walls, and demolished the nearer half of the suburban village of
Pedret, which lies (most inconveniently for the defence) along the
bank of the Ter between the water and the slopes of Monjuich.
[23] For a good historical study of the fortifications of Gerona
and their history, see Vacani, vol. iii. pp. 245-55.
[24] This last was done by public subscription, when the
engineers pointed out the danger of the city being stormed across
the river-bed. See Arteche, vii. 151. Belmas and Vacani do not
seem to have known of this fact, as each of them makes the remark
that if the Mercadal had been taken, a sudden rush might have
taken the assailants across the shallow river and into the old
town. It may be remarked that there had once been a river-wall,
but that most of it had been allowed to fall into decay when the
Mercadal was taken into the city defences.
All these precautions must be put to the credit of the governor,
Mariano Alvarez de Castro, a man to be mentioned with all honour and
respect, and probably the best soldier that Spain produced during
the whole Peninsular War. He was a veteran of the Revolutionary and
Portuguese wars, and had a good reputation, but no special credit
for military science, down to the moment when he was put to the
test. He had been the officer in charge of the castle of Barcelona
on the occasion when it was seized by Duhesme in March 1808: his
spirit had been deeply wounded by that vile piece of treachery, and
he had at once adhered to the national cause. Since then he had
been serving in the Ampurdam against Reille, till the moment when
he was appointed governor of Gerona. Alvarez is described by those
who served under him as a severe, taciturn man of a puritan cast of
mind. ‘I should call him,’ wrote one of his brigadiers, ‘an officer
without the true military talents, but with an extreme confidence in
Providence--almost, one might say, a believer in miracles. His soul
was great, capable of every sacrifice, full of admirable constancy;
but I must confess that his heroism always seemed to me that of
a Christian martyr rather than of a professional soldier[25].’
General Fournas, who wrote this somewhat depreciatory sketch of
his chief, was one of those who signed the capitulation while
Alvarez was moaning _no quiero rendirme_ on his sick-bed, so that
his judgement is hardly to be taken as unprejudiced; but his words
point the impression which the governor left on his subordinates.
The details of his defence sufficiently show that he was a skilful
and resourceful as well as an obstinate general. His minute care to
utilize every possible means of defence prove that he was no mere
waiter on miracles. That he was a very devout practising Catholic
is evident from some of his doings; at the opening of the siege a
great religious ceremony was held, at which the local patron saint,
Narcissus, was declared captain of the city and presented with a
gold-hilted sword. The levy _en masse_ of the citizens was called
‘the Crusade,’ and their badge was the red cross. The ideas of
religion and patriotism were so closely intertwined that to the lay
companies of this force were afterwards added two clerical companies,
one composed of monks and friars, the other of secular priests: about
200 of these ecclesiastics were under arms[26]. Even the women were
organized in squads for the transport of wounded, the care of the
hospitals, and the carrying of provisions to the soldiery on the
walls: about 300 served, under the command of Donna Lucia Fitzgerald
and Donna Maria Angela Bibern, wives of two officers of the regiment
of Ultonia. Five of this ‘company of St. Barbara’ were killed and
eleven wounded during the siege.
[25] Manuscript notes of General Fournas, quoted by Arteche, vii.
458.
[26] The bishop gave his sanction to the formation of this
strange corps; see his proclamation in Arteche’s Appendix vii. p.
539, dated June 9.
The garrison at the moment of Verdier’s first attack consisted of
about 5,700 men, not including the irregulars of the Crusade. There
were seven battalions of the old army, belonging to the regiments
of Ultonia[27], Borbon, and Voluntarios de Barcelona, with three
battalions of miqueletes, two local corps, 1st and 2nd of Gerona,
and the 1st of Vich. Of cavalry there was a single squadron, newly
levied, the ‘escuadron de San Narciso.’ Of artillery there were but
278 men, a wholly insufficient number: the officers of that arm
were given 370 more to train, partly miqueletes of the 2nd Gerona
battalion, partly sailors having some small experience of gunnery.
It was difficult to make proper use of the great store of cannon in
the fortress, when more than half the troops allotted to them had
never before seen, much less served, a heavy gun of position. To the
above 5,700 men of all arms must be added about 1,100 irregulars of
the ‘Crusade’--seven lay and two clerical companies of fusiliers
and two more of artificers. But these were set to guard almost
unapproachable parts of the wall, or held in reserve: most of the
stress fell upon the organized troops. The defence was altogether
conducted on scientific principles, and had nothing in common with
that of Saragossa. Here the irregulars formed only a small fraction
of the garrison[28], and were never hurled in senseless fury against
the French batteries, but used carefully and cautiously as an
auxiliary force, capable of setting free some part of the trained men
for service on the more important points of the enceinte[29].
[27] Ultonia, the regiment of Ulster, still contained many
officers of the old Jacobite strain, as may be seen by consulting
the list of killed and wounded, where such names as O’Donnell,
Macarthy, Nash, Fitzgerald, Pierson, Coleby, Candy, occur: but
it had just been raised from 200 to 800 bayonets by filling
the depleted _cadre_ with Catalan recruits, and all the junior
lieutenants, newly appointed, were Catalans also. So there was
little Irish about it save the names of some of its senior
officers.
[28] For the details of the composition of the Gerona garrison,
see Appendix no. 1.
[29] I know not why Napier, contrasting Gerona with Saragossa
(ii. 251), says that at the former place the regular garrison
was 3,000, the armed multitude ‘less than 6,000.’ When it is
remembered that its total population was 14,000 souls--of whom
some fled to places of safety before the siege began--and that
it had already raised two battalions of miqueletes with 1,360
bayonets out of its able-bodied male inhabitants, it is difficult
to see how more than 5,000 armed irregulars are to be procured,
for in a population of 14,000 souls there cannot be more than
some 3,000 men between eighteen and forty-five. As a matter of
fact (see documents in Arteche, vii. Appendix 5), the ‘Crusade’
was about 1,100 strong at most.
For the first two months of the siege Alvarez received no help
whatever from without: in May the central government of Catalonia had
been left in a perfectly paralysed condition, when Blake went off
himself and took with him the best of the regular troops, in order to
engage in the campaign of Alcañiz and Maria. Coupigny, the interim
commander at Tarragona, had only 6,000 organized men, and he and
the Catalan provincial junta were during that month much engrossed
with an enterprise which distracted them from the needs of Gerona. A
wide-spread conspiracy had been formed within the walls of Barcelona,
with the object of rising against the garrison in St. Cyr’s absence.
A secret committee of priests, merchants, and retired officers had
collected all the arms in the city, smuggled in many muskets from
without, and enlisted several thousand persons in a grand design
for an outbreak and a sort of ‘Sicilian Vespers’ fixed--after two
postponements--for the 11th of May. They opened communication with
Coupigny and with the captains of the British frigates blockading the
port. The one was to bring his troops to the gates, the others to
deliver an attack on the port, upon the appointed night. No Spaniard
betrayed the plot, though 6,000 citizens are said to have been in
the secret, but it was frustrated by two foreigners. Conscious that
the town could not be freed if the citadel of Monjuich was retained
by the French, the conspirators sounded two Italian officers named
Captain Dottori, fort adjutant of Monjuich, and Captain Provana, who
was known to be discontented and thought to be corruptible. They
offered them an immense bribe--1,000,000 dollars, it is said--to
betray the postern of Monjuich to the troops of Coupigny, who were to
be ready in the ditch at midnight. But they had mistaken their men:
the officers conferred with Duhesme, and consented to act as _agents
provocateurs_: they pretended to join the conspiracy, were introduced
to and had interviews with the chiefs, and informed the governor.
