Charles Oman

THE LAND AND THE COMBATANTS

CHAPTER I

MILITARY GEOGRAPHY OF THE PENINSULA: MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, ROADS

Of all the regions of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula possesses the best marked frontier. It is separated from France, its only neighbour, by one broad range of mountains, which defines its boundaries even more clearly than the Alps mark those of Italy. For the Alps are no single chain, but a system of double and triple chains running parallel to each other, and leaving between them debatable lands such as Savoy and the Southern Tyrol. Between Spain and France there is no possibility of any such claims and counter-claims. It is true that Roussillon, where the eastern end of the Pyrenean range runs into the sea, was Spanish down to 1659, but that was a political survival from the Middle Ages, not a natural union: there can be no doubt that geographically Roussillon is a French and not an Iberian land: the main backbone of the boundary chain lies south and not north of it.

The Pyrenees, though in height they cannot vie with the Alps, and though they are not nearly so jagged or scarped as the greater chain, are extremely difficult to cross, all the more so because the hand of man has seldom come to help the hand of nature in making practicable lines of access between France and Spain. In the whole length between the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean there are only two short fronts where intercommunication is easy, and these lie at the extreme east and west, where the mountains touch the sea. In the 250 miles which intervene there is hardly one good pass practicable for wheeled traffic or for the march of an army: most are mere mule-paths, rarely used save by smugglers and shepherds. The only one of these minor routes employed in the war was that which leads from Jaca in Aragon to Oloron in BÉarn, and that was not much used: only on one single occasion in 1813 does it appear prominently in history, when Clausel’s French division, fleeing before Wellington and pressed up against the foot of the mountains, escaped across it with some difficulty.

The only passes that were systematically employed during the war were those which lie close to the water at each end of the Pyrenean chain. At the eastern end there are three which lead from Roussillon into Catalonia. One hugs the water’s edge, and crawls along under the cliffs from Perpignan to Rosas: this was not in 1808 the most important of the three, though it is the one by which the railway passes to-day. Inland there are two other roads over difficult crests—one ten, the other forty miles from the shore—the former from Bellegarde to Figueras, the other from Mont-Louis to Puycerda and Vich. The first was the pass most used in the war, being less exposed than the Rosas route to English descents from the sea: the coast road could actually be cannonaded by warships at some corners. It was blocked indeed by the fortress of Figueras, but that stronghold was only in Spanish hands for a very short period of the war. The inmost, or Mont-Louis-Puycerda road was bad, led into nothing more than a few upland valleys, and was very little employed by the French. It would have been of importance had it led down into the lowlands of Aragon, but after taking a long turn in the hills it harks back towards the Catalan coast, and joins the other two roads near Gerona—a fortress which is so placed as practically to command every possible access into Eastern Spain.

Taking all three of these paths into Catalonia together, they do but form a sort of back door into the Iberian Peninsula. They only communicate with the narrow eastern coast-strip from Barcelona to Valencia. There is no direct access from them into Castile, the heart of the country, and only a roundabout entrance by Lerida into Aragon. The great mass of the Catalan and Valencian Sierras bars them out from the main bulk of the Spanish realm. Catalonia and Valencia, wealthy and in parts fertile as they are, are but its back premises.

The true front door of the kingdom is formed by the passes at the other, the western, end of the Pyrenees. Here too we have three available routes, but they differ in character from the roads at the edge of the Mediterranean, in that they open up two completely separate lines of advance into Spain, and do not (like the Catalan defiles) all lead on to the same goal. All three start from Bayonne, the great southern fortress of Gascony. The first keeps for some time close to the seaside, and after crossing the Bidassoa, the boundary river of France and Spain, at Irun, leaves the fortress of San Sebastian a few miles to its right and then charges the main chain of the mountains. It emerges at Vittoria, the most northerly town of importance in the basin of the Ebro. A few miles further south it crosses that stream, and then makes for Burgos and Madrid, over two successive lines of Sierras. It opens up the heart of both Old and New Castile. The other two roads from Bayonne strike inland at once, and do not hug the Biscayan shore like the Irun-Vittoria route. They climb the Pyrenees, one by the pass of Maya, the other, twenty miles further east, by the more famous pass of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne suffered disaster of old, and left the great paladin, Roland, dead behind him. The Maya and Roncesvalles roads join, after passing the mountains, at the great fortress of Pampeluna, the capital of Navarre. From thence several lines are available for the invader, the two chief of which are the roads into Old Castile by LogroÑo and into Aragon by Tudela. Pampeluna is quite as valuable as Vittoria as the base for an attack on Central Spain.

