not foreseen. The garrison was hopelessly demoralized, knew that
it must surrender, and did not see why it should expose itself to
another day’s bombardment for a lost cause. During the conference
in the casemate General d’Alorna and other Portuguese officers on
Masséna’s staff came out of the trenches, and boldly presented
themselves at the foot of the walls, calling to their compatriots
above and beseeching them to accept the good terms offered, and
not to risk their lives for Wellington, who would abandon them
just as he had abandoned Herrasti at Ciudad Rodrigo. The officers
on the ramparts ought to have driven the renegades away, by shots
if necessary; but, far from doing so, they entered into long
conversation with them and approved their arguments. D’Alorna
recognized some old acquaintances among the regulars, and pledged his
word to them that an assault was imminent, and that they were doomed
if they made any resistance. What was still more unlucky for Cox was
that the officer whom he sent out to the French camp to treat, Major
Barreiros of the artillery, was one of those who were most convinced
that further defence was fruitless; he divulged the hopeless state of
the place to the Marshal, and bade him press his attack without fear,
for the garrison would not fight. He himself remained at the French
head quarters, and did not return to Almeida. Masséna, therefore,
sent back a blank refusal of all Cox’s demands and conditions, and
ordered the bombardment to recommence at seven in the evening, while
approaches were thrown out from the second parallel towards the
ramparts. A feeble musketry fire alone replied.
The renewal of the bombardment speedily brought matters inside the
place to a head. A deputation of Portuguese officers, headed by
Bernardo Da Costa, the second in command, visited Cox and informed
him that further resistance was madness, and that if he did not at
once hoist the white flag they would open the gates to the enemy. The
Governor was forced to yield, and capitulated at eleven o’clock on
the night of the 27th. Masséna granted him the terms that the regular
troops should be sent as prisoners to France, while the three militia
regiments should be allowed to disperse to their homes, on giving
their parole not to serve again during the war.
On the morning of the 28th the garrison marched out, still 4,000
strong, its total loss during the siege having been some 600--nearly
all destroyed in the explosion. The French had lost fifty-eight
killed and 320 wounded during the operations. The capitulation was
no sooner ratified than it was violated: instead of dismissing
the militia and marching off the regulars towards France, Masséna
kept them together, and set the renegades d’Alorna and Pamplona to
tempt them to enter the French service. The officers were promised
confirmation of their rank, the men were invited to compare the
relative advantages of prison and of joining the victorious side
and keeping their liberty. The arguments of the traitors seemed to
prevail; almost the whole of the regulars and 600 of the militia
signified their consent to enlist with the enemy. The rest of the
militia were turned loose, but d’Alorna was able to organize a
brigade of three battalions to serve the Emperor as the ‘Second
Portuguese Legion[320].’ But the intentions of these docile recruits
were quite other than Masséna had supposed. They had changed their
allegiance merely in order to escape being sent to France, and while
left unguarded during the next three days, absconded in bands of 200
or 300 at a time, officers and all, and kept presenting themselves
at Silveira’s and Wellington’s outposts, for a week. The French,
undeceived too late, disarmed the few men remaining in the camp, who
were packed off to France, to rejoin Cox and the half-dozen officers
who had loyally refused to accept d’Alorna’s offers[321]. Wellington
had been somewhat alarmed when the first news of the adhesion of the
garrison to the French cause reached him, fearing that it implied
serious disaffection in the whole Portuguese army[322]. He was
soon undeceived on this point, as the troops gradually streamed in
to his camp[323]. But he was then seized with grave doubts as to
whether he could, consistently with military honour, accept the
service of these perjured but patriotic people. ‘It was well enough
for the private men, but highly disgraceful to the character of
the officers[324],’ he observed, and was pondering what should be
done, and proposing to cashier the officers, when he received a
proclamation from the Regency approving the conduct of the deserters
and restoring them to their place in the army. Finally he resolved
that, since Masséna had obviously broken the capitulation by his
action, it might be held that it was not binding on the prisoners,
and ordered the 24th Regiment to be re-formed at its head quarters
at Braganza. The militia he dismissed to their homes, on the scruple
that the French had let some, though not all of them, go free after
the capitulation[325]. There remained the problem of what was to be
done with the Portuguese officers who had played a treacherous part
on the 27th, especially Barreiros, the negotiator who had betrayed
the state of the town to Masséna, and Da Costa, who had headed the
mutinous deputation to Cox, which forced him to surrender. Finally,
their names were included with those of the officers who had served
on Masséna’s Portuguese staff during the campaign, in a great
indictment placed before a special commission on traitors (called a
_Junta de Inconfidencia_), which sat at Lisbon during the autumn. All
from d’Alorna downwards were declared guilty of high treason, and
condemned to death on December 22, 1810, but only two were caught and
executed--João de Mascarenhas, one of d’Alorna’s aides de camp, and
Da Costa, the lieutenant-governor of Almeida. The former was captured
by the Ordenança while carrying Masséna’s dispatches in 1810, and the
latter was apprehended in 1812; Mascarenhas died by the garotte, Da
Costa was shot. Of the others, some never returned to Portugal, the
others were pardoned at various dates between 1816 and 1820[326].
[320] The First Portuguese Legion, which served against Austria
in 1809, was composed of the troops drafted out of the Peninsula
by Junot in 1808 during his domination at Lisbon.
[321] D’Urban’s diary reports that 450 men and 18 officers of the
24th of the Line came in between the 2nd and 4th of September to
Silveira’s outposts; a still larger number reached Wellington’s.
[322] D’Urban has most gloomy remarks on the subject in his
diary, under the date Aug. 30.
[323] To Chas. Stuart, from Celorico, Aug. 31.
[324] To Chas. Stuart, from Celorico, Sept. 11.
[325] Wellington to Masséna, Sept. 24. ‘Votre excellence
s’est engagée que les officiers et les soldats de la milice
retourneraient chez eux: malgré cet engagement vous en avez
retenu 7 officiers et 200 soldats de chaque régiment, pour en
faire un corps de pionniers. La capitulation d’Almeida est donc
nulle, et je suis en droit d’en faire ce que je voudrais. Mais je
puis vous assurer qu’il n’y a pas un seul soldat de la milice qui
était en Almeida au service.’
[326] For details of all this, including the curious terms of
the Portuguese sentence for high treason, see Soriano da Luz,
iii. 80-109, and 719-22. The attempts to exculpate Barreiros seem
inadequate. Da Costa was shot, not for treason, but for cowardice
and mutiny.
During the siege of Almeida, the British army had been held in a
position somewhat less advanced and more concentrated than that
which it had occupied in July. Wellington had brought back his head
quarters from Alverca to Celorico, where he had the Light Division
under his hand. A few miles behind, on the high-road running down
the south bank of the Mondego, was the 1st Division, at Villa
Cortes. Picton and the 3rd Division had been drawn back from Pinhel
to Carapichina, but Cole and the 4th remained firm at Guarda. The
Portuguese brigades of Coleman and A. Campbell were at Pinhanços,
that of Pack at Jegua. The whole of the cavalry had come up from the
rear to join the brigade that had recently operated under Craufurd’s
orders. They now lay in a thick line of six regiments from in front
of Guarda, through Alverca and Freixadas to Lamegal. Thus the whole
army was concentrated on a short front of fifteen miles, covering the
watershed between the Coa and the Mondego, and the bifurcation of the
roads which start from Celorico, down the two banks of the last-named
river. The French held back, close to Almeida, with a strong advance
guard at Pinhel, and occasionally raided the low country towards the
Douro, in the direction of Villanova de Fosboa and Castel Rodrigo.
About August 19 Wellington moved forward a day’s march, the front of
his infantry columns being pushed up to Alverca and Freixadas, on a
false rumour that Masséna was leaving the 6th Corps unsupported at
Almeida, and had drawn back Junot into the plains of Leon. If this
had been the case, Wellington intended to make a push to relieve
the besieged fortress. But he soon discovered that the report was
baseless, and that the 8th Corps was still on the Azava and the
Agueda, wherefore he halted, and was still lying twelve miles in
front of Celorico when the noise of the explosion at Almeida, and the
cessation of fire on the next day, betrayed the fact that the place
had fallen, and that there was no longer any reason for maintaining
a forward position. On the night of the 28th, therefore, the whole
army was drawn back once more to the strong line between Guarda and
Celorico, and arrangements were made for a further retreat, in case
the French should follow up the capture of Almeida by an instant and
general advance. Masséna seemed at first likely to make this move:
on September 2 a brigade of infantry and 1,200 horse drove in the
British cavalry outposts to Maçal de Chão only five miles in front
of Celorico. Looking upon this as the commencement of the serious
invasion of Portugal, Wellington sent back his infantry to Villa
Cortes, Pinhanços, and Moita, far down the high-road on the south of
the Mondego, and bade Cole draw in the 4th Division from Guarda to
San Martinho, under the north side of the Serra da Estrella. Only
cavalry were left at, and in front of, Celorico and Guarda. This
retreat shows that Wellington was fully convinced that the French
would advance along the high-road to the south of the Mondego, where
he intended to stand at bay on the Alva, behind the entrenchments of
Ponte de Murcella.
The main point of interest at this moment was the movements of
the French 2nd Corps, which still lay in cantonments at Zarza and
Coria in front of Hill. Guarda being no longer held in force, it
was clear that Hill could not safely join the main army by the
road Atalaya-Fundão-Guarda, if Reynier moved up by the Pass of
Perales to Alfayates and Sabugal. Wellington began an anxious daily
correspondence with Hill, giving him a new line of march by Sobreira
Formosa, Villa d’el Rei and Espinhal, for his junction, but ordering
him to be sure that he did not move till Reynier had thoroughly
committed himself to the transference of his whole force to the north
of the Sierra de Gata. For it would be disastrous if feints should
induce the British detaining force to leave Villa Velha and Abrantes
uncovered, and Reynier should turn out to have selected them as his
objective, and to be meditating an invasion along the Castello Branco
line[327]. It was even possible, though not likely, that Masséna
might bring up the 6th and 8th Corps to join Reynier, instead of
bringing Reynier across the mountains to join them[328]. But every
contingency had to be provided against, the unlikely ones as well as
the likely. As a corollary to Hill’s march, that of Leith had also
to be arranged; he must wait at Thomar till it was certain that the
2nd Corps had moved, but the moment that certainty was obtained, must
march for Ponte de Murcella, and join the main army, if the French
had gone north, but support Hill on the Castello Branco road if they
had taken the other, and less probable, course.
[327] See Wellington to Hill of Aug. 31, Sept. 1, Sept. 4, Sept.
6. The Commander-in-Chief was much worried by a false rumour that
Reynier was already in force at Sabugal on Aug. 31, and then by
an equally false one that the whole 2nd Corps had marched south
towards the Tagus, and was about to cross it near Alcantara (see
the letter to La Romana of Sept. 6). As a matter of fact, Reynier
made no definite move from Zarza till Sept. 10, though he had
made feints, in both the directions indicated, with small forces.
[328] That this possibility was in Wellington’s mind is shown
by the letter to La Romana of Sept. 6, from Gouvea, in which he
writes, ‘Vous aurez appris les mouvements du corps de Regnier de
la part du Général Hill. Ou l’ennemi va faire le mouvement sur
notre droite (dont je vous ai écrit) ou il va faire le siège de
Badajoz. On dit que du canon a passé d’Almeida à Sabugal, et de
là vers Regnier, mais je ne sais pas si c’est vrai, ou si c’est
du canon de siège.... Vous savez ce qu’il faut faire si on se met
entre nous deux, en passant le Tage à Villa Velha, ou au-dessous
de la jonction.’
NOTE ON ALMEIDA AND THE BRIDGE OF THE COA
The small circular town of Almeida has never recovered from the
disaster of 1810. The population does not fill up the area within
the walls: open spaces are frequent, and some of the more important
buildings--especially the old palace of the governor--stand in ruins.
Others show solid seventeenth- or eighteenth-century masonry on
the ground floor, and flimsy modern repairs above, where the upper
stories were blown away by the explosion. The cathedral has never
been properly rebuilt, and is a mere fragment. The railway passes
twelve miles south of Almeida, so that the place has had no chance
of recovery, and remains in a state of decay. The walls stand just
as they were left after Wellington’s hasty repairs in 1811. The vast
bomb-proof shelters repeatedly mentioned in narratives of the siege
are still visible, damp but intact. The surrounding country-side is a
low, rolling, treeless upland--the edge of the vast plains of Leon.
It contrasts very strongly with the hilly and picturesque scenery
that is reached when once the Coa has been passed.
From Almeida the ground slopes down sharply to the place of
Craufurd’s celebrated skirmish. The town is not visible after the
first mile of the descent towards the deep-sunk gorge through which
the Coa cuts its way. The high-road is very bad for artillery, being
steep, filled with great stones, and in many places shut in by high
banks, which tower above it and make it narrow. The sharp turn at the
end, where it descends to the river with a sudden twist, must have
been specially tiresome to a force with cavalry and guns, compelled
to a hasty retreat. All the slopes about the road are cut up into
small fields by high walls of undressed stone, without mortar,
such as are seen on Cotswold. The bridge is not visible till the
traveller approaching from Almeida has got down to the level of the
river: it is completely masked by the high fir-clad knoll described
in the text, so long as he is descending the slope above. From the
point where the road swerves aside, to avoid this knoll, there is
a rough goat-track down to the still invisible bridge, but this is
not available for guns, horses, or _formed_ infantry, only for men
scrambling individually.
The two-arched bridge is seventy yards long; it crosses the Coa
diagonally, with a curious twist in the middle, where there is a
little monument recording the reparation of the structure by John
VI, in the days after the war was over. There is no mention of
Craufurd’s fight in the inscription--only a laudation of the King.