On the morning before the appointed date many of the leaders were
arrested. Duhesme placed guards in every street, and proclaimed that
he knew all. The citizens remained quiet in their despair, the chiefs
who had not been seized fled, and the troops on the Llobregat retired
to Tarragona. Duhesme hanged his captives, two priests named Gallifa
and Pou, a young merchant named Massana, Navarro an old soldier, and
four others. ‘They went to the gallows,’ says Vacani, an eye-witness,
‘with pride, convinced every one of them that they had done the duty
of good citizens in behalf of king, country, and religion[30].’
[30] Vacani, iii. 211.
Engrossed in this plot, the official chiefs of Catalonia half forgot
Gerona, and did nothing to help Alvarez till long after the siege had
begun. The only assistance that he received from without was that the
miqueletes and _somatenes_ of the Ampurdam and the mountain region
above Hostalrich were always skirmishing with Verdier’s outposts,
and once or twice cut off his convoys of munitions on their way from
Figueras to the front.
The French engineers were somewhat at variance as to the right way
to deal with Gerona. There were two obvious alternatives. An attack
on the weak front of the Mercadal was certain to succeed: the ground
before the walls was suitable for trenches, and the fortifications
were trifling. But when a lodgement had been made in this quarter
of the town it would be necessary to work forward, among the narrow
lanes and barricades, to the Oña, and then to cross that river in
order to continue similar operations through the streets of Gerona.
Even when the city had been subdued, the garrison might still hold
out in the formidable works on the Monjuich and Capuchin heights. The
reduction of the Mercadal and the city, moreover, would have to be
carried out under a continuous plunging fire from the forts above,
which overlooked the whole place. This danger was especially insisted
upon by some of the engineer officers, who declared that it would be
impossible for the troops to work their way forward over ground so
exposed. As a matter of fact it was proved, after the siege was over
and the forts had been examined by the captors, that this fear had
been exaggerated; the angle of fire was such that large sections of
the town were in no way commanded from the heights, and the streets
could not have been searched in the fashion that was imagined. But
this, obvious in December, could not have been known in May[31].
The second alternative was to commence the attack on Gerona not
from the easiest but from the most difficult side, by battering the
lofty fort of Monjuich from the high plateau beside it. The defences
here were very formidable: the ground was bare exposed rock: but if
Monjuich were once captured it was calculated that the town must
surrender, as it was completely overlooked by the fort, and had no
further protection save its antiquated mediaeval wall. The deduction
that it would be cheaper in the end to begin with the difficult task
of taking Monjuich, rather than the easier operations against the
Mercadal, seemed plausible: its fault was that it presupposed that
Alvarez and his garrison would behave according to the accepted rules
of siegecraft, and yield when their situation became hopeless. But in
dealing with Spanish garrisons the rules of military logic did not
always act. Alvarez essayed the impossible, and held out behind his
defective defences for four months after Monjuich fell. The loss of
men and time that he thereby inflicted on the French was certainly
no less than that which would have been suffered if the besiegers
had begun with the Mercadal, and worked upwards by incessant street
fighting towards the forts on the height. But it is hard to say that
Verdier erred: he did not know his adversary, and he did know, from
his experiences at Saragossa, what street fighting meant.
[31] See Belmas, iii. 516.
It may be added that Verdier’s views were accepted by the
engineer-general, Sanson, who had been specially sent from France by
the Emperor, to give his opinion on the best mode of procedure. The
document which Verdier, Sanson, and Taviel (the commanding artillery
officer of the 7th Corps) sent to Paris, to justify their choice of
the upper point of attack, lays stress mainly on the impossibility of
advancing from the Mercadal under the fire of the upper forts[32].
But there were other reasons for selecting Monjuich as the point
of attack. It lay far nearer to the road to France and the central
siege-dépôts beside Sarria and the Pont Mayor. The approaches would
be over highly defensible ground where, if a disaster occurred, the
defeated assailant could easily recover himself and oppose a strong
front to the enemy. The shortness of the front was suitable for
an army of the moderate strength of 14,000 men, which had to deal
with a fortress whose perimeter, allowing for outlying forts and
inaccessible precipices, was some six miles. Moreover, the ground
in front of the Mercadal had the serious inconvenience of being
liable to inundation; summer spates on the Ter and Oña are rare, but
occur from time to time; and there was the bare chance that when the
trenches had been opened all might be swept away by the rivers[33].
[32] See their letter in Appendix V to Belmas’s account of the
siege.
[33] Note, ibid., ii. p. 502.
Verdier’s opinion was arrived at after mature reflection: the French
had appeared in front of Gerona on May 8: the outlying villages
on the east had been occupied between the twelfth and eighteenth:
Lecchi’s Italians had closed the western exits by occupying the plain
of Salt on the twenty-fourth: the inner posts of observation of the
Spaniards had been cleared off when, on May 30, the Italians seized
the suburban village of Santa Eugenia, and on June 1 the Germans took
possession of the mountain of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. But it
was only on June 6 that the besiegers broke ground, and commenced
their trenches and batteries on the plateau of Monjuich. It was
necessary to make a beginning by subduing the outer defences of
the fort, the towers or redoubts of San Luis, San Narciso, and San
Daniel: two batteries of 24-pounders were constructed against them,
while a third battery of mortars on the ‘Green Mound’ by the Casa den
Roca on the west bank of the Ter, was to play upon the north end of
the town: Verdier hoped that the bombardment would break the spirit
of the citizens--little knowing the obstinate people with whom he
had to deal. Five thousand bombs thrown into the place in June and
July produced no effect whatever. More batteries on the heights were
thrown up upon the 13th and 15th of June, while on the former day, to
distract the attention of the Spaniards, Lecchi’s division, in the
plain below, was ordered to open a false attack upon the Mercadal.
This had good effect as a diversion, since Alvarez had expected an
assault in this quarter, and the long line of trenches thrown up
by the Italians in front of Santa Eugenia attracted much of his
attention. Three days of battering greatly damaged San Luis and San
Narciso, which were no more than round towers of masonry with ditches
cut in the rock, and only two or three guns apiece. The French also
took possession on the night of the fourteenth and fifteenth of the
remains of the half-destroyed suburb of Pedret, between Monjuich
and the Ter, as if about to establish themselves in a position from
which they could attack the low-lying north gate of the town and the
bastion of Santa Maria.
Hitherto the defence had seemed a little passive, but at dawn on the
morning of the seventeenth Alvarez delivered the first of the many
furious sallies which he made against the siege lines. A battalion
of Ultonia rushed suddenly down-hill out of Monjuich and drove the
French, who were taken completely by surprise, out of the ruins of
Pedret. Aided by a smaller detachment, including the artificers of
the _Crusade_, who came out of the Santa Maria gate, they destroyed
all the works and lodgements of the besiegers in the suburb, and
held it till they were driven out by two French and one Westphalian
battalion sent up from Verdier’s reserves. The Spaniards were forced
back into the town, but retired in good order, contented to have
undone three days of the besiegers’ labour. They had lost 155 men,
the French 128, in this sharp skirmish.
Two days later the towers of San Luis and San Narciso, which had been
reduced to shapeless heaps of stone, were carried by assault, with
a loss to the French of only 78 men; but an attempt to carry San
Daniel by the same rush was beaten off, this redoubt being still in
a tenable state. Its gorge, however, was completely commanded from
the ruins of San Luis, and access to or exit from it was rendered
so dangerous that Alvarez withdrew its garrison on the next night.
The possession of these three outworks brought the French close
up to Monjuich, which they could now attack from ground which was
favourable in every respect, save that it was bare rock lacking
soil. It was impossible to excavate in it, and all advances had to
be made by building trenches (if the word is not a misnomer in this
case) of sandbags and loose stones on the surface of the ground.
The men working at the end of the sap were therefore completely
exposed, and the work could only proceed at a great expense of life.