The whole Iberian Peninsula has been compared, not inaptly, to an inverted soup-plate: roughly it consists of a high central plateau, surrounded by a flat rim. But no comparison of that kind can be pressed too hard, and we must remember that the rim is variable in width: sometimes, as on the north coast, and in the extreme south-east of the peninsula, it is very narrow, and much cut up by small spurs running down to the sea. But as a rule, and especially in Central Portugal, Andalusia, Murcia, and Valencia, it is broad and fertile. Indeed if we set aside the northern coast—Biscay, Asturias, and Galicia—we may draw a sharp division between the rich and semi-tropical coast plain, and the high, wind-swept, and generally barren central plateau. All the wealth of the land lies in the outer strip: the centre is its most thinly inhabited and worthless part. Madrid, lying in the very midst of the plateau, is therefore not the natural centre of the land in anything save a mathematical sense. It is a new and artificial town of the sixteenth century, pitched upon as an administrative capital by the Hapsburg kings; but in spite of the long residence of the court there, it never grew into a city of the first class. Summing up its ineligibilities, an acute observer said that Madrid combined ‘the soil of the Sahara, the sun of Calcutta, the wind of Edinburgh, and the cold of the North Pole.’ Though in no sense the natural capital of the country, it has yet a certain military importance as the centre from which the road-system of Spain radiates. There is, as a glance at the map will show, no other point from which all the main avenues of communication with the whole of the provinces can be controlled. An invader, therefore, who has got possession of it can make any combined action against himself very difficult. But he must not flatter himself that the capture of Madrid carries with it the same effect that the capture of Paris or Berlin or Vienna entails. The provinces have no such feeling of dependence on the national capital as is common in other countries. France with Paris occupied by an enemy is like a body deprived of its head. But for Andalusians or Catalonians or Galicians the occupation of Madrid had no such paralysing effect. No sentimental affection for the royal residence—and Madrid was nothing more—existed. And a government established at Seville or Cadiz, or any other point, would be just as well (or as ill) obeyed as one that issued its orders from the sandy banks of the Manzanares.

The main geographical, as well as the main political, characteristics of Spain are determined by its very complicated mountain-system. It is a land where the rivers count for little, and the hills for almost everything, in settling military conditions. In most countries great rivers are connecting cords of national life: their waters carry the internal traffic of the realm: the main roads lie along their banks. But in Spain the streams, in spite of their length and size, are useless. They mostly flow in deep-sunk beds, far below the level of the surrounding country-side. Their rapid current is always swirling round rocks, or dashing over sandbanks: often they flow for mile after mile between cliffs from which it is impossible to reach the water’s edge. In the rainy season they are dangerous torrents: in the summer all save the very largest dwindle down into miserable brooks. A river in Spain is always a sundering obstacle, never a line of communication. Only for a few scores of miles near their mouths can any one of them be utilized for navigation: the Douro can be so employed as far as Freneda on the frontier of Portugal, the Tagus in good seasons as far as Abrantes, the Guadalquivir to Seville. For the rest of their long courses they are not available even for the lightest boats.

Spanish rivers, in short, are of importance not as lines of transit, but as obstacles. They form many fine positions for defence, but positions generally rendered dangerous by the fact that a very few days of drought may open many unsuspected fords, where just before there had been deep and impassable water. Rivers as broad as the Tagus below Talavera and the Douro at Toro were occasionally crossed by whole armies in dry weather. It was always hazardous to trust to them as permanent lines of defence.