The bridge crosses the river at a sort of gorge--the place where the
rocks on the two sides come nearest. Hence the stream runs under
it very fiercely, being constricted to far less than its normal
breadth. Up-stream the channel broadens and the passage looks much
less formidable, but for some distance on each side of the bridge the
river is very rapid, darting between rocks and boulders. The little
corner where the few French who passed the bridge found a small angle
of dead-ground can be easily identified. It was just to their right
after crossing. All the rest of the ground on the west bank could
be thoroughly searched by the British guns, which were placed a few
hundred yards up the road on the left hand, as well as by the fire of
the infantry ensconced among rocks and boulders above the bridge.
Of the French attacking force during the early part of the skirmish,
those who were on their left, nearest the river and opposite the
52nd, had far easier ground to cover than those on the right,
opposite the 43rd. It is not so high or rough, and less cut up by
stone walls. Hence the stress on the 52nd ought to have been the
heavier--yet they lost only 22 men to the 129 of the 43rd. The damage
to the latter must have been caused partly when the cavalry got in
among them, just as the retreat began, partly when they stormed the
knoll to cover the retreat of the 52nd.
The scene of the fight is most picturesque on a small scale--one of
the prettiest corners in Portugal, all rock, fir-trees, and rushing
water.--[Notes made on the spot on April 14, 1906.]
SECTION XX
OPERATIONS IN THE EAST AND SOUTH OF SPAIN DURING THE SPRING AND
SUMMER OF 1810
CHAPTER I
SUCHET AND AUGEREAU IN ARAGON, VALENCIA, AND CATALONIA, MARCH-JULY
1810
Though Suchet had successfully pacified the plains of Aragon during
the autumn of 1809, and though Augereau in the last month of that
year had received the surrender of the much-enduring garrison of
Gerona, the position of the French in North-Eastern Spain was still
far from satisfactory. It was not yet possible for the 3rd and the
7th Corps to combine their operations. While the broad strip of
territory in Western Catalonia reaching from the foot of the Pyrenees
to the sea--whose places of strength were Lerida, Tarragona, and
Tortosa--still remained intact, Augereau and Suchet could still
communicate only by the circuitous route through France: a letter
from Saragossa to Barcelona took a fortnight or more to arrive at
its destination. It was high time that they should endeavour to get
into touch with each other, by cutting through the Spanish line
of defence. Both of the corps-commanders had now a comparatively
free hand, and could assemble a considerable force for offensive
operations. Suchet’s position was the happier: he had no Spanish army
opposed to him at the moment. His only opponents were--to the West
the bold guerrillero Mina the Younger on the borders of Navarre; to
the South Villacampa with the dilapidated remains of his band on
the side of the Sierra de Albaracin and Molina; and to the East the
governor of Lerida, who kept a flying force under Colonel Perena on
foot between the Cinca and the Segre, for the encouragement of the
insurgents of Eastern Aragon. None of these three opponents could
do any serious mischief to the 3rd Corps, which had risen by the New
Year of 1810 to a strength of 24,000 men[329], now that its drafts
from France were beginning to arrive. Mina was the most tiresome
of the three: he was a young man of untiring energy, and kept the
borders of Navarre in a perpetual ferment, till he was finally put
down by mere force of numbers. For while Suchet sent a number of
columns under General Harispe to hunt him, Lagrange’s division of
the newly arrived 8th Corps came down from the side of Pampeluna,
and swept the valleys of the Arga and the Aragon from the other
quarter. Pursued from one refuge to another by 12,000 men, Mina ended
by bidding his followers disperse. He did not appear again as a
combatant till the 8th Corps had passed on into Castile in the month
of February 1810.
[329] Suchet in his _Mémoires_ (i. 77) says that in Jan. 1810 his
corps was only 20,000 strong. But the imperial muster-rolls show
that it had 23,000 _présents sous les armes_, besides 1,819 men
in hospital and 973 detached, in that month.
Villacampa and Perena being very weak adversaries, Suchet could now
dispose of the greater part of his corps for offensive operations.
Two lines of attack were open to him: the more natural and obvious
one was to attack Lerida or Tortosa, while Augereau and the 7th
Corps moved against them from the other side. This was Suchet’s own
intention, and he had received dispatches from Paris which approved
of the plan. But another objective was pointed out to him from
another quarter. It will be remembered that while King Joseph and
Soult were planning the details of their Andalusian expedition, one
of the schemes which they discussed was the use of the 3rd Corps
as a flanking detachment to cover their attack on Seville[330]:
it was to march on Valencia while Mortier marched on Badajoz. The
plan was rejected in favour of the direct frontal march against the
passes of the Sierra Morena. Nevertheless, when the defiles had been
passed, and the King had entered Cordova in triumph, he recurred to
his original scheme, and on January 27 Soult sent orders to Suchet
directing him to make a dash at Valencia, and assuring him that the
demoralization of the Spaniards was so great that he would probably
enter the city without meeting with much resistance. Similar orders,
as we have already seen, were sent to Ney, who was directed at the
same moment to make himself master of Ciudad Rodrigo[331], which
Soult and the King imagined to be likely to surrender at the first
summons.
[330] See p. 123 of this volume.
[331] See p. 222.
Suchet, though doubting (as he says) the wisdom of the plan of
campaign imposed upon him, prepared to obey, and concentrated 8,000
men, consisting of Laval’s division and half that of Musnier, at
Teruel, on the borders of Valencia, while Habert, with six battalions
more, was to move in a separate parallel column from Alcañiz, and to
strike down on to the sea-coast of Valencia by way of Morella. On
their way to Teruel some of Laval’s columns made a side-stroke at
Villacampa, and drove off his band into the mountains of New Castile.
The march on Valencia had already begun, when Suchet received at
Teruel, on March 1, the dispatch from the Emperor which announced to
him that the kingdom of Aragon had been made an independent ‘military
government’ under his charge[332], and that he was for the future to
take no orders from Madrid, but to seek all his instructions from
Paris. By the same dispatch Suchet was informed that the Emperor
approved of the plan for directing the 3rd Corps against Lerida and
the rear of Catalonia which he had himself always advocated. But
since Habert’s column had already disappeared in the mountains, and
could not be recalled, and since his own advanced guard had actually
crossed the borders of Valencia, Suchet thought that it was now too
late to turn back, and that he must endeavour to carry out Soult’s
orders, even though they were now countermanded by the Emperor.
Accordingly he marched by Sarrion, on the road which leads from
Teruel to Segorbe, and from thence to Murviedro on the Valencian
coast, where Habert was to join him.
[332] See p. 200.
The force opposed to Suchet was that Valencian army which the
governor--or rather the dictator--José Caro had so persistently
refused to lend to Blake in the preceding autumn for the relief
of Gerona. It was about 12,000 strong at the moment, and as some
nine months had elapsed since the disaster of Belchite, where the
Valencian troops had fared so badly, the regiments had been recruited
up to their old strength, and had been thoroughly reorganized and
re-equipped. Nevertheless, Caro did not wish to risk them in the
open field, and, when Suchet’s approach was reported to him, ordered
the troops to prepare to retreat within the walls of the city of
Valencia, which had been so successfully defended against Moncey
two years before. He was probably right in his decision: having no
great superiority of numbers over the French invading columns, he
would have been risking over much if he had offered battle on the
frontier, even in an advantageous position. Behind the fortifications
of Valencia, which had been improved and enlarged during the last two
years, he could at least be certain of making a long and formidable
resistance. If the enemy appeared without a great battering-train,
and unprepared for a regular siege, the garrison would be absolutely
safe. Accordingly, Caro sent out only a single brigade to observe and
retard Suchet’s advance: this force, assisted by some armed peasants,
tried to hold the defile of Alventosa against the French (March 4),
but was beaten out of the position with ease, lost four guns, and
retired by Segorbe and Murviedro on to Valencia, without offering
further resistance. Suchet, following in the wake of the Spanish
detachment, reached Murviedro on March 5, and there met Habert,
whose march by Morella and Castellon-de-la-Plana had been absolutely
unopposed.
A day later the French appeared in front of the fortifications of
Valencia. Having surveyed the outworks, and summoned the place in
vain, Suchet found that there was no more to be done. His bolt was
shot: the city intended to defend itself: it was full of troops,
and the whole population had been armed. Caro had given notice that
the defence was to be conducted in the style of Saragossa, and as
a foretaste of his intentions court-martialled and hanged several
persons who were accused of being traitors[333]. After lying four
days in front of Valencia, Suchet marched off again on the night of
March 10-11, having convinced himself that he had been sent on a
fool’s errand by Soult and King Joseph. For the expedition had only
been undertaken on the hypothesis that the enemy was demoralized
and ready to surrender--which was clearly not the case. No siege
train had been brought, and without heavy artillery Valencia was
impregnable. The retreat of the French was hastened by the fact
that their communications with Aragon had already been cut off.
Villacampa, undismayed by his defeat in February, had returned to
the front the moment that the invading columns had passed on to
the Valencian coast. He had blockaded the garrison of Teruel, cut
off two small columns which were moving in its neighbourhood, and
captured four guns and some 300 prisoners. At the same moment, though
Suchet was unaware of the fact, Colonel Perena, with a detachment
from Lerida, had made a demonstration against Monzon, and when the
garrison of Eastern Aragon concentrated to defend it, had fallen on
Fraga and burnt the bridge there--the only crossing of the Cinca
which was in French hands. Mina, too, warned of the departure of the
main body of the 3rd Corps for the South, had reassembled some of his
levies, and begun to render the road from Saragossa to Pampeluna once
more unsafe.
[333] Whether the Conde de Pozoblanco and the other persons
executed were really traitors is very doubtful. Napier takes them
as such (ii. 303), Suchet denies it (p. 100); Schepeler says
(iii. 627) that proclamations of King Joseph and treasonable
letters were found in the Count’s house. Toreno (ii. 124) remains
doubtful, but points out that Caro and Pozoblanco were old
enemies, and thinks that, at any rate, there was personal spite
in the matter.
Suchet, therefore, on withdrawing from Valencia, found plenty of
occupation awaiting him in Aragon. Villacampa was once more chased
into the wilds of the Sierra de Albaracin: and several columns
were detached in pursuit of Mina. This time the young partisan was
unfortunate--he was caught between one of Suchet’s detachments and
a party sent out by the governor of Navarre, and taken prisoner on
March 31, with some scores of his followers. His place, however, was
taken ere long by his uncle Espoz y Mina, who rallied the remnant of
the guerrilleros of North-Western Aragon, and continued the struggle
with an energy as great, and a success far greater, than that of his
nephew.
Meanwhile, the months of February and March had been wasted, so
far as the 3rd Corps was concerned, and it was not till April that
Suchet was able to take in hand the enterprise which he himself had
approved, and to which the Emperor had now given his consent--the
siege of Lerida. A few weeks after his return to Saragossa he
received from Paris two imperial letters denouncing his late
campaign as presumptuous, objectless, and altogether deserving of
high condemnation[334].
[334] Dated from Compiègne on April 9 and April 20. See
_Correspondance_, xx. 284 and 299.
While the Valencian expedition had been in progress Marshal Augereau
had been trying his hand at the Catalan problems which Verdier and
St. Cyr had found so puzzling. His luck had been bad--and his faults
had been many--for of all the commanders-in-chief who successively
endeavoured to subjugate the untameable principality he was decidedly
the least capable. When Gerona fell, the main body of his army was
let loose for operations in the open field. But Verdier’s divisions,
on whom the burden of the siege work had fallen, were in much too
dilapidated a condition for active service[335]. Leaving them
to recover their strength and gather up their convalescents, in
cantonments between Figueras and Gerona, Augereau moved southwards
in January, at the head of the troops of Souham and Pino, whose two
divisions still counted 12,000 bayonets with the eagles, though
they left behind them 5,000 sick in the hospitals of Figueras and
Perpignan.
[335] In January, Verdier’s French and Westphalian divisions
could only show 6,000 men in line and 7,000 in hospital. Muster
roll of Jan. 15 in the _Archives Nationaux_.
The Marshal’s main duty at this moment was to clear the road from
Figueras to Barcelona, which the Spanish fortress of Gerona had so
effectually blocked during the whole year 1809. All further advances
were suspended till this operation should have been completed, by
the Emperor’s special orders. Duhesme, indeed, isolated in Barcelona
with some 6,000 men, communicating with France only by sea, and
surrounded by a discontented population, which was reduced to
semi-starvation by the blockade kept up by the British fleet, was in
a perilous condition. There had been many who thought that if Blake,
in October 1809, had marched against Barcelona instead of trying to
throw succours into Gerona, he would have forced Augereau to abandon
the siege of the latter place. For Duhesme would have been in such
danger, since he was neither strong enough to fight in the open nor
to man efficiently the immense circuit of the walls of Barcelona,
that Augereau might probably have judged that it was better to save
the capital of Catalonia than to continue the interminable blockade
of the smaller town that was holding out so obstinately against
him. Be this as it may, Augereau set Souham’s and Pino’s columns
on the march early in January 1810, after having first executed at
their head a sort of _battue_ of the _somatenes_ of the mountains
around Gerona, as far as Ripol and Campredon. His progress was a
reign of terror: he had issued on December 28th a proclamation
stating that all irregulars taken with arms in their hands were to
be treated as simple highway robbers, and hung without any form of
trial[336]. He was as good as his word, and all the prisoners taken
by the flying columns of Souham and Pino were suspended on a line
of gallows erected on the high-road between Gerona and Figueras.
These atrocities turned the war in Catalonia into a struggle even
more ferocious than that of 1809, for the natives, very naturally,
retaliated upon every French straggler that they caught, and the
Spanish regular officers had great difficulty in saving the lives
even of large bodies who had laid down their arms upon formal terms
of surrender.
[336] The text of this bloodthirsty document may be found
in Belmas, i. 429. There are details of its execution in
Barckhausen, who mentions that several priests were among the
victims.