Nevertheless the preparations advanced rapidly, and on the night
of July 2 an enormous battery of sandbags (called the _Batterie
Impériale_) was thrown up at a distance of only four hundred yards
from Monjuich. Next morning it opened on the fort with twenty 16-
and 24-pounders, and soon established a superiority over the fire
of the defence. Several Spanish pieces were dismounted, others had
to be removed because it was too deadly to serve them. But a steady
fire was returned against the besiegers from the Constable and
Calvary forts, on the other side of the Galligan ravine. Nevertheless
Monjuich began to crumble, and it looked as if the end of the siege
were already approaching. On July 3 there was a breach thirty-five
feet broad in the fort’s north-eastern bastion, and the Spanish flag
which floated over it was thrown down into the ditch by a chance
shot. A young officer named Montorro climbed down, brought it up, and
nailed it to a new flagstaff under the fire of twenty guns. Meanwhile
long stretches of the parapet of Monjuich were ruined, the ditch
was half-filled with débris, and the garrison could only protect
themselves by hasty erections of gabions and sandbags, placed where
the crest of the masonry had stood.
By this time St. Cyr and the covering army had abandoned the position
in the plain of Vich which they had so long occupied. The general
had, as it seems, convinced himself at last that Blake, who was still
engaged in his unlucky Aragonese campaign, was not likely to appear.
He therefore moved nearer to Gerona, in order to repress the efforts
of the local _somatenes_, who were giving much trouble to Verdier’s
communications. On June 20 he established his head quarters at Caldas
de Malavella, some nine miles to the south-east of Gerona. That
same evening one of his Italian brigades intercepted and captured a
convoy of 1,200 oxen which the Governor of Hostalrich was trying to
introduce into the beleaguered city along one of the mountain-paths
which lead to the Capuchin heights from the coast. St. Cyr strung out
his 14,000 men in a line from San Feliu de Guixols on the sea to the
upper Ter, in a semicircle which covered all the approaches to Gerona
saving those from the Ampurdam. He visited Verdier’s camp, inspected
the siege operations, and expressed his opinion that an attack on
the Mercadal front would have been preferable to that which had been
actually chosen. But he washed his hands of all responsibility, told
Verdier that, since he had chosen to correspond directly with Paris,
he must take all the praise or blame resulting from his choice,
and refused to countermand or to alter any of his subordinate’s
dispositions. On July 2 however he sent, with some lack of logic, a
summons of his own to Alvarez, inviting him to surrender on account
of the desperate state of his defences: this he did without informing
Verdier of his move. The Governor returned an indignant negative, and
Verdier wrote in great wrath to complain that if the siege was his
affair, as he had just been told, it was monstrous that his commander
should correspond with the garrison without his knowledge[34]. The
two generals were left on even worse terms than before. St. Cyr,
however, gave real assistance to the siege operations at this time by
storming, on July 5, the little fortified harbour-town of Palamos,
which lies on the point of the sea-coast nearest to Gerona, and
had been hitherto used by the miqueletes as a base from which they
communicated by night with the fortress, and at the same time kept
in touch with Tarragona and the English ships of the blockading
squadron.
[34] See St. Cyr to Alvarez and Verdier to the Minister of War at
Paris, nos. 9 and 11 of Belmas’s Appendices in his second volume,
pp. 677 and 678.
On the night of the 4th and 5th of July the defences of Monjuich
appeared in such a ruinous condition that Commandant Fleury, the
engineer officer in charge of the advanced parallel, took the
extraordinary and unjustifiable step of assaulting them at 10 p.m.
with the troops--two companies only--which lay under his orders,
trusting that the whole of the guards of the trenches would follow
if he made a lodgement. This presumptuous attack, made contrary
to all the rules of military subordination, was beaten off with a
loss of forty men. Its failure made Verdier determine to give the
fort three days more of continuous bombardment, before attempting
to storm it: the old batteries continued their fire, a new one was
added to enfilade the north-western bastion, and cover was contrived
at several points to shelter the troops which were to deliver the
assault, till the actual moment of the storm arrived[35]. But three
hundred yards of exposed ground still separated the front trenches
from the breach--a distance far too great according to the rules of
siegecraft. The Spaniards meanwhile, finding it impossible under such
a fire to block the breach, which was now broad enough for fifty men
abreast[36], threw up two walls of gabions on each side of it, sank a
ditch filled with chevaux-de-frise in front of it, and loopholed some
interior buildings of the fort, which bore upon its reverse side.
[35] Napier says (ii. 250) that ‘the breaching fire ceased for
four days before the assault,’ and that this caused the failure.
The statement is in direct contradiction of Vacani (iii. 277)
who states that Verdier on the contrary ‘proseguì per tre giorni
il vivo fuoco della sua artilleria,’ and of Belmas (ii. 530) who
makes the same statement.
[36] See Alvarez’s letter in Belmas’s Appendix, no. 15, where he
says that the breach had this breadth since July 3.
Monjuich, however, looked in a miserable state when, just before
sunrise on July 7, Verdier launched his columns of assault upon
it. He had collected for the purpose the grenadier and _voltigeur_
companies of each of the twenty French, German, and Italian
battalions of the besieging army, about 2,500 men in all[37]. They
were divided into two columns, the larger of which went straight
at the breach, while the smaller, which was furnished with ladders,
was directed to escalade the left face of the demi-lune which covers
the northern front of Monjuich. The troops passed with no great loss
over the open space which divided them from the work, as its guns
had all been silenced, and the fire from the more distant forts was
ineffective in the dusk. But when they got within close musketry
range they began to fall fast; the head of the main column, which
was composed of some sapper companies and the Italian Velites of the
Guard, got up on to the face of the breach, but could never break in.
Every officer or man who reached the cutting and its chevaux-de-frise
was shot down; the concentric fire of the defenders so swept the
opening that nothing could live there. Meanwhile the rear of the
column was brought to a stand, partly in, partly outside, the ditch.
The Spaniards kept playing upon it with musketry and two or three
small 2- and 4-pounders, which had been kept under cover and reserved
for that purpose, firing canister into it at a distance of twenty or
thirty yards. Flesh and blood could not bear this for long, and the
whole mass broke and went to the rear. Verdier, who had come out to
the _Batterie Impériale_ to view the assault, had the men rallied
and sent forward a second time: the head of the column again reached
the breach, and again withered away: the supporting mass gave way at
once, and fell back much more rapidly than on the first assault. Yet
the General, most unwisely, insisted on a third attack, which, made
feebly and without conviction, by men who knew that they were beaten,
only served to increase the casualty list. Meanwhile the escalade of
the demi-lune by the smaller column had been repelled with ease: the
assailants barely succeeded in crossing the ditch and planting a few
ladders against the scarp: no one survived who tried to mount them,
and the troops drew off.
[37] This seems a low estimate of Belmas, as the _compagnies
d’élite_ formed a third of each battalion.
This bloody repulse cost the French 1,079 casualties, including
seventy-seven officers killed or wounded--much more than a third
of the troops engaged. It is clear, therefore, that it was not
courage which had been lacking: nor could it be said that the
enemy’s artillery fire had not been subdued, nor that the breach was
insufficient, nor that the 300 yards of open ground crossed by the
column had been a fatal obstacle; indeed, they had been passed with
little loss. The mistake of Verdier had been that he attacked before
the garrison was demoralized--the same error made by the English
at Badajoz in 1811 and at San Sebastian in 1813. A broad breach by
itself does not necessarily make a place untenable, if the spirit
of the defenders is high, and if they are prepared with all the
resources of the military art for resisting the stormers, as were the
Geronese on July 7-8. The garrison lost, it may be remarked, only
123 men, out of a strength of 787 present in the fort that morning.
The casualty list, however, was somewhat increased by the accidental
explosion, apparently by a careless gunner, of the magazine of the
tower of San Juan, alongside of the Galligan, which was destroyed
with its little garrison of twenty-five men.