It is the mountains which really require to be studied in detail from the military point of view. Speaking generally we may describe the Iberian system—as distinct from the Pyrenees—as consisting of one chain running roughly from north to south, so as to separate the old kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, while at right angles to this chain run a number of others, whose general courses are parallel to each other and run from east to west. There is no single name for the mountains which separate Castile and Aragon, nor do they form one continuous range. They are a number of separate systems, often divided from each other by wide gaps, and sometimes broadening out into high tablelands. The central nucleus, from which the rest run out, lies between the provinces of New Castile and Valencia, from Guadalajara in the former to Morella in the latter. Here there is a great ganglion of chaotic sierras, pierced by hardly a single practicable road. Northward, in the direction of Aragon, they sink down into the plain of the Ebro: southward they spread out into the lofty plateau of Murcia, but rise into higher and narrower ranges again as they get near the frontier of Andalusia.

This block of chains and plateaus forms the central watershed of Spain, which throws westward the sources of the Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir, and eastward those of the Xucar and Segura. The basins of these streams and their tributaries form three-fourths of the Iberian Peninsula. The rest consists mainly of the great valley of the Ebro: this hardly falls into the system, and is somewhat exceptional. It has been described as serving as a sort of wet-ditch to the main fortification of the peninsula. Starting in the western extension of the Pyrenees, quite close to the Bay of Biscay, it runs diagonally across Spain, more or less parallel to the Pyrenees, and falls into the Mediterranean between Catalonia and Valencia. It is more low-lying than the rest of the main valleys of Spain, is broader, and is not so much cramped and cut up by mountains running down to it at right angles to its course.

Behind the Ebro lie, chain after chain, the parallel sierras which mark off the divisions of the great central plateau of Spain. Arteche compares them to the waves of a great petrified sea, running some higher and some lower, but all washing up into jagged crests, with deep troughs between them.

The first and most northerly of these waves is that which we may call the range of Old Castile, which separates the basin of the Ebro from that of the Douro. At one end it links itself to the Pyrenean chain in the neighbourhood of Santander: at the other it curves round to join the more central sierras in the direction of Soria and Calatayud. It is the lowest of the chains which bound the central plateau of Spain, and is pierced by three practicable roads, of which the most important is that from Vittoria to Burgos.

Between this chain on the east and the Cantabrian mountains on the north lies the great plain of Old Castile and Leon, the heart of the elder Spanish monarchy, in the days when Aragon was still independent and Andalusia remained in the hands of the Moor. It is a fairly productive corn-producing land, studded with ancient cities such as Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Toro, Zamora, Salamanca. The Tierra de Campos (land of the plains), as it was called, was the granary of Northern Spain, the most civilized part of the kingdom, and the only one where there existed a fairly complete system of roads. For want of the isolated mountain chains which cut up most provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, it was hard to defend and easy to overrun. If the mountains that divide it from the Ebro valley are once passed, there is no way of stopping the invader till he reaches the border of Asturias, Galicia, or New Castile. The whole plain forms the valley of the Upper Douro and its tributaries, the Adaja, Pisuerga, Esla, Tormes, and the rest. It narrows down towards Portugal, as the mountains of Galicia on the one side and Estremadura on the other throw out their spurs to north and south. Hence the Lower Douro valley, after the Portuguese frontier has been passed, is a defile rather than a plain. Before Oporto and the estuary are reached, there are many places where the mountains on either side come right down to the river’s edge.