Two roads lead from Gerona and the valley of the Ter to
Barcelona--that by Vich and that by Hostalrich. They unite near
Granollers, twenty miles outside Barcelona. Augereau marched with the
Italian division of Pino by the second road, while he sent Souham by
the other. Both met with opposition: the small castle of Hostalrich
was still held by the Spaniards--it was the only fortified place in
central Catalonia which was now in their hands, and commanded, though
it did not actually block, the main road to Barcelona. On arriving
before it, the Marshal ordered Mazzuchelli’s Italian brigade to form
the siege, trusting that the place would fall in a few days; but
finding the resistance more serious than he had expected, he finally
continued his march, with the remainder of the Italian division,
towards Granollers and Barcelona. He had ordered Duhesme to come out
to meet him at the former place, with as many of his troops as he
could spare from garrison duty.
[Illustration: CATALONIA]
Souham meanwhile, on the eastern road, had entered Vich on January
11. He found that it had just been evacuated by the main body of the
Spanish Army of Catalonia, whose head quarters had been maintained
in that town all through the later months of the siege of Gerona.
This force, still numbering about 7,000 men, was no longer under the
command of its old general. Blake had resigned at Christmastide,
after a lively altercation with the Junta of Catalonia, who laid the
blame for the fall of Gerona on his shoulders, while he maintained
that they were to blame for not having ordered the general _levée
en masse_ of the principality at an earlier date[337]. The command
then passed in quick succession to the two senior general officers of
the Catalan army, first to the Marquis of Portago, and then, after
he had fallen ill, to General Garcia Conde, Governor of Lerida. But
these interim commanders-in-chief were replaced in a few weeks by a
younger and much more active leader, Henry O’Donnell--the man who had
conducted the second convoy for Gerona, and had cut his way out of
the place with such splendid address and resolution. He had only just
been raised to the rank of Major-General, yet was now entrusted by
the Central Junta with the control of the entire army of Catalonia.
As he was setting to work to reorganize it, Souham arrived in front
of his head quarters. Judging it unwise to offer battle at the head
of demoralized troops, O’Donnell evacuated Vich, and fell back to the
mountains above it. Souham followed him with an advanced guard as far
as the pass called the Col de Suspina, where the Spaniard suddenly
turned upon the pursuing force, and hurled it back with loss upon the
main body of the division (January 12, 1810). He refused, however,
to face Souham next day, and retreated towards Manresa; thereupon
the French general also turned back, thinking it profitless to leave
the Vich-Barcelona road, and to plunge into the hills in pursuit of
an evasive enemy. He ended by making his way across the mountains to
join the Marshal.
[337] See pp. 62, 63 of this volume.
Meanwhile, Augereau, with Pino’s Italian brigades, reached
Granollers, and came into touch with Duhesme’s troops, just in time
to find that a disaster had preceded his arrival. The Governor of
Barcelona, in obedience to the orders sent him, had marched out on
January 16 with three battalions and 250 cuirassiers in order to meet
the Marshal. He waited four days at Granollers, and then left the
brigade under the charge of Colonel Guétry, and returned in person
to Barcelona, recalled by rumours of a threatened attack from the
side of Tarragona. On the morning after his departure Guétry’s force,
which believed itself in complete security, was suddenly surprised in
its camps by a detachment sent out by O’Donnell. That enterprising
officer had heard that Augereau was still twenty miles away, and
that Guétry had scattered his men in the three villages of Santa
Perpetua, Mollet, and Granollers, in order to cover them from the
bitter January weather. Accordingly, he resolved to risk an attack
on this unwary detachment. Two brigades--about 4,000 men--under the
Marquis of Campo Verde, made a forced march across the mountains,
and fell upon the villages at dawn. The battalion of the 112th in
Santa Perpetua was completely cut to pieces or captured--only two
men are said to have escaped. The 7th and the cuirassiers at Mollet
fared somewhat better, but were driven back to Barcelona with heavy
loss. Part of the third battalion, one of the 5th Italian Line
regiment, which was posted at Granollers, escaped destruction by
throwing itself into a fortified convent, and held out for two days,
till it was saved by the approach of Augereau along the high-road.
Altogether, Duhesme’s division was thinned by the loss of 1,000 men
on January 21-22: Guétry had been taken prisoner, with some 600 men
more and two guns. The Spaniards disappeared the moment that Augereau
came in sight, and rejoined O’Donnell in the hills.
Augereau entered Barcelona on the twenty-fourth, and at once
asserted his authority by deposing Duhesme from the governorship and
sending him home to France. They were old enemies, and the general’s
friends regarded his disgrace as a display of spite on the part of
his superior[338]. But as all the Spanish narratives describe the
eighteen-months’ dictatorship of Duhesme as having been as much
distinguished for private rapacity as for public oppression, it
is probable that the Marshal’s action was wholly justifiable. The
Emperor, however, refused to sanction the prosecution of the general
on the charges laid against him, remarking that such proceedings
would give too much pleasure to the Catalans, ‘il y avait bien autre
chose à faire que de réjouir les Espagnols par cette réaction[339].’
[338] Duhesme, or the friend writing under his name, gives
himself most handsome and unconvincing testimonials in the
narrative printed in 1823, as part of the _Mémoires sur la Guerre
d’Espagne_. They contrast strangely with Arteche’s quotations
from Barcelonese local writers.
[339] Napoleon to Clarke, Compiègne, April 24, 1810.
Having concentrated Pino’s and Souham’s troops at Barcelona, Augereau
would have proceeded to advance against the Catalans, and lay siege
to Tarragona, but for one fact--the magazines of the city were almost
empty, and no food could be procured for the army. Indeed, after a
very few days it was necessary for the Marshal to retrace his steps,
in order to bring up an enormous convoy for the revictualling of
the place, which was being collected at Perpignan and Figueras.
All that he had done by his march was to open up the road, and to
muzzle the fortress of Hostalrich, which was still being blockaded by
the Italians. Accordingly, on February 1 his two divisions marched
back each by the way that it had originally taken--Souham to Vich,
where he halted, Pino to Gerona, where the convoy began presently
to gather, escorted thither in detachments by a large body of
reinforcements which had just come up from France. For the Emperor
had strengthened the Army of Catalonia by a division of troops of the
Confederation of the Rhine, under General Rouyer, and by a Neapolitan
brigade--some 8,000 men in all. But the long train of carts and mules
came in slowly, and March began before Augereau was ready to move.
Meanwhile, his lieutenant Souham had been exposed to a sudden and
unexpected peril. O’Donnell had discovered that the division at Vich
was completely isolated and did not count much more than 5,000 sabres
and bayonets. Having reorganized his own field army at Moya, near
Manresa, and brought it up to a strength of 7,000 foot and 500 horse
by calling a few troops from Tarragona, he directed the somatenes
of Northern Catalonia to muster on the other side of Vich, so as to
fall on Souham from the rear. The indefatigable miquelete leaders
Rovira and Milans got together between 3,000 and 4,000 men, despite
of all their previous losses and defeats. On February 19 these levies
thrust in the pickets of the French division on the eastern side,
but Souham did not see his danger till, on the following morning, he
found O’Donnell’s regular troops pouring down into the plain of Vich
in three columns, and challenging him to a battle in the open. Since
the day of Valls the Catalan army had never tried such a bold stroke.
The French general was greatly outnumbered--he had but 4,000 infantry
and 1,200 horse to oppose to O’Donnell’s 7,500 regulars and the
3,500 miqueletes. The action fell into two separate parts--while
Rovira and Milans bickered with two battalions left to guard the
town of Vich, Souham fought a pitched battle against the Spanish
main body with the eight battalions and two and a half regiments of
cavalry[340] which constituted the remainder of his force. It was a
fierce and well-contested fight: O’Donnell took the offensive, and
his men displayed an unwonted vigour and initiative. Unhappily for
this enterprising general his small body of horsemen was utterly
unable to restrain or to cope with the superior French cavalry. Twice
the battle was turned by the charge of Souham’s squadrons: after the
first repulse O’Donnell rallied his beaten right wing, threw in all
his reserves, and tried to outflank the shorter French line on both
sides. The enemy was losing heavily and showing signs of yielding,
when the whole of his cavalry made a second desperate charge on the
Spanish right. It was completely successful; O’Donnell’s turning
column, composed of the Swiss regiments of Kayser[341] and Traxler,
was broken, and the larger part of it captured. Thereupon, the
Spanish general, who had displayed undaunted courage throughout the
day, and headed several charges in person, thought it time to retire.
He fell back on the mountains, leaving behind him 800 killed and
wounded, and 1,000 prisoners. The French had suffered at least 600
casualties[342], including Souham himself, desperately wounded in
the head, and had been within an ace of destruction: but for their
superiority in cavalry, the day was lost.
[340] 1st Léger (three batts.), 42nd Ligne (three batts.), 93rd
Ligne (one batt.), and 7th Ligne (one batt.). Meanwhile the
other battalion of the 7th Ligne and that of the 3rd Léger were
holding back the miqueletes. The cavalry were the 24th Dragoons,
3rd Provisional Chasseurs (soon afterwards rechristened the 29th
Chasseurs), and half the Italian ‘Dragoons of Napoleon.’
[341] This regiment had been formed on the ‘cadre’ of the old
Swiss regiment of Beschard, by means of deserters from the German
and Italian troops of the French Army of Catalonia.
[342] Martinien’s lists show 29 officers killed and wounded,
which, at the usual rate, presupposes about 600 or 700
casualties. Napier, Schepeler, and Arteche all three state the
French loss at 1,000 or 1,200--evidently too high.
On March 13, Augereau had at last collected his vast convoy at
Gerona--there were more than a thousand waggons laden with flour,
besides pack-mules, caissons, carriages, and other vehicles of all
sorts. He marched in person to escort it, with the Italians--who were
now under Severoli, Pino having gone home on leave,--and the newly
arrived German division of Rouyer. Verdier was left behind--as in
January--to defend the Ampurdam from the incursions of the miqueletes
of Rovira and Milans. Meanwhile, Souham’s division, which had passed
into the hands of General Augereau, the Marshal’s brother, since
its old chief had been invalided to France, pursued a line of march
parallel to that of the main force. Moving from Vich by the Col de
Suspina and Manresa, it came down into the valley of the Llobregat,
on the same day that Pino’s and Rouyer’s troops reached it by the
other route. The Marshal and the main column had made their way past
Hostalrich, which was found still unsubdued, and still blockaded by
Mazzuchelli’s brigade, which had been left opposite it in January.
These troops were ordered to join their division, a mixed detachment
under Colonel Devaux being left in their stead to watch the castle.
The Marshal then took up his residence in the palace at Barcelona,
and had himself proclaimed Governor of Catalonia with great state,
in consonance with the imperial decree of February 8, which had
taken the principality out of the hands of King Joseph, and made its
administrator responsible to Paris alone, and not to Madrid.
Augereau established himself permanently at Barcelona, and proceeded
during the next two months to act rather as a viceroy than as a
commander-in-chief. The conduct of military operations he handed
over to his brother, to the unbounded disgust of the other generals.
In what proportions the responsibility for the disasters which
followed should be distributed between the two Augereaus it is hard
to say. But Napoleon, very naturally and reasonably, placed it on
the Marshal’s shoulders, and wrote that ‘Ce n’est point en restant
dans les capitales éloignées de l’armée que des généraux en chef
peuvent acquérir de la gloire ou mériter mon estime[343].’ The force
assembled on the Llobregat was now a very large one, consisting of
three divisions, those of Augereau, Severoli, and Rouyer. It numbered
nearly 20,000 men, for along with the convoy there had marched a mass
of drafts for the old regiments of the 7th Corps, which brought their
battalions up to full strength[344].
[343] _Correspondance_, 16411. From Compiègne, 24 April, 1810.
[344] Severoli’s division alone numbered 6,900 foot and 900
horse, at the moment.
There were only two rational plans of campaign open to the French:
the one was to march on Tarragona with a siege-train, and to
complete the conquest of Catalonia by the capture of its greatest
fortress. The other was to mask Tarragona, and to strike across
the principality westward, in order to get into communication with
Suchet and the Army of Aragon, by way of Igualada, Cervera, and
Lerida. If the two corps could meet, Northern Catalonia would be
completely isolated from Tarragona, Tortosa, and Valencia. It was
this latter plan which Augereau had been ordered to carry out by
his master. He was directed to march on Lerida, and to join Suchet
before that place. By a dispatch of February 19 he had been informed
that on March 1 the Army of Aragon would have arrived before Lerida,
and would be forming its siege[345]. This prophecy was false: for
Suchet, as we have seen, had gone off on his Valencian expedition,
and was at Teruel on the appointed day. It was impossible to direct
from Paris a combined movement depending on accurate timing for its
success. But Augereau should have attempted to carry out the order
sent him by his master with proper zeal and dispatch. This he failed
to do: his own inclination was to strike a blow at Tarragona, and the
movements of his corps show that this was the operation which he had
determined to carry out. Instead of marching in person with his main
body, on Cervera and Lerida, he directed his brother to take his own
and Severoli’s divisions and to move by Villafranca on Reus, a large
town twelve miles to the north-west of Tarragona, and suitable as
a base of operations against that city (March 29). A battalion and
a half was dropped at Villafranca, to keep open the communications
between Reus and Barcelona, while a brigade of Rouyer’s newly arrived
Germans, under the ever-unlucky Schwartz--the vanquished of Bruch and
Esparraguera[346]--was placed as a sort of flank-guard at Manresa.
On March 27 a summons was sent in to Tarragona demanding surrender.
This was, of course, refused--the town was full of troops, for Henry
O’Donnell had just strengthened its garrison by retiring into it
himself, with the 6,000 men who represented the remains of his field
army.