The repulse of the assault of Monjuich thoroughly demoralized
the besieging army: the resistance of the Spaniards had been so
fierce, the loss they had inflicted so heavy, that Verdier’s motley
collection of French, German, Lombard, and Neapolitan regiments lost
heart and confidence. Their low spirits were made manifest by the
simultaneous outbreak of desertion and disease, the two inevitable
marks of a decaying morale. All through the second half of July and
August the hospitals grew gradually fuller, not only from sunstroke
cases (which were frequent on the bare, hot, rocky ground of the
heights), but from dysentery and malaria. The banks of the Ter always
possessed a reputation for epidemics--twice in earlier centuries
a French army had perished before the walls of Gerona by plagues,
which the citizens piously attributed to their patron, San Narciso.
It was mainly because he realized the depression of his troops that
Verdier refrained from any more assaults, and went on from July 9 to
August 4 battering Monjuich incessantly, while he cautiously pushed
forward his trenches, till they actually reached the ditch of the
demi-lune which covers the northern front of the fort. The garrison
was absolutely overwhelmed by the incessant bombardment, which
destroyed every piece of upstanding masonry, and prevented them from
rebuilding anything that was demolished. They were forced to lurk in
the casemates, and to burrow for shelter in the débris which filled
the interior of the work. Three large breaches had been made at
various points, yet Verdier would never risk another assault, till
on August 4 his approaches actually crowned the lip of the ditch of
the demi-lune, and his sappers had blown in its counterscarp. The
ruined little outwork was then stormed with a loss of only forty men.
This put the French in the possession of good cover only a few yards
from the main body of the fort. Proceeding with the same caution as
before, they made their advances against Monjuich by mining: on the
night of the 8th-9th August no less than twenty-three mines under the
glacis of the fort were exploded simultaneously. This left a gaping
void in front of the original breach of July 7, and filled up the
ditch with débris for many yards on either side: part of the interior
of the fort was clearly visible from the besiegers’ trenches.
Only one resource for saving Monjuich remained to Alvarez--a sortie
for the expulsion of the enemy from their advanced works. It was
executed with great courage at midday on August 9, while at the same
time separate demonstrations to distract the enemy were made at two
other points. The column from Monjuich had considerable success;
it stormed two advanced batteries, spiked their guns, and set fire
to their gabions; the French were cleared out of many of their
trenches, but made head behind one of the rear batteries, where
they were joined by their reserves, who finally thrust back the
sallying force into the fort. The damage done, though considerable,
could be repaired in a day. Verdier gave orders for the storm of
the dilapidated fort on the night of August 11, and borrowed a
regiment from St. Cyr’s covering army to lead the assault, being
still very doubtful of the temper of his own troops. But at six on
the preceding afternoon an explosion was heard in Monjuich, and great
part of its battered walls flew up into the air. The Spaniards had
quietly evacuated it a few minutes before, after preparing mines for
its demolition. The French, when they entered, found nothing but a
shapeless mass of stones and eighteen disabled cannon. The garrison
had lost, in the sixty-five days of its defence, 962 men killed and
wounded; the besiegers had, first and last, suffered something like
three times this loss.
While the bombardment of Monjuich was going on, the Spanish generals
outside the fortress had at last begun to make serious efforts for
its assistance. Not only had the _somatenes_ redoubled their activity
against Verdier’s convoys, and several times succeeded in destroying
them or turning them back, but Coupigny had at last begun to move,
for he saw that since Blake’s rout at Belchite on June 18 he, and he
alone, possessed an organized body of troops on this side of Spain,
small though it was. Unable to face St. Cyr in the field, he tried
at least to throw succours into Gerona by the mountain paths from
the south, if he could do no more. The first attempt was disastrous:
three battalions started from Hostalrich under an English adventurer,
Ralph Marshall, whom Alvarez had suggested for the command of this
expedition. They evaded the first line of the covering army, but at
Castellar, on July 10, ran into the very centre of Pino’s division,
which had concentrated from all sides for their destruction. Marshall
escaped into Gerona with no more than twelve men: 40 officers and 878
rank and file laid down their arms; the rest of the column, some 600
or 700 men, evaded surrender by dispersion[38].
[38] St. Cyr, Vacani, and Belmas all say that Marshall escaped
by hoisting the white flag, and taking to the hills while terms
of capitulation were being arranged. Coupigny on the other
hand (see his letter in Belmas’s Appendix no. 18) says that
Marshall behaved admirably, but was not seconded by his men,
who flinched and abandoned him. Rich, the officer who failed to
guide the column aright, was not, as Napier supposed (ii. 236),
an Englishman, but a Catalan, as is shown by his Christian name
Narciso. Ric or Rich is a common name in Catalonia.
Equally disastrous, though on a smaller scale, was another attempt
made on August 4 by a party of 300 miqueletes to enter Gerona: they
eluded St. Cyr, but on arriving at the entry of the Galligan, close
under the forts, made the unfortunate mistake of entering the convent
of San Daniel, which the garrison had been compelled to evacuate a
few days before. It was now in the French lines, and the Catalans
were all taken prisoners. It was not till August 17, six days
after the fall of Monjuich, that Alvarez obtained his first feeble
reinforcement: the miquelete battalion of Cervera, with a draft for
that of Vich already in the garrison, altogether 800 bayonets, got
into the city on the west side, by eluding Lecchi’s Italians in
the plain and fording the Ter. They were much needed, for Alvarez
was complaining to the Catalan Junta that he had now only 1,500
able-bodied men left of his original 5,000[39].
[39] This must have been an exaggeration, as 2,000 men under
arms of the old garrison survived to surrender in December. See
Alvarez’s letter, on p. 686 of Belmas’s Appendix.
Verdier had written to his master, after the capture of Monjuich, to
announce that Gerona must infallibly surrender within eight or ten
days[40], now that it had nothing but an antiquated mediaeval wall
to oppose to his cannon. So far, however, was he from being a true
prophet that, as a matter of fact, the second and longer episode of
the siege, which was to be protracted far into the winter, had only
just begun.
[40] See Verdier’s letter of August 12, in Belmas’s Appendix no.
11, p. 700.
SECTION XVII: CHAPTER III
THE FALL OF GERONA. AUGUST-DECEMBER, 1809
When Monjuich had been evacuated, the position of Gerona was
undoubtedly perilous: of the two mountain summits which command the
city one was now entirely in the hands of the French; for not only
the great fort itself but several of the smaller works above the
ravine of the Galligan--such as the fortified convent of San Daniel
and the ruined tower of San Juan--had been lost. The front exposed
to attack now consisted of the northern section of the old city
wall, from the bastion of Santa Maria at the water’s edge, to the
tower of La Gironella, which forms the north-eastern angle of the
place, and lies further up the slope of the Capuchin heights than any
other portion of the enceinte. The space between these two points
was simply covered by a mediaeval wall set with small round towers:
neither the towers nor the curtain between them had been built to
hold artillery. Indeed the only spots on this front where guns had
been placed were (1) the comparatively modern bastion of Santa Maria,
(2) a work erected under and about the Gironella, and called the
‘Redoubt of the Germans,’ and (3, 4) two parts of the wall called the
platforms[41] of San Pedro and San Cristobal, which had been widened
till they could carry a few heavy guns. On the rest of the enceinte,
owing to its narrowness, nothing but wall-pieces and two-pounders
could be mounted. The parts of the curtain most exposed to attack
were the sections named Santa Lucia, San Pedro, San Cristobal, and
Las Sarracinas, from churches or quarters which lay close behind
them. With nothing but an antiquated wall, seven to nine feet thick,
thirty feet high, and destitute of a ditch, it seemed that this side
of Gerona was doomed to destruction within a few days.
[41] Some call them bastions, but they are too small to deserve
that name.
But there were points in the position which rendered the attack
more difficult than might have been expected. The first was that any
approaches directed against this front would be exposed to a flanking
fire from the forts on the Capuchin heights, especially from the
Calvary and Chapter redoubts. The second was that the greater part
of the weak sections of the wall were within a re-entering angle;
for the tower of Santa Lucia and the ‘Redoubt of the Germans’ by the
Gironella project, and the curtains between them are in a receding
sweep of the enceinte. Attacks on these ill-fortified sections would
be outflanked and enfiladed by the two stronger works. The only
exposed part of the curtain was that called Santa Lucia, running
from the tower of that name down to the bastion of Santa Maria.
Lastly, the parallels which the French might construct from their
base on Monjuich would have to be built on a down slope, overlooked
by loftier ground, and when they reached the foot of the walls they
would be in a sort of gulley or bottom, into which the defenders of
the city could look down from above. The only point from which the
north end of Gerona could be approached from flat ground and without
disadvantages of slope, is the short front of less than 200 yards
breadth between the foot of Monjuich and the bank of the Ter. Here,
in the ruins of the suburb of Pedret, there was plenty of cover, a
soil easy to work, and a level terrain as far as the foot of the
Santa Maria bastion. The engineers of the besieging army selected
three sections of wall as their objective. The first was the ‘Redoubt
of the Germans’ and the tower of La Gironella, the highest and most
commanding works in this part of the enceinte: once established in
these, they could overlook and dominate the whole city. The other
points of attack were chosen for the opposite reason--because
they were intrinsically weak in themselves, not because they were
important or dominating parts of the defences. The curtain of Santa
Lucia in particular seemed to invite attack, as being in a salient
angle, unprotected by flanking fire, and destitute of any artillery
of its own.
Verdier, therefore, on the advice of his engineers, set to work
to attack these points of the enceinte between La Gironella and
Santa Maria. New batteries erected amid the ruins of Monjuich were
levelled against them, in addition to such of the older batteries
as could still be utilized. On the front by Pedret also, where
nothing had hitherto been done, works were prepared for guns to be
directed against Santa Maria and Santa Lucia. Meanwhile a perpetual
bombardment with shell was kept up, against the whole quarter of the
town that lay behind the selected points of attack. Mortars were
always playing, not only from the Monjuich heights but from two
batteries erected on the so-called ‘Green Mound’ in the plain beyond
the river Ter. Their effect was terrible: almost every house in the
northern quarter of Gerona was unroofed or destroyed: the population
had to take refuge in cellars, where, after a few days, they began
to die fast--all the more so that food was just beginning to run
short as August advanced. From the 14th to the 30th of that month
Verdier’s attack was developing itself: by its last day four breaches
had been established: one, about forty feet broad, in the curtain
of St. Lucia, two close together in the works at La Gironella[42],
the fourth and smallest in the platform of San Cristobal. But the
approaches were still far from the foot of the wall, the fire of the
outlying Spanish works, especially the Calvary fort, was unsubdued,
and though the guns along the attacked front had all been silenced,
the French artillery had paid dearly both in lives and in material
for the advantage they had gained. Moreover sickness was making
dreadful ravages in the ranks of the besieging army. The malarious
pestilence on which the Spaniards had relied had appeared, after
a sudden and heavy rainfall had raised the Ter and Oña beyond
their banks, and inundated the whole plain of Salt. By malaria,
dysentery and sunstroke Verdier had lost 5,000 men, in addition to
his casualties in the siege. Many of them were convalescents in the
hospitals of Perpignan and Figueras, but it was hard to get them
back to the front; the _somatenes_ made the roads impassable for
small detachments, and the officers on the line of communication,
being very short of men, were given to detaining drafts that reached
them on their way to Gerona[43]. Hence Verdier, including his
artillerymen and sappers, had less than 10,000 men left for the
siege, and these much discouraged by its interminable length, short
of officers, and sickly. This was not enough to guard a periphery
of six miles, and messengers were continually slipping in or out of
Gerona, between the widely scattered camps of the French.
[42] Belmas, for convenience’ sake, distinguishes these two
breaches by calling the northern one the breach in the Barracks,
the southern the breach in the Latrines of the ‘German Redoubt.’
[43] Between Gerona and Perpignan, for the defence of
communications and the garrisoning of Figueras, there were
at this time the Valais battalion, one battalion of the
Confederation of the Rhine (Waldeck-Reuss-Schwarzburg), one
battalion each of the French 7th and 113th--not more than 2,300
bayonets in all. See Returns of the Army of Spain for Sept. 15,
1809.
On August 31 a new phase of the siege began. In response to the
constant appeals of Alvarez to the Catalan Junta, and the consequent
complaints of the Junta alike to the Captain-General Blake, and to
the central government at Seville, something was at last about to
be done to relieve Gerona. The supreme Central Junta, in reply to a
formal representation of the Catalans dated August 16[44], had sent
Blake 6,000,000 reals in cash, and a peremptory order to march on
Gerona whatever the state of his army might be, authorizing him to
call out all the _somatenes_ of the province in his aid. The general,
who had at last returned to Tarragona, obeyed, though entirely
lacking confidence in his means of success; and on the thirty-first
his advance guard was skirmishing with St. Cyr’s covering army on the
heights to the south of the Ter.
[44] For this correspondence see the Appendices nos. 16 and 24-5
in vol. ii of Belmas.
Blake’s army, it will be remembered, had been completely routed at
Belchite by Suchet on June 18. The wrecks of his Aragonese division
had gradually rallied at Tortosa, those of his Valencian divisions
at Morella: but even by the end of July he had only a few thousand
men collected, and he had lost every gun of his artillery. For many
weeks he could do nothing but press the Junta of Valencia to fill
the depleted ranks of his regiments with recruits, to reconstitute
his train, and to provide him with new cannon. Aragon had been
lost--nothing could be drawn from thence: Catalonia, distracted by
Suchet’s demonstration on its western flank, did not do as much as
might have been expected in its own defence. The Junta was inclined
to favour the employment of miqueletes and _somatenes_, and to
undervalue the troops of the line: it forgot that the irregulars,
though they did admirable work in harassing the enemy, could not be
relied upon to operate in large masses or strike a decisive blow.
Still, the regiments at Tarragona, Lerida, and elsewhere had been
somewhat recruited before August was out.
Blake’s field army was composed of some 14,000 men: there were five
Valencian regiments--those which had been least mishandled in the
campaign of Aragon--with the relics of six of the battalions which
Reding had brought from Granada in 1808[45], two of Lazan’s old
Aragonese corps, and five or six of the regiments which had formed
the original garrison of Catalonia. The battalions were very weak--it
took twenty-four of them to make up 13,000 infantry: of cavalry there
were only four squadrons, of artillery only two batteries. Those of
the rank and file who were not raw recruits were the vanquished of
Molins de Rey and Valls, or of Maria and Belchite. They had no great
confidence in Blake, and he had still less in them. Despite the
orders received from Seville, which bade him risk all for the relief
of Gerona, he was determined not to fight another pitched battle.
The memories of Belchite were too recent to be forgotten. Though
much obloquy has been poured upon his head for this resolve, he was
probably wise in his decision. St. Cyr had still some 12,000 men in
his covering army, who had taken no share in the siege: their morale
was intact, and they had felt little fatigue or privation. They could
be, and were in fact, reinforced by 4,000 men from Verdier’s force
when the stress came. Blake, therefore, was, so far as regular troops
went, outnumbered by the French, especially in cavalry and artillery.
He could not trust in time of battle the miqueletes, of whom some
4,000 or 5,000 from the Ampurdam and Central Catalonia came to join
him. He thought that it might be possible to elude or outflank
St. Cyr, to lure him to divide his forces into scattered bodies by
threatening many points at once, or, on the other hand, to induce him
to concentrate on one short front, and so to leave some of the exits
of Gerona open. But a battle with the united French army he would not
risk under any conditions.
[45] See the ‘morning state’ given in Arteche, vii. pp. 565-6.