[345] Napoleon to Clarke, Feb. 19, from Paris. Cf. another
dispatch of Feb. 26, no. 16294 of the _Correspondance_.
[346] See vol. i. pp. 309-11.
The Spanish general, contemplating the position of affairs with a
wary eye, had convinced himself that he could stop General Augereau’s
further movements by striking at his line of communication with
Barcelona. This he proceeded to do in the most skilful and successful
fashion. Before the enemy closed in upon Tarragona, he sent out
a picked force under General Juan Caro, with orders to attack
Villafranca and Manresa without a moment’s delay. This daring stroke
was completely successful: Caro stormed Villafranca at dawn on March
30, and took or captured the whole of the 800 men posted there. He
was wounded, and had to hand over his command to Campo Verde, who,
after some preliminary skirmishing lasting for three days, completed
the little campaign by driving Schwartz out of Manresa, after a heavy
fight, on April 5, in which the German brigade lost 30 officers and
800 men[347]. The somatenes turned out to hunt the routed force as
it retired on Barcelona, and inflicted many further losses, so that
Schwartz only brought back a third of his brigade to the Marshal.
[347] The Lippe-Bückeburg officer Barckhausen says in his diary
that only 20 officers and 620 men were lost. But Martinien’s
lists show 30 officers of the Nassau, ducal Saxon, and
Anhalt-Lippe regiments killed or wounded at or near Manresa on
the 2nd-5th of April.
The touch between the two divisions at Reus and the garrison of
Barcelona was thus completely severed. Moreover, Augereau feared
lest the next move of the raiding force might be an attack on the
isolated force under Colonel Devaux which was blockading Hostalrich.
He therefore sent out a brig with one of his aides-de-camp on
board, bearing orders to his brother and Severoli to return at
once to his head quarters with their troops. By good fortune the
messenger reached his destination without being intercepted by
English cruisers, and the two divisions started on their march back
to Barcelona on April 7. Only two days before, Severoli, more by
luck than by skill, had got for a moment into touch with the Army
of Aragon. An exploring column of two battalions under Colonel
Villatte, which he had sent out westward to Falcet, in the direction
of the Ebro, met--entirely by chance--a similar detachment of
Musnier’s division of the 3rd Corps, which had advanced to Mora. On
interchanging news of their respective armies, Villatte learnt from
his colleague that Suchet was at this moment marching on Lerida,
where, according to the Emperor’s instructions to Marshal Augereau,
he ought to have arrived more than a month before. Villatte brought
back the information to Severoli, but the latter could make no
use of it while he was under orders to return without delay to
Barcelona[348]. He and General Augereau accomplished their retreat
in three days, much harassed on the way, not only by the somatenes
of the mountains but also by O’Donnell, who followed them with
a detachment of the garrison of Tarragona. They took some small
revenge on him, however, at Villafranca, where they turned on the
pursuers and inflicted a sharp check on their advanced guard, which
was pressing in, with more courage than discretion, on a force which
outnumbered it by four to one. On April 9 the whole army was encamped
outside the walls of Barcelona. Counting the garrison, Augereau
had now more than 20,000 men in hand, but, not contented with this
concentration, he sent orders back to the Ampurdam, ordering Verdier
to bring forward as many troops as possible to Gerona, and from
thence to push forward down the high-road as far as Granollers, so
as to succour Devaux, if the Spaniards should show any intention of
relieving Hostalrich.
[348] For details of Villatte’s expedition see Vacani, iv. 140-1.
The Marshal’s next move lost him the favour of Napoleon, and led to
his removal in disgrace to Paris. On April 11 he issued orders to
Severoli to march on Hostalrich, and there to take over the conduct
of the siege from Devaux, while at the same time he himself moved
back to Gerona with his brother’s French division, and an immense
train, consisting partly of the empty carts of the convoy which he
had brought south in March, partly of confiscated property of all
sorts from Barcelona[349]. Augereau’s excuse for this retrograde
movement, which abandoned all Central Catalonia to the enemy, was
that his army would have exhausted the magazines of Barcelona if
he had kept it concentrated for ten days more, and that he had
no other way of feeding it, since the activity of the somatenes
made the dispatch of foraging detachments utterly impossible. The
moral effect of the move was deplorable: after taking in hand an
offensive movement against Tarragona, he had allowed himself to be
checked by an enemy hopelessly inferior in numbers, had lost over
3,000 men in petty combats, and then had retired to the base from
which he had started in January. Three months had been wasted, and
nothing had been gained save that the small castle of Hostalrich
was now in a desperate condition for want of food, and must fall if
not speedily succoured. What rendered the position of Augereau the
more shameful was that he had now in front of him only a skeleton
enemy. For O’Donnell at this moment was distracted by the advance
of Suchet against Lerida, and had been forced to draw off towards
the borders of Aragon two of the four divisions into which he had
reorganized his little field army. Facing Augereau there was only
Campo Verde’s division of regulars--not over 5,000 strong--and the
bands of the mountains. It was against such an enemy that the Marshal
had concentrated 25,000 men--including Verdier’s force--between
Hostalrich and Gerona.
[349] According to Spanish accounts this included much ill-gotten
property belonging to the Marshal himself, and other superior
officers. Ferrer (see Arteche, viii. 203) declares that Augereau
carried off all the furniture of the Royal Palace.
The food-problem, on which those who defend Augereau lay all the
stress possible[350], was no doubt a very real one. The feeding
of Barcelona, with its garrison and its large civil population, by
means of convoys brought from France, was no easy task. But it seems
clear that with the large force at his disposition--the 7th Corps was
over 50,000 strong[351]--Augereau could have organized convoy-guards
sufficiently powerful to defy the Spaniards, without abandoning the
offensive position in front of Barcelona, which was all-important to
him. He might have set aside 10,000 men for that purpose, and still
have kept a strong field army together. Had he done so, O’Donnell
could not have dared to march with 8,000 men, the pick of the Catalan
army, to relieve Lerida, while his old enemies were massed, awaiting
an impossible attack, a hundred miles away.
[350] For a defence of the Marshal on these lines, see _Victoires
et Conquêtes_, vol. xx. pp. 52-3.
[351] About 56,000 in all, but 10,000 were in hospital or
detached.
Meanwhile, the one task which was completed by the 7th Corps during
the months of April and May was the reduction of Hostalrich. The
little castle was a place of strength, perched high above the
abandoned town to which it belonged. It was garrisoned by two
battalions, one of Granadan regulars from Reding’s old division, the
other of local Catalan levies[352], under Colonel Juliano Estrada,
an officer of high spirit and commendable obstinacy. To the first
summons made to him in January by Augereau, he had replied that
‘Hostalrich was the child of Gerona, and would know how to emulate
the conduct of the mother-city.’ Nor was this high-flown epigram
belied by the after-conduct of the garrison. Hostalrich held out from
January 16 to May 12 without receiving either a convoy from without
or any reinforcements. Twice the local miqueletes attempted to pass
succours into the castle, but on each occasion they were driven off,
after having barely succeeded in communicating with Estrada. Their
convoys never got close enough to enter the gates. At last, on May
12, the provisions of the place were completely exhausted: thereupon
Estrada took in hand a scheme which was only tried by one other
governor during the whole Peninsular War--the Frenchman Brennier at
Almeida in May 1811. He put every able-bodied man of the garrison
under arms at midnight, issued silently from the castle, and
charged at the besiegers’ lines, with the intention of cutting his
way through to Campo Verde’s head quarters in the mountains. He was
fortunate enough to pierce the Italian outposts at the first rush.
But two whole brigades were presently at his heels, his guides lost
their way among cliffs and ravines, and he was overtaken. Turning
back with his rearguard to fend off the pursuers, he was wounded and
taken prisoner. Ten other officers and some 300 soldiers shared his
fate: the rest of the garrison dispersed in the hills, and reached
Vich in small parties to the number of 800 men. If only their gallant
commander had escaped with them, the exploit would have been an exact
parallel to the Almeida sortie of 1811.
[352] One battalion of Iliberia (or 1st of Granada) and one
tercio of levies from the province of Gerona: total strength
about 1,200 bayonets.
The reduction of Hostalrich and of a small fort on the Isles of Las
Medas near the mouth of the Ter, were the last achievements of the
Army of Catalonia while it was under the command of Augereau. On
April 24 the Emperor had resolved to remove him from his post, and
had ordered Marshal Macdonald, Duke of Tarentum, to relieve him.
In the _Moniteur_ it was merely stated that the elder Marshal had
been forced by ill-health to resign his charge. But the real causes
of his displacement are plainly stated in Napoleon’s letter to
the Minister of War. They were the blow which he had given to the
imperial prestige by his retreat to Gerona, and his disobedience
in having failed to march on Lerida in aid of Suchet. It must be
confessed that the wrath of the Emperor was justifiably roused. Its
final manifestation took the shape of a minute directing that when
the _Moniteur_ published the news of the successes at Hostalrich and
Las Medas, the name of Augereau was to be kept out of the paragraph,
and only those of his subordinates mentioned[353].
[353] See _Correspondance_, 16411, Napoleon to Clarke, of April
24, and 16500, same to same of May 23.
While the new commander of the 7th Corps was on his way from Italy
to Perpignan, and for some time after his arrival on May 22, there
was a complete suspension of active operations. None of the French
generals in the principality could do more than await orders, and
keep the neighbourhood of his cantonments safe from the irrepressible
miqueletes. The whole interest of the French operations in
North-Western Spain during this period turns on the movements of the
Army of Aragon.
On returning from his futile Valencian expedition, Suchet had found
awaiting him at Saragossa orders to commence without delay the siege
of Lerida, and promising that Augereau would ‘contain’ the Spanish
army of Catalonia, and would ultimately open up communication with
him by way of Cervera or Momblanch. In obedience to the imperial
mandate, the commander of the 3rd Corps collected more than half
his troops for the expedition against Lerida. This concentration
entailed the abandonment of the rough country of Southern Aragon to
Villacampa and his bands; for having determined to leave only Laval’s
division behind him to protect the central parts of the province,
Suchet had to evacuate the region of Teruel, Albaracin and Montalvan.
Laval’s two brigades remained in the valley of the Jiloca, between
Saragossa and Daroca, watching the debouches from the mountains.
The other two divisions of the Army of Aragon were destined for the
siege of Lerida. Musnier, with one column, marching down from Caspe
and Alcañiz[354], crossed the Ebro at Flix, and approached Lerida
from the south. Habert, with his division, coming from the side of
Saragossa, made for the same goal by way of Alcubierre and Monzon. It
might seem a dangerous experiment to march the two isolated columns
across the Spanish front, for a junction at a point so remote from
their respective starting-points. But, for the moment, there was no
hostile force of any importance in their neighbourhood. Severoli
and Augereau being still at Reus, when Musnier and Habert started
on their way, O’Donnell could spare no troops for the relief of
Lerida. It was not till they had retired, and the Duke of Castiglione
had withdrawn all his forces to Hostalrich and Gerona, that the
Captain-General found himself free for an expedition to the West. In
front of Musnier, while he was marching on Lerida, there were nothing
but trifling detachments sent out for purposes of observation by
the Governor of Tortosa. In front of Habert there were only 2,000
men under Colonel Perena, thrown out from Lerida to observe the
open country between the Segre and the Cinca. This was the sole
field-force which remained from the old Spanish Army of Aragon,
with the exception of the two dilapidated regiments that formed the
nucleus of Villacampa’s band.
[354] It was with a detachment of this column that Severoli’s
flanking party under Villatte got into communication on April 4,
as detailed above, page 296.
On April 10, Suchet arrived at Monzon with a brigade of infantry,
and the six companies of artillery and four of engineers which were
destined for the siege of Lerida. On the thirteenth he was before the
walls of the place on the west bank of the Segre, while on the next
day Habert appeared on the other bank, driving before him Colonel
Perena and his battalions. This second French column had passed the
Segre at Balaguer, from which it had expelled the Spanish brigade.
Perena, having the choice between returning into the mountains
or strengthening the garrison of Lerida, had taken the latter
alternative. On the same day Musnier came up from the South, and
joined the army with the force that had started from Alcañiz and had
crossed the Ebro at Flix. Suchet had now concentrated the whole of
the 13,000 men[355] whom he destined for the siege.
[355] For his strength at this moment, see the table which he
gives in his _Mémoires_, vol. i, Appendix 4. His figures cannot
always be trusted: for instance, purporting in this table to
give his whole force, present at Lerida or detached in Aragon,
he omits the six squadrons of gendarmerie which were guarding
his rear [37 officers, 1,121 men] and the four battalions of
_Chasseurs des Montagnes_, who were garrisoning Jaca, Venasque,
&c. [about 2,000 men].
The town of Lerida, then containing some 18,000 inhabitants, lies
in a vast treeless plain on the western bank of the broad and rapid
Segre. Its topography is peculiar: out of the dead level of the
plain rise two steep and isolated hills. One of these, about 800
yards long by 400 broad, and rising 150 feet above the surrounding
flats, is crowned by the citadel of the town; the other, somewhat
longer but rather narrower, is no other than the hill about which
Caesar and Afranius contended in the old Civil Wars of Rome, when
Lerida was still Ilerda. It lies about three-quarters of a mile from
the first-named height. In 1810 its culminating summit was covered
by a large work called Fort Garden, and its southern and lower end
was protected by the two small redoubts called San Fernando and El
Pilar. The town occupies the flat ground between the citadel-height
and the river. It has no trans-pontine suburb, but only a strong
_tête-du-pont_ on the other side of the Segre. The strength of the
place lay in the fact that its whole eastern front was protected
by the river, its whole western front by the high-lying citadel.