The Valencian regiments were Savoia, Orihuela, Voluntarios de
Valencia, and Almanza, with about 5,000 bayonets. Of Reding’s old
troops from the south there were Almeria, Baza, Santa Fé, 1st
of Granada (otherwise called Iliberia), and two battalions of
Provincial Grenadiers, something over 3,000 men. The rest were
mainly Catalans.
St. Cyr, however, was too wary for his opponent: he wanted to fight
at all costs, and he was prepared to risk a disturbance of the siege
operations, if he could catch Blake in the open and bring him to
action. The moment that pressure on his outposts, by regular troops
coming from the south, was reported, he drew together Souham’s and
Pino’s divisions on the short line between San Dalmay on the right
and Casa de Selva on the left, across the high road from Barcelona.
At the same time he sent stringent orders to Verdier to abandon
the unimportant sections of his line of investment, and to come to
reinforce the field army at the head of his French division, which
still counted 4,000 bayonets. Verdier accordingly marched to join
his chief, leaving Lecchi’s Italians--now little more than 2,000
strong--to watch the west side of Gerona, and handing over the charge
of the works on Monjuich, the new approaches, and the park at Pont
Mayor, to the Westphalians. He abandoned all the outlying posts on
the heights, even the convent of San Daniel, the village of Campdura,
and the peak of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. Only 4,600 infantry
and 2,000 gunners and sappers were left facing the garrison: but
Alvarez was too weak to drive off even such a small force.
On September 1 Blake ostentatiously displayed the heads of his
columns in front of St. Cyr’s position; but while the French general
was eagerly awaiting his attack, and preparing his counter-stroke,
the Spaniard’s game was being played out in another quarter. While
Rovira and Claros with their miqueletes made noisy demonstration
from the north against the Westphalians, and threatened the park and
the camp at Sarria, Blake had detached one of his divisions, that of
Garcia Conde, some 4,000 strong, far to the left beyond St. Cyr’s
flank: this corps had with it a convoy of more than a thousand mules
laden with provisions, and a herd of cattle. It completely escaped
the notice of the French, and marching from Amer at break of day came
down into the plain of Salt at noon, far in the rear of St. Cyr’s
army. Garcia Conde had the depleted Italian division of the siege
corps in front of him: one of the brigadiers, the Pole Milosewitz,
was in command that day, Lecchi being in hospital. This small force,
which vainly believed itself covered from attack by St. Cyr’s corps,
had kept no look-out to the rear, being wholly intent on watching
the garrison. It was surprised by the Spanish column, cut into two
halves, and routed. Garcia Conde entered the Mercadal in triumph with
his convoy, and St. Cyr first learnt what had occurred when he saw
the broken remnants of the Italians pouring into the rear of his own
line at Fornells.
That night Gerona was free of enemies on its southern and eastern
sides, and Alvarez communicated freely with Rovira’s and Claros’s
irregulars, who had forced in the Westphalian division and compelled
it to concentrate in Monjuich and the camp by the great park near
Sarria. The garrison reoccupied the ruined convent of San Daniel by
the Galligan, and placed a strong party in the hermitage on the peak
of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. It also destroyed all the advanced
trenches on the slopes of Monjuich. On the next morning, however, it
began to appreciate the fact that the siege had not been raised. St.
Cyr sent back Verdier’s division to rejoin the Westphalians, and with
them the wrecks of Lecchi’s routed battalions. He added to the force
under Verdier half Pino’s Italian division--six fresh battalions.
With these reinforcements the old siege-lines could be reoccupied,
and the Spaniards were forced back from the points outside the walls
which they had reoccupied on the night of September 1.
By sending away such a large proportion of the 16,000 men that he had
concentrated for battle on the previous day, St. Cyr left himself
only some 10,000 men for a general action with Blake, if the latter
should resolve to fight. But the Spanish general, being without
Garcia Conde’s division, had also no more than 10,000 men in line.
Not only did he refuse to advance, but when St. Cyr, determined to
fight at all costs, marched against him with offensive intentions,
he hastily retreated as far as Hostalrich, two marches to the rear.
There he broke up his army, which had exhausted all its provisions.
St. Cyr did the same and for the same reasons; his men had to
disperse in order to live. He says in his memoirs that if Blake had
shown a bold front against him, and forced him to keep the covering
army concentrated for two more days, the siege would have had to be
raised. For the covering army had advanced against the Spaniards on
September 2 with only two days’ rations, it had exhausted its stores,
and eaten up the country-side. On the fourth it would have had to
retire, or to break up into small fractions, leaving the siege-corps
unprotected. St. Cyr doubted whether the retreat would have ceased
before Figueras was reached. But it is more probable that he would
have merely fallen back to join Verdier, and to live for some days
on the dépôts of Pont Mayor and Sarria. He could have offered battle
again under the walls of Gerona, with all his forces united. Blake
might have got into close touch with Alvarez, and have thrown what
convoys he pleased into the town; but as long as St. Cyr and Verdier
with 22,000 men lay opposite him, he could not have risked any
more. The situation, in short, would have been that which occurred
in February 1811 under the walls of Badajoz, when Mortier faced
Mendizabal, and would probably have ended in the same fashion, by the
French attacking and driving off the relieving army. Blake, then, may
be blamed somewhat for his excessive caution in giving way so rapidly
before St. Cyr’s advance: but if we remember the quality of his
troops and the inevitable result of a battle, it is hard to censure
him overmuch.
Meanwhile Garcia Conde, whose movements were most happy and adroit,
reinforced the garrison of Gerona up to its original strength of
5,000 bayonets, by making over to Alvarez four whole battalions and
some picked companies from other corps, and prepared to leave the
town with the rest of his division and the vast drove of mules, whose
burden had been discharged into the magazines. If he had dedicated
his whole force to strengthening the garrison, the additional troops
would have eaten up in a few days all the provisions that the
convoy had brought in[46]. Accordingly he started off at two a.m.
on September 4 with some 1,200 men, by the upland path that leads
past the hermitage of Los Angeles: St. Cyr had just placed Pino’s
troops from the covering army to guard the heights to the south-east
of Gerona, but Garcia Conde, warned by the peasants of their exact
position, slipped between the posts and got off to Hostalrich with a
loss of no more than fifty men[47].
[46] The reinforcements left behind by Garcia Conde consisted of
two battalions of Baza (one of Reding’s old Granadan regiments),
with 1,368 bayonets, two Catalan ‘tercios,’ 1st and 2nd of
Talarn, with 716 bayonets, and select companies of 1st of Granada
(Iliberia), 2nd of Vich, and Voluntarios de Tarragona--in all
apparently about 2,707 men.
The table on p. 375 of Arteche’s vol. vii seems to err in
crediting the Cervera ‘tercio’ to Garcia: this had come in on
Aug. 17, as described on p. 35. On the other hand the company of
Voluntarios de Tarragona should be credited to him.
[47] St. Cyr tells a story to the effect that he had placed
Mazzuchelli’s brigade of Pino’s division in ambush behind the
hill of Palau to intercept Garcia Conde, and that the Spaniards
would have marched right into the trap on Sept. 3, if the
Italians had not been stupid enough to sound the _réveil_ at
dawn, and so warn the enemy of their existence. But the Spanish
accounts of Minali and Claros are quite different (see Arteche,
vii. 377); they are to the effect that Garcia Conde had intended
to start _at dusk_ on the third, but, hearing firing on the side
of Palau, deferred his exit and took another road. If he was
starting at 7 or 8 o’clock at night on the third, he cannot have
been warned by the morning bugles at 4 o’clock on the previous
morning. See St. Cyr, p. 234, and Napier, ii. 245, for the
French story, which the latter takes over whole from the former.
Belmas and Vacani do not give the tale, though they have a full
narration of the escape of Garcia Conde.
Before he could consider his position safe, Verdier had to complete
the lines of investment: this he did on September 5 by driving off
the intermediate posts which Alvarez had thrown out from the Capuchin
heights, to link the town with the garrison in the hermitage of
Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. Mazzuchelli’s brigade stormed the
hermitage itself on the following day, with a loss of about eighty
men, and massacred the greater part of the garrison. On that same
day, however, the French suffered a small disaster in another part of
the environs. General Joba, who had been sent with three battalions
to clear the road to Figueras from the bands of Claros and Rovira,
was beaten and slain at San Gregorio by those chiefs. But the
miqueletes afterwards retired to the mountains, and the road became
intermittently passable, at least for large bodies of men.
It was not till September 11, however, that Verdier recommenced the
actual siege, and bade his batteries open once more upon Gerona.
The eleven days of respite since Blake interrupted the bombardment
on September 1 had been invaluable to the garrison, who had cleared
away the débris from the foot of the breaches, replaced the damaged
artillery on the front of attack, and thrown up interior defences
behind the shattered parts of the wall. They had also destroyed all
the advanced trenches of the besiegers, which had to be reconstructed
at much cost of life. In four days Verdier had recovered most of
the lost ground, when he was surprised by a vigorous sally from the
gate of San Pedro: the garrison, dashing out at three p.m., stormed
the three nearest breaching batteries, spiked their guns, and filled
in all the trenches which were advancing towards the foot of the
walls. Four days’ work was thus undone in an hour, and it was only
on September 19 that Verdier had reconstructed his works, and pushed
forward so far towards his objective that he considered an assault
possible. He then begged St. Cyr to lend him a brigade of fresh
troops, pleading that the siege-corps was now so weak in numbers,
and so demoralized by its losses, that he did not consider that the
men would do themselves justice at a storm. The losses of officers
had been fearful: one battalion was commanded by a lieutenant,
another had been reduced to fifty men; desertion was rampant among
several of the foreign corps. Of 14,000 infantry[48] of the French,
Westphalian, and Italian divisions less than 6,000 now remained. So
far as mere siegecraft went, as he explained to St. Cyr, ‘the affair
might be considered at an end. We have made four large practicable
breaches, each of them sufficient to reduce the town. But the troops
cannot be trusted.’ St. Cyr refused to lend a man for the assault,
writing with polite irony that ‘every general has his own task:
yours is to take Gerona with the resources placed at your disposal
by the government for that object, and the officers named by the
government to conduct the siege[49].’ He added that he considered,
from its past conduct, that the morale of the siege-corps was rather
good than bad. He should not, therefore, allow the covering army to
join the assault; but he would lend the whole of Pino’s division to
take charge of Monjuich and the camps, during the storm, and would
make a demonstration against the Mercadal, to distract the enemy
from the breaches. With this Verdier had to be content, and, after
making two final protests, concentrated all his brigades save those
of the Westphalian division, and composed with them four columns,
amounting to some 3,000 men, directing one against each of the four
breaches. That sent against the platform of San Cristobal was a mere
demonstration of 150 men, but the other three were heavy masses: the
Italians went against Santa Lucia, the French brigade against the
southern breach in the ‘Redoubt of the Germans,’ the Berg troops
against the northern one. A separate demonstration was made against
the Calvary fort, whose unsubdued fire still flanked the breaches, in
the hope that its defenders might be prevented from interfering in
the main struggle.
[48] Verdier did not exaggerate: see Appendix no. 2 at end of
this volume, showing that his three divisions had lost 8,161 men
out of 14,044 by September 15.
[49] See the acrid correspondence between St. Cyr and Verdier in
Appendices nos. 37-8, 40-6 of Belmas, vol. ii.
Alvarez, who had noted the French columns marching from all quarters
to take shelter, before the assault, in the trenches on the slopes
of Monjuich and in front of Pedret, had fair warning of what was
coming, and had done his best to provide against the danger. The
less important parts of the enceinte had been put in charge of
the citizens of the ‘Crusade,’ and the picked companies of every
regiment had been told off the breaches. The Englishman, Ralph
Marshall, was in charge of the curtain of Santa Lucia, William Nash,
the Spanish-Irish colonel of Ultonia, commanded at the two breaches
under La Gironella: Brigadier Fournas, the second-in-command of the
garrison, had general supervision of the defences; he had previously
taken charge of Monjuich during the great assault in August.
Everything had been done to prepare a second line of resistance
behind the breaches; barricades had been erected, houses loopholed,
and a great many marksmen disposed on roofs and church towers, which
looked down on the rear-side of the gaps in the wall.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of September 19 the three columns
destined for the northern breaches descended from Monjuich on the
side of San Daniel, crossed the Galligan, and plunged into the
hollow at the foot of the ‘Redoubt of the Germans.’ At the same
moment the fourth column started from the ruins of the tower of San
Juan to attack the curtain of Santa Lucia. The diversion against the
Calvary fort was made at the same moment, and beaten off in a few
minutes, so that the fire of this work was not neutralized during
the assault according to Verdier’s expectation. The main assault,
nevertheless, was delivered with great energy, despite the flanking
fire. At the two points of attack under La Gironella the stormers
twice won, crossed, and descended from the breach, forcing their
way into the ruined barracks behind. But they were mown down by the
terrible musketry fire from the houses, and finally expelled with
the bayonet. At the Santa Lucia curtain the Italians scaled the
breach, but were brought up by a perpendicular drop of twelve feet
behind it--the foot of the wall in this quarter chancing to be much
higher than the level of the street below. They held the crest of the
breach for some time, but were finally worsted in a long and furious
exchange of fire with the Spaniards on the roofs and churches before
them, and recoiled. The few surviving officers rallied the stormers,
and brought them up for a second assault, but at the end of two hours
of hard fighting all were constrained to retire to their trenches.
They had lost 624 killed and wounded, including three colonels (the
only three surviving in the whole of Verdier’s corps) and thirty
other officers. The Spanish loss had been 251, among them Colonel
Marshall, who was mortally wounded at his post on the Santa Lucia
front.
[Illustration: SIEGE OF GERONA]
Verdier accused his troops of cowardice, which seems to have been
unjust. St. Cyr wrote to the Minister of War to express his opinion
that his subordinate was making an excuse to cover his own error,
in judging that a town must fall merely because there were large
breaches in its walls[50]. ‘The columns stopped for ninety minutes
on the breaches under as heavy a fire as has ever been seen. There
was some disorder at the end, but that is not astonishing in view of
the heavy loss suffered before the retreat. I do not think that
picked grenadiers would have done any better, and I am convinced
that the assault failed because the obstacles to surmount were
too great.’ The fact was that the Spaniards had fought with such
admirable obstinacy, and had so well arranged their inner defences,
that it did not suffice that the breaches should have been perfectly
practicable. At the northern assault the stormers actually penetrated
into the buildings behind the gaps in the ruined wall, but could
not get further forward[51]. In short, the history of the siege of
Gerona gives a clear corroboration of the old military axiom that
no town should ever surrender merely because it has been breached,
and justifies Napoleon’s order that every governor who capitulated
without having stood at least one assault should be sent before a
court martial. It refutes the excuses of the too numerous commanders
who have surrendered merely because there was a practicable breach in
their walls, like Imaz at Badajoz in 1811. If all Spanish generals
had been as wary and as resolute as Mariano Alvarez, the Peninsular
War would have taken some unexpected turns. The moral of the defences
of Tarifa, Burgos, and San Sebastian will be found to be the same as
that of the defence of Gerona.
[50] ‘Il paraît que l’on a employé la ressource, malheureusement
trop usitée en pareil cas, de dire que les troupes n’ont pas fait
leur devoir, ce qui produit de justes réclamations de leur part.’
(St. Cyr to the Minister, Sept. 24, 1809.)