The comparatively short southern front was under the guns of Fort
Garden, which commanded all the ground over which an enemy could
approach this side of the town. There only remained, unprotected
by outer works, the northern front, and this was the point which a
skilful enemy would select as his objective. Another fact which much
favoured the defence was that the besieger was forced to make very
long lines of investment, since he had to shut in not only the town,
but the whole plateau on which lie Fort Garden and its dependent
works. Moreover, he must keep a force beyond the Segre, to block
the _tête-du-pont_, and this force must be a large one, because the
east was the quarter from which succours sent from Catalonia must
certainly appear. The garrison, on the other hand, was quite adequate
to man the works entrusted to it; the entry into the town of Perena’s
Aragonese battalions had brought it up to a strength of over 8,000
men. The artillery were the weak point--there were only 350 trained
men to man over 100 pieces. The Governor was Major-General Garcia
Conde, who owed his promotion to his brilliant achievements at Gerona
in the preceding September.
Suchet’s 13,000 men were insufficient for a close and thorough
investment of such a large space as that covered by the Lerida-Garden
fortifications. He was forced to leave a considerable part of
its southern front watched by cavalry posts alone. Of his total
force, Musnier, with six battalions and the greater part of the
cavalry--about 4,000 men in all, was beyond the river. Three
battalions blocked the _tête-du-pont_, the rest formed a sort
of covering force, destined to keep off the approach of enemies
from the side of Catalonia. On the hither side of the Segre the
three brigades of Habert, Buget, and Vergès were encamped facing
the western and north-western fronts of Lerida. They counted only
thirteen battalions, being weakened by 1,200 men who had been
detached to garrison Monzon and Fraga. The communication between
Musnier’s division and the rest of the army was by a flying bridge
thrown across the Segre two miles above the town; it was guarded
by a redoubt. The artillery park was placed at the village of San
Rufo, opposite the north-western angle of the town, from which it is
distant about 2,500 yards. It was evident from the first that this
would be the point of attack selected by the French engineers.
The army had barely taken up its position when, on April 19, rumours
were spread abroad that O’Donnell was on his way to relieve Lerida.
They must have been pure guesses, for the Spanish general on that day
was still at Tarragona and had made no movement. They were, however,
sufficiently persistent to induce Suchet to take off Musnier’s
covering corps, strengthened by three other battalions, on a mission
of exploration, almost as far as Tarrega, on the Barcelona road. No
Spanish force was met, nor could any information be extracted from
the inhabitants. The absence of the troops on the left bank of the
Segre was soon detected by Garcia Conde, who--to his great regret
three days later--sent messengers to inform O’Donnell that the French
lines to the east of the city were now almost unoccupied.
The fiery O’Donnell was already on his way when this news reached
him. The moment that he was sure that Augereau had left Barcelona
and was retreating northward, he had resolved to fly to the relief
of Lerida with the two divisions of which he could dispose. On
the twentieth he marched from Tarragona by Valls and Momblanch,
with 7,000 regular infantry, 400 horse, a single battery, and some
1,500 miqueletes. On the twenty-third he had reached Juneda, twelve
miles from Lerida, without having seen a French picket or having
been detected himself. He intended to drive off the few battalions
blocking the bridge-head, and to open up communication with the
besieged town that same day. Unfortunately for him, Suchet and
Musnier had returned on the previous night from their expedition to
Tarrega, and were now lying at Alcoletge, three miles north of the
bridge-head, with seven battalions and 500 cuirassiers.
Pushing briskly forward along the high-road, in a level treeless
plateau, destitute of cover of any kind, the leading Spanish
division--that of Ibarrola--came into contact about midday with
the small force guarding the bridge-head, which was now in charge
of Harispe, Suchet’s chief-of-the-staff. To the surprise of the
Spaniards, who had expected to see these three battalions and two
squadrons of hussars retire in haste, the French showed fight.
Harispe was aware that Musnier could come up to his aid within an
hour, and was ready for battle. His hussars charged the leading
regiment of Ibarrola’s column, and threw it into disorder, while his
infantry formed up in support. At this moment the Spanish general
received news that Musnier was moving in towards his flank; he
therefore retired, to get the support of O’Donnell, who was following
him with the second division. But at the ruined village of Margalef,
six miles from Lerida, the column of Musnier came up with Ibarrola,
and he was so hard pressed that he formed line, with 300 cavalry on
his right wing and his three guns on his left. The position was as
bad a one as could be found for the Spanish division--a dead flat,
with no cover. Musnier, on reaching the front, flung his cavalry,
500 cuirassiers of the 13th regiment, at the Spanish right wing.
The horsemen placed there broke, and fled without crossing sabres,
and the French charge fell on the flank battalion of the infantry,
which was caught while vainly trying to form square. It was ridden
down in a moment, and the horsemen then rolled up the whole line,
regiment after regiment. A great part of Ibarrola’s corps was
captured, and O’Donnell, who came on the field with the division of
Pirez just as the disaster took place, could do no more than retire
in good order, covering the scattered remnants of his front line. A
Swiss battalion, which he told off as his rearguard, was pierced by
the cuirassiers and for the most part captured. In this disastrous
affair the Spaniards lost 500 killed and wounded and several thousand
prisoners[356], as also four flags and the half-battery belonging
to Ibarrola’s division. The French, of whom the cavalry alone were
seriously engaged, are said by Suchet to have had no more than 23
killed and 82 wounded[357].
[356] Suchet says that he took 5,600 prisoners, a figure that
appears quite impossible, as Schepeler rightly remarks (iii.
649). Ibarrola’s division had only 4,000 bayonets, and of that
of Pirez only the one Swiss battalion was seriously engaged.
Moreover, Ibarrola’s division was not absolutely exterminated,
for O’Donnell on April 26 issued an order of the day, in which he
thanks the division for its courage, and praises the battalions
which kept their ranks and re-formed behind those of Pirez,
‘returning in good order to occupy the position (Juneda), from
which they had started at dawn.’ See the document, printed in
Arteche’s Appendix, no. 12 of vol. viii. I should doubt if 2,000
prisoners were not nearer the mark than 5,600.
[357] Figures probably correct. Martinien’s lists show one
officer killed and two wounded; of the latter, one was the
cavalry general Boussard.
It is clear that O’Donnell must take the blame for the ruin that
fell upon his little field army. He should not have been caught with
his two divisions marching with an interval of four miles between
them. Nor ought he to have been ignorant of the return of Musnier’s
force, considering that he had 400 cavalry, who should have been
exploring the whole country-side for miles around, instead of riding
in a mass along with Ibarrola’s infantry. The carelessness shown was
unpardonable: relying, apparently, on Garcia Conde’s dispatch--now
two days old--concerning the weakness of the French beyond the Segre,
the Spanish general was caught moving as if for an unopposed entry
into Lerida, instead of in battle order. It may be added that he
would have done well to collect more men before advancing against
Suchet--8,000 bayonets and sabres were too small a force to tackle
the main body of the 3rd Corps, even if they were aided by a sortie
from Lerida, as O’Donnell had intended. It would have been well to
make some endeavour to get troops from the Valencian army, whose
12,000 men were absolutely idle at the moment. It is true that José
Caro and the Valencian Junta were very chary of sending their men
outside their own border. But for such a great affair as the relief
of Lerida a brigade or two might have been borrowed. There was a
considerable Valencian force, at the moment, in the neighbourhood of
Alcañiz.
After the combat of Margalef Suchet summoned Lerida for a second
time, and offered to allow the Governor to see the prisoners and
guns which he had taken from O’Donnell. Garcia Conde very rightly
answered that he relied on his own forces alone, and should fight
to the end. Accordingly, the regular siege began. The trenches were
opened opposite the north front of the town on April 29; several days
of heavy rain hindered the completion of the first parallel, but on
May 7 the breaching batteries were ready and the bombardment began.
The front attacked--the Carmen and Magdalena bastions--was weak: it
was not protected by any flanking fires, and had neither a ditch nor
a covered way. It was bound to succumb before the very heavy fire
directed against it, unless the defence should succeed in beating
down the fire of the breaching batteries. The Spaniards did their
best, bringing up every gun that could be mounted, and replacing each
injured piece as it was disabled. But the end was obvious from the
first: the walls were not strong enough to resist the attack.
Meanwhile, Suchet made two successive assaults on a part of the
defences very far distant from the main front of attack--the two
isolated redoubts which stood on the south end of the extramural
plateau, of which Fort Garden formed the main protection. He wished
to gain a footing on this high ground, both because he could from
thence molest the south front of the town, and because he wished to
prevent the Spaniards from using the plateau as a place of refuge
after the fall of the city, which he regarded as inevitable. The
first attempt to take the works by escalade, on the night of April
23-24, was a disastrous failure: the Pilar was occupied for a moment,
but the attack on San Fernando failed, and the dominating fire from
it drove the stormers out of the smaller work, after they had held it
for a few hours.
The second escalade was more successful: it was carried out on the
night of May 12-13, and ended in the storming of both works. Only a
small part of their garrison succeeded in escaping into Fort Garden:
the besieged lost 300 men, the successful assailants only 120. The
greater part of the plateau was now in the hands of the French.
On the next day, May 13, the engineers announced that the two
breaches in the north front of the town walls were practicable, and
that same evening Lerida was stormed. The breaches were carried with
no great difficulty, but the garrison made a stubborn resistance
for some time, behind traverses and fortified houses in the rear of
them. When these were carried, the city was at Suchet’s mercy; but
it was not at the city alone that he was aiming--he wished to master
the citadel also. During the last siege of Lerida, that by the Duke
of Orleans in 1707, the high-lying castle had held out for many days
after the town had been lost. Suchet’s way of securing his end was
effective but brutal. On the whole, it was the greatest atrocity
perpetrated by any combatant, French, Spanish, or English, during
the whole Peninsular War. When his troops had entered the streets,
he directed columns towards each gate, and having secured possession
of them all, so as to make escape into the open country impossible,
bade his troops push the whole non-combatant population of Lerida
uphill into the citadel, where the beaten garrison was already taking
refuge. ‘The soldiery,’ as he writes, with evident complacency and
pride in his ingenuity, ‘were set in a concentric movement to push
the inhabitants, along with the garrison, towards the upper streets
and the citadel. They were dislodged by musketry fire from street
after street, house after house, in order to force them into the
castle. That work was still firing, and its discharges augmented the
danger and the panic of the civil population, as they were thrust,
along with the wreck of the garrison, into the ditch and over the
drawbridge. Pressed on by our soldiers, they hastily poured into the
castle yard, before the Governor had time to order that they should
not be allowed to enter.’ The castle being crammed with some fifteen
thousand men, women, and children, Suchet gave orders to bombard it
with every available mortar and howitzer. ‘Every shell,’ he writes,
‘that fell into the narrow space containing this multitude, fell on
serried masses of non-combatants no less than of soldiery. It had
been calculated that the Governor and the most determined officers
would be influenced by the presence of these women, children, old
folk, and unarmed peasants. As General Suchet had flattered himself
would be the case, the scheme had a prompt and decisive effect.’ On
the 14th at midday, Garcia Conde, unable to stand the slaughter any
longer, hoisted the white flag.
It is difficult to see how the forcing of thousands of
non-combatants, by means of musketry fire, on to the front of the
enemy’s line of defence, differs in any way from the device, not
unknown among African savages and Red Indians[358], of attacking
under cover of captured women and children thrust in upon the weapons
of their fathers and husbands. The act places that polished writer
and able administrator Louis-Gabriel Suchet on the moral level of
a king of Dahomey. He acknowledges that the plan was deliberately
thought out, and that scores of his victims perished not in the
subsequent bombardment, but by being shot down by his own men while
the crowd was being collected and hunted forward[359]. Historians
have denounced the atrocities committed by the French rank and file
at Tarragona or Oporto, by the English rank and file at Badajoz or
St. Sebastian, but the cultured general who worked out this most
effective plan for the reduction of a hostile citadel has never had
his due meed of shame. Napier’s remark that, ‘though a town taken by
assault is considered the lawful prey of a licentious soldiery, yet
this remnant of barbarism does not warrant the driving of unarmed and
helpless people into a situation where they must perish,’ seems a
sufficiently mild censure, when all the circumstances are taken into
account[360].
[358] One or two cases can also be quoted from the European
Middle Ages.
[359] Suchet, _Mémoires_, i. pp. 147-8.
[360] Napier, ii. 322.
The total number of Spanish troops surrendered by Garcia Conde in the
Citadel and Fort Garden, or captured by the French during the storm,
amounted to over 7,000 men, of whom about 800 were wounded lying in
the hospital. It was calculated that 1,200 or 1,500 more had perished
during the siege, and that about 500 of the civil population had
fallen victims to Suchet’s barbarous device. The French losses during
the whole series of operations had been 1,100 killed and wounded. The
Spaniards declared that Garcia Conde had betrayed Lerida, and ought
never to have surrendered. But the only ground for this accusation
was that, after a short captivity, he did homage to King Joseph, and
became an _Afrancesado_. Though he had shown dash and courage at
Gerona, it is clear that he lacked the firmness of governors such
as Mariano Alvarez, or Andrés Herrasti. His defence of Lerida had
not been particularly skilful nor particularly resolute: with over
8,000 men within the walls he ought to have been able to hold out
longer against Suchet’s 13,000. The most blameworthy part of his
arrangements was his neglect to retrench the breaches, and to form
a strong second line of temporary works behind them. Alvarez, under
similar conditions, and with a garrison far less strong in comparison
to the besieging army, held out for months after his walls had been
breached, simply because he treated them only as an outer line of
resistance, and was prepared to fight on behind his inner defences.
After the fall of Lerida, Suchet, having received through France
the news that the whole of Augereau’s army was collected in the
neighbourhood of Hostalrich and Gerona, made up his mind that he
had better attempt nothing ambitious until the 7th Corps was in a
position to help him. But there was a small task close to his hand,
which was well worth undertaking in a moment of enforced leisure.
This was the siege of Mequinenza, the only fortress left in Spanish
hands on the eastern side of Aragon. It was a small place, but not
without its strategic importance, for not only did it cover the
junction of the Segre and the Ebro, but it was the highest point open
for navigation on the last-named river. Any one holding Mequinenza
can use the Ebro as a high-road, except in times of drought, and
this was an advantage of no small importance, since the country from
thence to the sea chances to be singularly destitute of roads of
any kind. A few months later, Suchet found the place invaluable, as
he was able to prepare his battering-train for the siege of Tortosa
within its walls, and then to send all the heavy material down-stream
with the minimum of trouble. Mequinenza was a small place, consisting
of a few hundred houses along the river bank enclosed by a weak
and old-fashioned wall, but dominated by a strong castle, which
towers 500 feet above the water at the end of a spur of the Sierra
de Montenegre. The garrison consisted of about 1,000 men, under a
Colonel Carbon.
The very day after Lerida had fallen, Suchet sent a brigade to invest
Mequinenza: more troops followed after an interval. It was clear that
the taking of the town would offer small difficulty: but the castle
was another matter. Its defences were independent of those of the
place below, and its site was so lofty and rocky that it could not
be battered from any ground accessible by existing roads. Indeed,
it could only be approached along the crest of the Sierra, of which
it forms the last lofty point. The main interest of the siege of
Mequinenza lies in the fact that, in order to reduce the castle, the
French engineers had to build a road practicable for heavy guns in
zig-zags up the side of the Sierra. They had arrived in front of the
place on May 15: by June 1 the road was completed: it was a piece
of hard work, as in order to utilize the easiest possible slopes it
had been made no less than five miles long. But when the guns had
once been got up on to the crest of the mountain, Mequinenza--town
and castle alike--was doomed. The town was stormed on June 5; it
might have been captured long before, but there was little use in
taking possession of it until the attack upon the castle had been
begun. Before the storm, Colonel Carbon had wisely ordered all the
large river craft in the place, eleven in number, to run down-stream
to Tortosa; he was well aware that Suchet wanted to open up the
navigation of the Ebro, and was resolved that he should find no
vessels ready for him. Two of the craft ran ashore and were captured;
the other nine got off clear.
When the three batteries erected on the summit of the Sierra opened
on the castle, the walls began to crumble at once. At the end of
eight days its front towards the French trenches was a mass of
shapeless ruins. Carbon then surrendered, without waiting for an
assault, which must undoubtedly have proved successful. There was
nothing particularly obstinate, or, on the other hand, particularly
discreditable, in the defence. The castle was not a modern fortress;
its sole strength had lain in its inaccessible position; and when the
French had climbed up on to a level with it, nothing more could be
done.
Having mastered Lerida and Mequinenza, and obtained a firm footing
in the plain of Western Catalonia, Suchet had now harder work before
him. His first necessity was to clear the country behind him of
the insurgents, who had swarmed down from the hills to attack the
troops left behind in Central Aragon, while the main army had been
concentrated before Lerida. Villacampa had half destroyed a column
of 350 men at Arandija on the Xalon on May 14. Catalan somatenes
had attacked the garrison of the valley of Venasque, on the very
frontier of France, on May 16. Valencian bands had besieged the
castle of Alcañiz for many days. But all the enemies of Suchet had
to fly, as soon as his main army became once more free for field
service. No attempt was made to oppose a serious resistance to his
movable columns: the insurgents fled to right and left: the most
extraordinary proof of their demoralization was that, on June 13,
General Montmarie, at the head of one of these columns, found the
strong fort of Morella, within the Valencian border, absolutely
unoccupied. He seized and garrisoned it, knowing that this place,
which commands the mountain-road from Aragon to Valencia, was of
immense strategical importance.
When June came round, Suchet had once more mastered all Aragon, and
was free for work outside its borders. A march against Valencia, on
the one side, or against Tortosa and Tarragona on the other, was
equally possible. But at this moment Napoleon was set on proceeding
‘methodically’--in Eastern Spain no less than in Portugal--and the
orders issued to the Commander of the 3rd Corps were, to proceed
against Tortosa, and cut off Valencia from Catalonia by its capture.
The longer and more difficult advance against Valencia itself was
relegated to a distant date; there must be no more fiascos like that
of February. Accordingly, Suchet was ordered to follow up the capture
of Lerida and Mequinenza by the reduction of Tortosa[361]. He was
informed at the same time that Macdonald, the new commander of the
Army of Catalonia, was ordered to attack Tarragona. In this way, the
restless O’Donnell would find his hands full at home, and would not
be able to spare time or men for the relief of Tortosa. Only from the
Valencian Army, which had always been badly led, and managed with the
most narrow particularism by José Caro and his Junta, need Suchet
expect any trouble.
[361] Napoleon to Berthier, _Correspondance_, May 29, 1810.
But until Macdonald was prepared to lead down his corps to the
neighbourhood of Tarragona and the lower Ebro, Suchet felt that his
own enterprise must be held back, or at least conducted with caution.
And although Macdonald had received his orders in May, on taking
over Augereau’s post, it was some time before he was able to execute
them. June and July had passed, and August had arrived, before he
appeared in the regions where Suchet had been told to expect him,
and at last placed himself in communication with the Army of Aragon.
This long delay was entirely due to the burden imposed upon him by
the necessities of Barcelona, with its large garrison and its vast
civil population. The provisions which Augereau had introduced into
the city in the early spring were exhausted, and his successor was
forced to replace them by escorting thither two new convoys of great
size in June and July. So active were the miqueletes that Macdonald
found himself obliged to take with him his French and his Italian
division as escort on each occasion. For a first-class convoy is a
vast affair, stretching out to long miles in a mountain country,
and requiring to be strongly guarded at every point of its unwieldy
length. The Emperor was bitterly disappointed at Macdonald’s delays:
it was hard to convince him that the problem of food-supply in
Catalonia was almost insoluble, and that neither Barcelona nor the
field army could be permanently fed by seizing the resources of
the valley of the Llobregat, or the Campo of Tarragona, and making
war support war in the regular style. Catalonia had never fed its
whole population even in time of peace, but had largely depended
on corn brought up from Aragon or imported by sea. But the British
Mediterranean squadron now made the transport of food to Barcelona
by water impossible, while, till the 3rd Corps and the 7th Corps
should finally meet, it was impossible to supply the latter from
the Aragonese base. While neither of the normal ways of procuring
a regular supply of provisions was practicable, nothing remained
but the weary task of escorting convoys from Perpignan and Figueras
to Barcelona. This Macdonald accomplished thrice, in June, July,
and August: it was only after the third journey that he left the
storeshouses of Barcelona so thoroughly replenished that he was
able to think of further offensive operations, and to concert the
long-delayed junction with Suchet and the 3rd Corps. The Marshal in
his autobiography confesses that he hated the task set him, and found
it entirely out of the lines of his experience. He began his career
by repealing Augereau’s hanging edicts, and endeavoured to introduce
more humane methods of warfare. But his own men were out of hand, and
the Spaniards being as fierce as ever, his task was a very hard one.
Meanwhile, Henry O’Donnell was granted three months in which to
reorganize the Catalan army, which had suffered so severely at
Margalef. His untiring energy enabled him to raise his force by the
end of July to 22,000 men, organized in five divisions, with which
he formed a double front, facing Suchet on the west and Macdonald
on the east. One division under Campo Verde lay northward in the
mountains, with head quarters at Cardona, and detachments pushed
forward as far as Urgel and Olot: its main task was to harass the
French garrison of the Ampurdam, and to threaten Macdonald’s rear
every time that he moved forward towards Barcelona. A second division
lay facing that city, on the lower Llobregat, with detachments
at Montserrat and Manresa, which kept up the communications with
Campo Verde and the North. Two more divisions lay westward, in the
direction of Falcet and Borja Blanca, watching Suchet, and prepared
to oppose any serious attempt on his part to close in upon Tortosa.
The fifth division, or reserve, formed a central mass of troops,
ready to reinforce either the detachments which watched Suchet or
those which watched Macdonald; it lay south of Tarragona, at the Col
de Alba. Thus posted O’Donnell waited for further developments, and
continued to drill and exercise his new levies, to dismiss inactive
and incompetent officers, to collect magazines, and to quarrel
with the local Junta. For this active and intelligent, if reckless
and high-handed, young officer was on even worse terms with the
Catalan authorities than his predecessor, Blake. The main cause of
quarrel was that O’Donnell wished to strengthen his regular troops,
by drafting into the depleted _cadres_ of Reding’s and Coupigny’s
old battalions every recruit that he could catch. He held that the
French could only be brought to a final check by disciplined troops.
The Junta, on the other hand, believed in guerrilla warfare, and
preferred to call out from time to time the miqueletes and somatenes,
who drifted back to their homes whenever a crisis was over. Both
sides had much to say for themselves: the Catalans could point out
that the regular troops had been beaten times out of number, while
their own irregulars had achieved many small successes, and done
the French much harm. O’Donnell, on the other hand, was quite right
in holding that guerrilla operations, much as they might incommode
the enemy, would never deal him a fatal blow or finish the war. He
dreamed of recruiting his army up to a force of 50,000 men at some
happy future date, and of delivering a stroke with superior numbers
which should destroy the French hold on Catalonia. Meanwhile, much as
they quarrelled, the Irish-Spanish general and the local Junta were
both too good haters of France to allow their disputes to prevent
a vigorous resistance from being kept up in the principality.
O’Donnell carried his point to the extent of persuading the Junta to
allow him to form many of the ever-changing tercios of miqueletes
into ‘legions,’ which were to be kept permanently embodied[362], and
to count as part of the regular army. Hence came the large rise in
his muster-rolls.
[362] To please the Catalans, who hated the idea of long service,
the enlistment in the Legions was made for two years only, and
the men were to be entitled to fifteen days’ leave during each
half-year of service.
SECTION XX: CHAPTER II
OPERATIONS IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN DURING THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1810
(MARCH-OCTOBER 1810)
The situation which had been created by King Joseph’s rapid conquest
of the open country of Andalusia in January and February 1810, and
by his failure to capture Cadiz, was destined to remain unchanged
in any of its more important details for a full year. Soult, with
the three corps of Victor, Sebastiani, and Mortier, was strong
enough to hold the towns and plains, strong enough also to blockade
Cadiz and to spare expeditionary forces at intervals for operations
outside the limits of his own sphere of command. From time to time
he sent the greater part of Mortier’s corps against Estremadura,
and the greater part of Sebastiani’s corps against Murcia. But his
70,000 men were not sufficient to provide an army for the permanent
conquest of either of these provinces. And every time that 10,000 or
15,000 sabres and bayonets were distracted to one of these raids,
the total of troops left behind to watch Cadiz, to guard Seville,
and to repress the interminable activity of the guerrilleros of the
mountains was found to be dangerously small. Ere long the force that
had marched out for external operations had to be called back in
haste, to ward off some peril to one or other of the vital points of
Andalusia.
Soult himself remained for the greater part of his time at Seville,
occupied not only in keeping the movements of his three corps in
unison--no easy task, for both Victor and Sebastiani had wills of
their own, and even the placid Mortier occasionally murmured--but
in superintending the details of civil administration. It was
very seldom that he marched out in person at the head of his last
reserves, to strengthen some weak point in his line of offence
or defence. During the next two years he was quite as much the
Viceroy as the Commander-in-Chief in Andalusia. Though the Emperor
had refrained from naming that kingdom one of the ‘Military
Governments,’ which he had created by his decree of Feb. 15, 1810,
yet Soult made himself in fact, if not in name, as independent as
the governors of Aragon or Navarre or Catalonia. The bond of common
interests and desires which had united him to King Joseph during
the winter of 1809-10 was soon broken. The monarch at Madrid soon
discovered that his presence was not desired in Andalusia--some
good military reason could always be discovered which made it
impracticable that he should revisit Seville. Little or no money
was remitted to him from the South: rich as was Soult’s sphere of
governance, it was always made to appear that the expenses of the
sustenance of the army and of the siege of Cadiz were so great
that no surplus remained for the central government. When the King
murmured, and appealed to Paris, his brother usually supported the
Marshal[363]; it was Napoleon’s first maxim that war should maintain
war, and he thought it of far more importance that the army of
Andalusia should pay for itself, than that the bankrupt exchequer at
Madrid should be recruited[364]. As the months rolled on, and Joseph
gradually realized the position, his hatred for the plausible Marshal
became as bitter as it had been during their earlier quarrel in the
summer of 1809. He had good reason to be angry, for Soult undoubtedly
sacrificed the interests of the King of Spain to those of the Viceroy
of Andalusia. He played a selfish game, though he had always a good
military excuse for any particular refusal to fall in with the King’s
plans or to obey his orders. In 1810 his conduct may be justified,
but in 1811 and 1812 he undoubtedly--as will be shown in chapters to
come--ruined what small chance there was of bringing the Peninsular
War to a successful termination, by pursuing a policy which made the
maintenance of the French authority in Andalusia its chief end, and
not the general good of the imperial arms in Spain.
[363] Though not always. See the case of the revenue from the
quicksilver mines, in _Correspondance_, no. 17,076.
[364] Cf. ibid., July 10, to Soult.
Soult’s conduct at Oporto in the days of his invasion of Portugal
must never be forgotten when his doings in Andalusia are discussed.