[51] The not unnatural suggestion that the German and Italian
troops may have failed to display such desperate courage as the
native French in the assault seems to be refuted by their losses,
which were hardly smaller in proportion. Of 1,430 native French
of the 7th and 56th Line and 32nd Léger, 328 were put out of
action; of 1,400 Berg, Würzburg, and Italian troops, 296. The
difference in the percentage is so small that it is clear that
there was no great difference in conduct.
The effect of the repulse of September 19 on the besieging army was
appalling. Verdier, after writing three venomous letters to the
Emperor, the War Minister, and Marshal Augereau[52], in which he
accused St. Cyr of having deliberately sacrificed the good of the
service to his personal resentments, declared himself invalided. He
then went off to Perpignan, though permission to depart was expressly
denied him by his superior: his divisional generals, Lecchi and
Morio, had already preceded him to France. Disgust at the failure of
the storm had the same effect on the rank and file: 1,200 men went
to the hospital in the fortnight that followed the assault, till by
October 1 the three divisions of the siege-corps numbered little more
than 4,000 bayonets--just enough to hold Monjuich and the camps by
the great dépôts at Pont Mayor and Sarria. The store of ammunition in
the park had been used up for the tremendous bombardment poured upon
the breaches from the 15th to the 17th of September. A new supply was
wanted from Perpignan, yet no troops could be detached to bring it
forward, for the miqueletes were again active, and on September 13
had captured or destroyed near Bascara a convoy guarded by so many as
500 men.
[52] See especially Verdier to Augereau, no. 53, and to the
Minister, no. 61, of Belmas’s Appendices.
St. Cyr, left in sole charge of the siege by Verdier’s departure,
came to the conclusion that it was useless to proceed with the attack
by means of trenches, batteries, and assaults, and frankly stated
that he should starve the town out, but waste no further lives on
active operations. He drew in the covering corps closer to Gerona, so
that it could take a practical part in the investment, put the wrecks
of Lecchi’s troops--of whom less than 1,000 survived--into Pino’s
division, and sent the French brigade of Verdier’s old division to
guard the line between Bascara and the Frontier. Thus the distinction
between the siege-corps and the covering troops ceased to exist, and
St. Cyr lay with some 16,000 men in a loose circle round Gerona,
intent not on prosecuting advances against the walls, but only on
preventing the introduction of further succours. He was aware that
acute privations were already being suffered by the Spaniards:
Garcia Conde’s convoy had brought in not much more than eight days’
provisions for the 5,000 men of the reinforced garrison and the
10,000 inhabitants who still survived. There was a considerable
amount of flour still left in store, but little else: meat, salt
and fresh, was all gone save horseflesh, for Alvarez had just begun
to butcher his draught horses and those of his single squadron of
cavalry. There was some small store of chocolate, tobacco, and
coffee, but wine and aguardiente had run out, so had salt, oil, rice,
and--what was most serious with autumn and winter approaching--wood
and charcoal. All the timbers of the houses destroyed by the
bombardment had been promptly used up, either for fortification or
for cooking[53]. Medical stores were wholly unobtainable: the chief
hospital had been burnt early in the siege, and the sick and wounded,
laid in vaults or casemates for safety, died off like flies in the
underground air. The seeds of pestilence were spread by the number
of dead bodies of men and animals which were lying where they could
not be reached, under the ruins of fallen houses. The spirit alike of
garrison and troops still ran high: the repulse of the great assault
of September 19, and the cessation of the bombardment for many days
after had encouraged them. But they were beginning to murmur more
and more bitterly against Blake: there was a general, if erroneous,
opinion that he ought to have risked a battle, instead of merely
throwing in provisions, on September 1. Alvarez himself shared this
view, and wrote in vigorous terms to the Junta of Catalonia, to ask
if his garrison was to perish slowly by famine.
[53] The very interesting list of the prices of commodities at
the commencement and the end of the siege, drawn up by Dr. Ruiz,
one of the Gerona diarists, may be found on p. 579 of Arteche’s
vol. vii. Note the following--the real (20 to the dollar) =
2½_d._ :--
_Reals._
_In June._ _In Sept._
Wheat flour, the qr. 80 112
Barleymeal, the qr. 30 56
Oatmeal, the qr. 48 80
Coffee, the lb. 8 24
Chocolate, the lb. 16 64
Oil, the measure 2½ 24
Salt fish, the lb. 2¼ 32
Cheese, the lb. 4 40
Wood, the arroba (32 lb.) 5 48
Charcoal, ditto 3½ 40
Tobacco, the lb. 24 100
A fowl 14 320
Rice, the lb. 1½ 32
Fresh fish from the Ter, the lb. 4 36
Thus while flour and meal had not doubled in value, coffee had
gone up threefold, chocolate and tobacco fourfold, cheese and
fuel tenfold, and the other commodities far more.
Blake responded by a second effort, less happily planned than that of
September 1. He called together his scattered divisions, now about
12,000 strong, and secretly concentrated them at La Bispal, between
Gerona and the sea. He had again got together some 1,200 mules
laden with foodstuffs, and a large drove of sheep and oxen. Henry
O’Donnell, an officer of the Ultonia regiment, who had been sent out
by Alvarez, marched at the head of the convoy with 2,000 picked men;
a division of 4,000 men under General Wimpfen followed close behind
to cover its rear. Blake, with the rest, remained at La Bispal: he
committed the egregious fault of omitting to threaten other parts of
the line of investment, so as to draw off St. Cyr’s attention from
the crucial point. He trusted to secrecy and sudden action, having
succeeded in concentrating his army without being discovered by the
French, who thought him still far away beyond Hostalrich. Thus it
came to pass that though O’Donnell struck sharply in, defeated an
Italian regiment near Castellar, and another three miles further on,
and reached the Constable fort with the head of the convoy, yet the
rest of Pino’s division and part of Souham’s concentrated upon his
flank and rear, because they were not drawn off by alarms in other
quarters. They broke in between O’Donnell and his supports, captured
all the convoy save 170 mules, and destroyed the leading regiment of
Wimpfen’s column, shooting also, according to the Spanish reports,
many scores of the unarmed peasants who were driving the beasts of
burden[54]. About 700 of Wimpfen’s men were taken prisoners, about
1,300 killed or wounded, for little quarter was given. The remnant
recoiled upon Blake, who fell back to Hostalrich next day, September
27, without offering to fight. The amount of food which reached the
garrison was trifling, and Alvarez declared that he had no need for
the additional mouths of O’Donnell’s four battalions, and refused to
admit them into the city. They lay encamped under the Capuchin fort
for some days, waiting for an opportunity to escape.
[54] See Toreno, ii, and Arteche, vii. 412.
After having thus wrecked Blake’s second attempt to succour Gerona,
and driven him from the neighbourhood, St. Cyr betook himself to
Perpignan, in order, as he explained to the Minister of War[55],
to hurry up provisions to the army at the front, and to compel
the officers at the base to send forward some 3,000 or 4,000
convalescents fit to march, whose services had been persistently
denied him[56]. Arrived there he heard that Augereau, whose gout
had long disappeared, was perfectly fit to take the field, and
could have done so long before if he had not preferred to shift on
to other shoulders the responsibility for the siege of Gerona. He
was, on October 1, at the baths of Molitg, ‘destroying the germs of
his malady’ as he gravely wrote to Paris,--amusing himself, as St.
Cyr maintains in his memoirs. Convinced that the siege had still a
long time to run, and eager to do an ill turn to the officer who had
intrigued to get his place, St. Cyr played on the Marshal precisely
the same trick that Verdier had played on himself a fortnight before.
He announced that he was indisposed, wrote to congratulate Augereau
on his convalescence, and to resign the command to his hands, and
departed to his home, without waiting for an answer, or obtaining
leave from Paris--a daring act, as Napoleon was enraged, and might
have treated him hardly. He was indeed put under arrest for a short
time.