He undoubtedly yearned after supreme power, and though the lesson
which he had received after his vain attempt to create himself king
of ‘Northern Lusitania’ had not been forgotten, his ambitions were as
great as ever. He suppressed his desire for the royal name, but gave
himself the reality of the royal power. He practically kept a court,
a ministry, and a revenue of his own[365], despite of all the angry
complaints of his immediate master at Madrid. Secure in the support
of the Emperor, who reckoned him the ‘best military head in Spain,’
he ignored or disobeyed all such communication from Joseph as did
not suit his purpose. To a great extent he justified his policy by
success: the plain-land of Andalusia was undoubtedly the part of the
French holding in Spain where the administration was most successful,
and the occupation most thorough. Soult not only built up, but
kept together, an _Afrancesado_ party among the local population,
which was stronger and more compact than in any other part of the
Peninsula. He even succeeded in raising a small permanent force of
Spanish auxiliaries, which was decidedly more trustworthy and less
given to desertion than the regiments of the same class which King
Joseph was perpetually creating in Madrid--only to see them crumble
away under his hand. The Army of Andalusia was strengthened by two
regiments of Chasseurs à Cheval, which were attached to the 5th
Corps[366], and some free companies of infantry[367], which were used
for garrison and blockhouse work. But it was far more important that
Soult succeeded in enlisting many battalions of a sort of national
guard, which he called _Escopeteros_ (fusiliers); with them he kept
the peace of the larger towns, such as Seville, Cordova, and Jaen.
The very existence of such a force, which King Joseph had vainly
attempted to establish in Madrid, was of evil omen for the patriotic
cause in Andalusia. On several occasions they fought well against
the guerrilleros, when the latter attempted raids dangerously close
to the great cities. For the _Juramentado_ was well aware that if the
national cause were at last to triumph an evil fate would await him.
Having once committed himself to the French side, he was forced to
defend his own neck from the gallows.
[365] There was desperate quarrelling with Madrid when Soult
tried to get hold of the port-revenues--small as these were,
owing to the English blockade--and when he tried to nominate
consuls on his own authority. See Ducasse’s _Correspondance du
Roi Joseph_, vol. vii. p. 337.
[366] 3rd and 4th Chasseurs à Cheval, both present at Albuera and
other fights in Estremadura in 1810-12. They seem to have gone to
pieces on the evacuation of Andalusia in the autumn of 1812.
[367] Cazadores de Jaen, Francos de Montaña, &c. There was a
company of this sort in Badajoz when it was taken in 1812. The
Spanish government shot the officers after trial by court martial.
Soult’s civil government was conducted with a far greater decency
than that of Duhesme, Kellermann, and other noted plunderers among
the French governors. But it involved, nevertheless, a considerable
amount of more or less open spoliation. The Marshal’s own hands
were not quite clean: his collection of the works of Murillo and
Velasquez, the pride of Paris in after years, represented blackmail
on Andalusian church-corporations, when it did not come from
undisguised confiscation. Unless he was much maligned by his own
compatriots, no less than by the Spaniards, hard cash as well as
pictures did not come amiss to him[368]. But his exactions were
moderate compared with those of some of his subordinates: though
Mortier and Dessolles had good reputations Sebastiani had an infamous
one, and Perreymond, Godinot (who shot himself early in 1812 when
called to face a commission of inquiry), and certain other generals
have very black marks against them. Still the machine of government
worked, if not without friction, at least with an efficiency that
contrasted favourably with the administration of any other province
of Spain save Suchet’s domain of Aragon.
[368] Cf. Observations by his aide-de-camp St. Chamans, in his
_Memoirs_, pp. 203-5, as to the Marshal’s administration. It may
serve as an example of the liberal way in which the superior
officers were allowed to draw in money, that Soult gave his
ex-aide-de-camp 1,500 francs a month, when he was commanding in
the town of Carmona, besides his pay and free food and quarters.
It is small wonder that he and other governors began, as he said,
‘à trancher du grand seigneur.’ Cf. Arteche, viii. 109, for
Spanish views on Soult’s administration.
But it was only the valley of the Guadalquivir which lay subdued
beneath the feet of Soult. Cadiz and the mountains had yet to be
dealt with, and, as the months went on, the difficulties of the
French Army of Andalusia became more and more evident. It was only
by degrees that the French generals came to comprehend the absolute
impregnability of Cadiz, and the advantage that the possession of the
island-city and the fleet depending on it gave to the Spaniards. In
the first months of the siege Victor’s engineers and artillerists
had flattered themselves that something might be done to molest the
place, if not to reduce it to surrender, by pushing batteries forward
to the extreme front of the ground in their possession all around the
harbour. Within the first weeks of his arrival in front of Cadiz,
Victor made an attempt to push forward his posts along the high-road
which crosses the broad salt-marshes of the Santi Petri. But the bogs
and water-channels were found impracticable, and the Spanish works
in front of the bridge of Zuazo too strong to be attacked along the
narrow causeway. The French drew back to Chiclana, which became the
head quarters of the left wing of the blockading force, and where
Ruffin’s division was permanently encamped. It was then thought that
something might be accomplished further to the north, by working
against the Arsenal of La Carraca, at the one end of the Spanish
line, or the projecting castle of Puntales at the other. The struggle
for the points of vantage from which Puntales could be battered
formed the chief point of interest during the early months of the
siege. The French, pushing down from the mainland on to the peninsula
of the Trocadero, began to erect works on the ground most favourable
for attacking the fort of Matagorda, which had once more become the
outermost bulwark of Cadiz.
There was a bitter fight over this work, which stands on the tidal
flats below the Trocadero, surrounded by mud for one half of the day,
and by water for the other. It will be remembered that Matagorda had
been blown up at the time of the first arrival of the French before
Cadiz. But after a few days of reflection the English and Spanish
engineer officers in command of the defence grew uneasy as to the
possibilities of mischief which might follow from the seizure of the
ruined fort by the enemy. Their fears, as it afterwards turned out,
were unnecessary. But they led to the reoccupation of Matagorda on
February 22 by a detachment of British artillery, supported by a
company of the 94th regiment. The front of the work facing toward
the mainland was hastily repaired, and heavy guns brought over the
harbour from Cadiz were mounted on it. Moreover, it was arranged
that it should be supported by a Spanish ship-of-the-line and some
gunboats, as far as the mud banks permitted.
Victor took the reoccupation of the fort as a challenge, and
thought that the Allies must have good reasons for attaching so
much importance to it. Accordingly he multiplied his batteries on
the Trocadero, till he had got forty guns mounted in a dominating
position, with which to overwhelm the garrison in their half-ruinous
stronghold. There was a long and fierce artillery contest, but the
French had the advantage both in the number of guns and in the
concentric fire which they could pour upon the fort. The naval help
promised to Matagorda proved of little assistance, partly owing to
the impracticability of the mud flats when the tide was out, partly
because the gunboats could not endure the fire of the French heavy
artillery. On April 22 General Graham, who had arrived at Cadiz and
taken command of the British forces over the head of General Stewart,
ordered Matagorda to be evacuated. It was high time, for the fort was
shot to pieces, and 64 men out of a garrison of 140 had been killed
or wounded[369]. The enemy took possession of the ruins, and rebuilt
and rearmed the fort; they also re-established the ruined forts of
San Luis and San José, on the firm ground facing Matagorda, to which
they had not possessed a safe access till the outer work in the mud
had been captured. These were the most advanced points toward Cadiz
which the French could hold, and here they mounted their heaviest
guns, in the hope of demolishing the Castle of Puntales on the other
side of the water, and of making the inner harbour useless for
shipping. Their purpose was only partly accomplished: the ships, it
is true, had to move east or west, into the outer harbour or nearer
to the Carraca and the Isla de Leon. But Puntales was never seriously
injured, and maintained an intermittent artillery duel with Matagorda
across the strait as long as the siege lasted. The occasional bombs
that fell beyond Puntales, in the direction of the Cortadura, did not
seriously incommode the garrison, and ships could always pass the
strait between the two forts at night without appreciable risk. Later
on Soult caused mortars of unprecedented dimensions to be cast in the
arsenal of Seville, on the designs presented to him by an artillery
officer of the name of Villantroys. But even when these had been
mounted on Matagorda no great damage was done, one bomb only--as a
Spanish popular song recorded--ever touched Cadiz town, and that only
killed a street dog.
[369] There is a good account of the desperate life of the
garrison of Matagorda during the bombardment in the _Eventful
Life of a Scottish Soldier_, by Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th.
[Illustration: _Spanish Infantry 1810_
(_showing the new uniform introduced under British influence_)]
After the fall of Matagorda, the next most notable event of the
spring in front of Cadiz was a fearful hurricane, lasting from the
6th to the 9th of March, which caused grave losses to the vessels
in the outer harbour. A south-wester from the Atlantic drove three
Spanish line-of-battle ships, one of which, the _Concepcion_, was a
three-decker of 100 guns, and a Portuguese 74, upon the coast about
Puerto Santa Maria and Rota. The French opened upon them with red-hot
shot, and destroyed them all, slaying a great part of the unfortunate
crews, who had no thought of resistance, and were only trying to
escape to land, where they were bound to become prisoners. More than
thirty merchant ships, mostly British, were destroyed by the same
storm. One was a transport containing a wing of the 4th regiment,
which was coming to reinforce the garrison of Cadiz. Some 300 men
from this unlucky vessel got ashore and were captured by the French.
A month after the loss of Matagorda the outer harbour of Cadiz again
saw some exciting scenes. Moored beside the Spanish fleet were a
number of pontoons, old men-of-war from which the masts and rigging
had been removed, and which were used as prison-ships. On them there
were still kept several thousands of French prisoners, mostly the men
captured with Dupont in 1808. It is astonishing that the Regency had
not ordered their removal to some more remote spot the moment that
Victor’s army appeared in front of Cadiz. Overcrowded, and often kept
without sufficient food for days at a time, these unhappy captives
were in a deplorable position. The sight of their fellow-countrymen
in possession of the opposite coast drove them to desperation, and
they were prepared to take any risks for a chance of escape. Having
noted, during the hurricane of March 6th-9th, that every vessel
which broke loose from its moorings had been cast by the set of
the tide upon the coast in the direction of Rota, the prisoners on
the _Castilla_, on which nearly all the officers were confined,
waited for the next south-wester. When it came, on the night of the
15th-16th May, they rose upon their small guard of Spanish marines,
overpowered them, and then cut the cables of the pontoon, committing
themselves to the perils of the sea as well as to the risk of being
sunk by the neighbouring men-of-war. But it was supposed that they
had got adrift by accident, and they had been carried by the tide
almost to the opposite shore before it was realized that an escape
was on foot. Two gunboats sent to tow the _Castilla_ back met with
resistance, the prisoners firing on them with the muskets taken from
their guard, and throwing cold shot down upon the little vessels when
their crews tried to board. Just as they were beaten off, the pontoon
went ashore. The French garrisons of the neighbouring batteries ran
down to help their countrymen to escape; at the same moment other
gunboats, Spanish and English, came up, and began firing on the
crowd, who strove to swim or scramble ashore. Some were killed, but
over 600 got to land. It is surprising that after this incident the
Spaniards did not take better care of the remaining pontoons, but
ten days later the prisoners on the _Argonauta_ were able to repeat
the trick of their comrades. On this occasion the absconding vessel
ran ashore upon a mud-bank some hundreds of yards from the shore of
the Trocadero. The stranded vessel remained for hours under the fire
of the gunboats which pursued it, and a large proportion of the men
on board perished, for when the troops on shore brought out boats
to save the survivors, many of them were sunk as they plied between
the _Argonauta_ and the land. Finally the pontoon was set on fire,
and several wounded Frenchmen are said to have been burnt alive. The
English seamen who were engaged in this distressing business were
heartily disgusted with their share in it[370].
[370] See the letter of Charles Vaughan deploring the ‘beastly
necessity of firing into the poor devils’ quoted by Napier in his
Appendix, vol. ii. p. 482. For a narrative by one of the escaping
French officers see the _Mémoires_ of Colonel Chalbrand.
After this the Regency at last ordered the removal of the rest of
the French prisoners from Cadiz. The few remaining officers were
sent to Majorca, and afterwards to England. Of the men part were
dispatched to the Canaries, part to the Balearic Islands. But the
islanders protested against the presence of so many French in their
midst, raised riots, and killed some of the prisoners. Thereupon the
Regency ordered 7,000 of them to be placed upon the desolate rock
of Cabrera, where there were no inhabitants and no shelter save one
small ruined castle. The wretched captives, without roofs or tents
to cover them, and supplied with food only at uncertain intervals
and in insufficient quantity, died off like flies. Once, when storms
hindered the arrival of the provision ships from Majorca, many scores
perished in a day of sheer starvation[371]. The larger half did not
survive to see the peace of 1814, and those who did were for the most
part mere wrecks of men, invalids for life. Even allowing for the
desperate straits of the Spanish government, which could not feed its
own armies, the treatment of the Cabrera prisoners was indefensible.
They might at least have been exchanged for some of the numerous
Spanish garrisons taken in 1810-11; but the Regency would not permit
it, though Henry O’Donnell had arranged with Macdonald a regular
_cartel_ for prisoners in the neighbouring Catalonia. This is one of
the most miserable corners of the history of the Peninsular War.
[371] Nothing can be more distressing reading than the chronicles
of the Cabrera prisoners, Ducor, Guillemard, Gille and others.
Actual cannibalism is said to have occurred during the longest of
the spells of fasting caused by the non-arrival of provisions.
[See Gille, p. 240.]
But to return to Andalusia. By the month of May the Regency at Cadiz
had recovered a certain confidence, in view of the utter inefficacy
of Victor’s attempt to molest their city. From that month began a
systematic attempt to organize into a single system all the forces
that could be turned to account against Soult. There were now in
the Isla some 18,000 Spanish troops, as well as 8,000 British and
Portuguese. This was a larger garrison than was needed, now that
the defences had been put in order; and it was possible to detach
small expeditionary corps to east and west, to stir up trouble in
the coast-land of Andalusia, and serve as the nuclei round which
the insurgents of the mountains might gather. For the insurrection
in the remoter corners of the kingdom of Granada had never died
down, despite of all the efforts of Sebastiani to quell it. The
Regency had now determined that an effort should be made to extend
it westward--the Sierra de Ronda being quite as well suited for
irregular operations as the Alpujarras. At the other end of the line,
too, there were opportunities in the Condado de Niebla and the lands
by the mouth of the Guadiana, which the French had hardly touched:
trifling detachments of the 5th Corps at Moguer and Niebla observed
rather than occupied that region. By means of the large fleet always
moored in Cadiz harbour, it was possible to transfer troops to any
point of the coast, for the French could not guard every creek and
fishing-village, and if an expedition failed it had a fair chance of
escaping by sea. Moreover any force thrown ashore in the south had
the option of retiring into Gibraltar if hard pressed, just as any
force sent to the west might retire on Portugal.
In addition to the insurgents and the garrison of Cadiz there were
two regular armies whose energies might be turned against Soult.
The relics of Areizaga’s unfortunate host, which had fled into the
kingdom of Murcia, and had been rallied by Blake, were now 12,000
strong, and since Suchet’s expedition against Valencia had failed,
and there was no danger from the north, this force could be employed
against Sebastiani and the French corps in the kingdom of Granada. It
was in a deplorable condition, but was yet strong enough to render
assistance to the insurgents of the Alpujarras, by demonstrating
against Granada, and so forcing Sebastiani to keep his troops massed
for a regular campaign. Whenever the French general was threatened
from the east, he had to abandon his smaller posts, and to desist
from hunting the guerrilleros, who thus obtained a free hand.
The Regency could also count to a certain extent upon aid from
La Romana and the Army of Estremadura. The Marquis--it will be
remembered--was now confronted in his own province by Reynier and
the 2nd Corps[372], but he had thrust his flanking division, under
Ballasteros, into the mountains of North-Western Andalusia, where it
had been contending with Mortier’s corps in the direction of Araçena
and Zalamea, as has already been recounted[373]. This outlying
division was in communication with Cadiz, via Ayamonte and the
lower Guadiana, and could always compel Soult to detach troops from
Seville by descending into the plains. La Romana himself could, and
occasionally did, provide further occupation for the 5th Corps by
moving other troops southward, on the Seville high-road, when he was
not too much engrossed by Reynier’s demonstrations in his front.
[372] See pp. 213-14 of this volume and p. 246.
[373] See pp. 215-16 of this volume.
Thus it was possible to harass the French troops in Andalusia on
all sides. With the object of securing some sort of unity for their
operations, the Regency made Blake Commander-in-Chief of the forces
in Cadiz as well as of those in Murcia, declaring them parts of a
single ‘Army of the Centre.’ Albuquerque’s separate charge had come
to an end when, after many quarrels with the Cadiz Junta, he resigned
the post of governor, and accepted that of Ambassador to the Court
of St. James’s at the end of March. He died not long after his
arrival in London, engaged to the last in a hot warfare of pamphlets
and manifestos with the Junta, whose monstrous insinuations against
his probity and patriotism are said to have driven him into the
brain-fever which terminated his life. He was a man of unsullied
honour and high personal courage, but not a lucky general, though
his last military action, the direction of the Army of Estremadura
on Cadiz, was a sound and meritorious piece of strategy. He and
La Romana were the only Spanish officers with whom Wellington was
able to work in concert without perpetual friction, but the British
Commander-in-Chief had a greater respect for his allies’ hearts
than for their heads as may be gathered from constant references
in the _Wellington Dispatches_, as well as from the confidential
conversations of the Duke’s later years[374].
[374] See _Wellington Dispatches_, v. p. 292, &c., and Stanhope’s
_Conversations with the Duke of Wellington_, pp. 10 and 23.
Blake arrived in Cadiz on April 22, having turned over the temporary
command of the Murcian army to General Freire, the ever-unlucky
cavalry commander who had served under Venegas and Areizaga in the
campaigns of Almonacid and Ocaña. He set himself to reorganize the
various Estremaduran and other troops in Cadiz into one division
of horse and three divisions of foot, which he numbered Vanguard,
2nd, and 4th of the Army of the Centre. The Murcian forces were
distributed into the 1st, 3rd, and 5th infantry divisions of the
same army, and two small cavalry divisions. This reorganization of
the regular troops was followed by systematic attempts to foster the
insurrection to right and left of Seville. General Copons was sent
to Ayamonte, at the mouth of the Guadiana, with 700 men, round whom
he collected a miscellaneous assemblage of peasantry, which often
descended from the hills to worry the French garrisons of Moguer and
Niebla. When chased by stronger forces detached from Mortier’s corps,
he would retire into Portugal. When unmolested he joined hands with
Ballasteros and the flanking division of the army of La Romana, or
executed raids of his own in the central plain of the kingdom of
Seville. Often chased, and sometimes dispersed, his bands were never
completely crushed, and kept Western Andalusia, or ‘Spanish Algarve,’
as it was called in the old days when the boundaries of Castile and
Portugal had only just been fixed, in a state of constant ferment.
The diversion which was prepared on the other flank by Blake and the
Regency was far more important. Their intention was to wrest from
the French the whole district of the Sierra de Ronda, the mountain
region between Gibraltar and Malaga, and so to thrust in a wedge
between Victor and Sebastiani. There was already the nucleus of an
insurrection in this quarter; soon after King Joseph’s triumphal
progress from Xeres by Ronda and Malaga to Granada, the first small
bands had appeared. They were headed by local chiefs, such as
Becerra, Ruiz, and Ortiz--better known as El Pastor--whose original
followers were a party of the smugglers who, in times of peace and
war alike, had been wont to ply a contraband trade with Gibraltar.
In March and April they were not strong enough to do more than
molest the convoys passing from Malaga and Seville to the French
garrison of Ronda. But finding the enemy in their neighbourhood weak
and helpless--the bulk of the 1st Corps was before Cadiz, and that
of the 5th Corps was still watching La Romana on the roads north
of Seville--they multiplied in numbers and extended their raids
far afield. They asked for aid both from the British Governor of
Gibraltar and from the Regency at Cadiz, promising that, if they were
backed by regular troops, they would easily expel the French and
master the whole country-side. Already their activity had produced
favourable results, for Soult sent down from Seville Girard’s
division of the 5th Corps, a detachment which left Mortier too weak
for any serious operations on the side of Estremadura, and Sebastiani
drew back from an expedition against Murcia, which might otherwise
have proved most prejudicial to the Spanish cause.
This raid deserves a word of notice: just after Blake had left Murcia
for Cadiz, Sebastiani (who had for the moment got the better of the
insurgents in the Alpujarras) assembled at Baza, in the eastern
extremity of the kingdom of Granada, the greater part of the 4th
Corps, and marched with 7,000 men on Lorca. Freire, distrusting
his troops, refused to fight, threw 4,000 men into the impregnable
harbour-fortress of Cartagena, and retired with the rest of his army
to Alicante, within the borders of Valencia. Thus, the rich city of
Murcia, along with the whole of the rest of its province, which had
never seen the French before, was exposed undefended to Sebastiani.
He entered it on April 23, and commenced by fining the corporation
50,000 dollars for not having received him with a royal salute
and the ringing of the bells of their churches. The rest of his
behaviour was in keeping: he entered the cathedral while mass was in
progress, and interrupted the service to seize the plate and jewels.
He confiscated the money and other valuables in all the monasteries,
hospitals, and banks. He permitted his officers to blackmail many
rich inhabitants, and his rank and file to plunder houses and shops.
Two days after his entry he retraced his footsteps, and retreated
hastily towards Granada, leaving a ruined city behind him[375]. The
cause of his sudden departure was the news that the insurgents of the
Alpujarras, whom he had vainly imagined that he had crushed, were
beleaguering all his small garrisons, and that Malaga itself had been
seized by a large band of the Serranos, and held for a short space,
though General Perreymond had afterwards succeeded in driving them
out. But the whole of the Alhama and Ronda Sierras were up in arms,
no less than the more eastern hills where the rising had begun. It
would have been absurd for Sebastiani to proceed any further with
the offensive campaign in Murcia, when Southern Andalusia was being
lost behind his back.
[375] For strange and scandalous details of Sebastiani’s doings
in Murcia, see Schepeler, iii. pp. 566-7.
Throughout the month of May Girard and Sebastiani, with some small
assistance from Dessolles, who spared a few battalions from the
kingdom of Cordova, were actively engaged in endeavouring to repress
the mountaineers. The larger bands were dispersed, not without
severe fighting--Girard’s men had hot work at Albondonates on May
1, and at Grazalema on May 3[376]. But just as the main roads had
been reopened, and the blockade of the French garrison of Ronda
raised, the whole situation was changed by the landing at Algeciras
of General Lacy, with a division of 3,000 regulars sent from Cadiz
by the Regency (June 19). His arrival raised the spirits of the
insurgents, and they thronged in thousands to his aid, when he
announced his intention of marching against Ronda. Lacy, however,
was both irresolute and high-handed--as he afterwards showed on a
larger stage when he became Captain-General of Catalonia. On arriving
before Ronda he judged the rocky stronghold too formidable for him
to meddle with, and turned aside to Grazalema, to the disgust of his
followers. He then fell into a quarrel with the Serranos, dismissed
many of them--smugglers and others--from his camp, as unworthy to
serve alongside of regular soldiers, and even imprisoned some of
the more turbulent chiefs. At this moment Girard from the north
and Sebastiani from the east began to close in upon him. Uneasy
at their approach, Lacy fell back towards the coast, and after
some insignificant skirmishes re-embarked his force at Estepona
and Marbella, from whence he sailed round to Gibraltar and landed
at the Lines of San Roque, under the walls of that fortress (July
12)[377]. Almost the only positive gain produced by his expedition
had been the occupation of Marbella, where he left a garrison which
maintained itself for a considerable time. It was no doubt something
to have detained Girard and Sebastiani in the remote mountain of the
south for a full month, when they were much needed by Soult in other
directions. Yet the evil results of Lacy’s timid manœuvres and hasty
flight upon the morale of the insurgents might have been sufficiently
great to counterbalance these small advantages, if the Serranos had
been less tough and resolute. It is surprising to find that they did
not lose courage, but kept the rising afoot with undiminished energy,
being apparently confirmed in their self-confidence by the poor show
made by the regular army, rather than disheartened at the ineffective
succour sent them from Cadiz. Despite of all the efforts of Soult’s
flying columns, they could not be entirely dispersed, though they
were hunted a hundred times from valley to valley. The power of the
viceroy of Andalusia stopped short at the foot-hills, though his
dragoons kept the plains in subjection. Every time that Ronda and the
other isolated garrisons in the mountains had to be revictualled,
the convoy had to fight its way to its destination through swarms of
‘sniping’ insurgents[378].
[376] Martinien’s lists show that the 40th regiment of Girard’s
division lost four officers at Albondonates, and the 64th the
same number at Grazalema--so the skirmishes must have been fairly
vigorous.
[377] That Lacy’s force was not so entirely destroyed as Napier
implies is shown by the fact that many of the same regiments
could be utilized for the subsequent expedition to the Condado de
Niebla.
[378] For illustrative anecdotes of warfare in the Serrania de
Ronda, see the autobiography of Rocca of the 2nd Hussars, who was
busy in this region in the spring and summer of 1810.
The Regency had not yet done with Lacy and his expeditionary force.
After they had lain for some time under the walls of Gibraltar, they
were re-embarked and taken back to Cadiz, from where a short time
after they were dispatched for a raid in the Condado de Niebla. In
this region, where Copons was already in arms, the French forces,
under Remond and the Duke of Aremberg, were so weak that the
Junta believed that Lacy’s division would easily clear the whole
country-side of the enemy. Its liberation would be most valuable,
because Cadiz was wont to draw both corn and cattle from the lands
between the Rio Tinto and Guadiana, and had felt bitterly the want of
its accustomed supplies since the war had been carried thither.
Lacy landed in the Bay of Huelva on August 23 with nearly 3,000 men.
He had the good fortune to meet and to overcome in succession two
small French columns which marched against him from Moguer and from
San Juan del Puerto. Thereupon the Duke of Aremberg--whose whole
force in this region was less than 1,500 men (two battalions of the
103rd of the line and the 27th Chasseurs)--evacuated Niebla and fell
back on Seville. Copons, who had been told to join Lacy but had
failed to receive his instructions in time, pursued a separate French
column under General Remond for some distance, but was soon stopped
by the news that a large force was moving against him, to repair
this check to the French arms. Lacy, meanwhile, to the surprise and
disgust of the inhabitants of the Condado, re-embarked on August
29 and went back to Cadiz, professing to regard the purpose of his
expedition as completed. He had this much justification, that the
news of his raid had induced Soult to send out against him, at a most
critical moment, the main body of Gazan’s division, which marched to
Niebla, vainly sought the expeditionary force, and returned to its
base after wasting a fortnight. But a larger garrison was now left in
Western Andalusia, Copons was hunted more vigorously than before, and
cruel reprisals were made on the inhabitants of Moguer and Huelva,
who had aided Lacy.
Feeble as it had been, Lacy’s raid on the Condado had staved off a
serious danger to the Spanish Army of Estremadura, by forcing Soult
to detach Gazan against him, at a moment when he was concentrating
the 5th Corps for a blow at La Romana, and was already engaged in
active operations against the Marquis. A complete change had taken
place in the situation in Estremadura at the end of July, when
Reynier, acting under orders from Masséna[379], had marched northward
from his old base at Merida and Medellin, and crossed the Tagus at
the ferry of Alconetar above the broken bridge of Alcantara[380]
(July 16). This removal of the whole 2nd Corps to the north, followed
(as we have already seen) by the corresponding transference of Hill’s
British force from Portalegre to the neighbourhood of Castello
Branco, had left La Romana at Badajoz with no enemy in front of him,
and had caused a complete rupture of communications between the
French Army of Andalusia and the Army of Portugal, who could for
the future only hear of each other by the circuitous route through
Madrid, since that by Almaraz was closed.
[379] See pp. 246-7 of this volume.