The second chain is much more important, and more strongly marked: it divides Old from New Castile, the valley of the Douro from that of the Tagus. In its central and western parts it is really a double range, with two narrow valleys between its chief ridges. These valleys are drained by the Zezere and Alagon, two tributaries of the Tagus which flow parallel for many scores of miles to the broad river which they feed. If we call this great system of mountains the chain of New Castile it is only for convenience’ sake: the Spaniards and Portuguese have no common name for them. In the east they are styled the Sierra de Ayllon; above Madrid they are known as the Guadarrama—a name sometimes extended to the whole chain. When they become double, west of Madrid, the northern chain is the Sierra de Gata, the southern the Sierra de Gredos. Finally in Portugal the extension of the Sierra de Gata is called the Sierra da Estrella, the southern parallel ridge the Sierra do Moradal. The whole system forms a very broad, desolate, and lofty belt of hills between the Tagus and Douro, through which the practicable passes are few and difficult. Those requiring notice are (1) the Somosierra Pass, through which runs the great northern road from Burgos to Madrid: its name is well remembered owing to the extraordinary way in which Napoleon succeeded in forcing it (against all the ordinary rules of war) in the winter of 1808. (2) There is a group of three passes, all within twelve miles of each other, across the Guadarrama, through which there debouch on to Madrid the main roads from North-western Spain—those from (a) Valladolid and Segovia, (b) from Astorga, Tordesillas, and Arevalo, (c) from Salamanca by Avila. After this group of passes there is a long space of impracticable hills, till we come to the chief road from north to south, parallel to the Portuguese frontier: it comes down the valley of the Alagon from Salamanca, by BaÑos and Plasencia, on to the great Roman bridge of Alcantara, the main passage over the Middle Tagus. This is a bad road through a desolate country, but the exigencies of war caused it to be used continually by the French and English armies, whenever they had to transfer themselves from the valley of the Douro to that of the Tagus. Occasionally they employed a still worse route, a little further west, from Ciudad Rodrigo by Perales to Alcantara. When we get within the Portuguese frontier, we find a road parallel to the last, from Almeida by Guarda to Abrantes, also a difficult route, but like it in perpetual use: usually, when the French marched from Salamanca to Alcantara, Wellington moved in a corresponding way from near Almeida to Abrantes. This road runs along the basin of the Zezere, though not down in the trough of the river, but high up the hillsides above it. Spanish and Portuguese roads, as we shall see, generally avoid the river banks and run along the slopes far above them.

The next great chain across the Peninsula is that which separates the barren and sandy valley of the Upper Tagus from the still more desolate and melancholy plateau of La Mancha, the basin of the Guadiana. Of all the regions of Central Spain, this is the most thinly peopled and uninviting. In the whole valley there are only two towns of any size, Ciudad Real, the capital of La Mancha, and Badajoz, the frontier fortress against Portugal. The mountains north of the Guadiana are called first the Sierra de Toledo, then the Sierra de Guadalupe, lastly on the Portuguese frontier the Sierra de San Mamed. Their peculiarity, as opposed to the other cross-ranges of the Peninsula, is that at their eastern end they do not unite directly with the mountains of Valencia, but leave a broad gap of upland, through which the roads from Madrid to Murcia and Madrid to Valencia take their way. When the Sierra de Toledo once begins roads are very few. There are practically only three—(1) Toledo by San Vincente to Merida, a most break-neck route winding among summits for forty miles; (2) Almaraz by Truxillo to Merida, the main path from Tagus to Guadiana, and the most used, though it is difficult and steep; (3) Alcantara by Albuquerque to Badajoz, a bad military road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, continuing the similar route from Salamanca to Alcantara.

Leaving the barren basin of the Guadiana to proceed southward, we find across our path a range of first-rate importance, the southern boundary of the central plateaux of Spain: dropping down from its crest we are no longer among high uplands, but in the broad low-lying semi-tropical plain of Andalusia, the richest region of Spain. The chain between the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir and the barren plateau of La Mancha is known for the greater part of its course as the Sierra Morena, but in its western section it takes the name of Sierra de Constantino. The passes across it require special notice: the most eastern and the most important is that of DespeÑa Perros, through which passes the high road from Madrid to Cordova, Seville, and Cadiz. At its southern exit was fought the fight of Baylen, in which the armies of Napoleon received their first great check by the surrender of Dupont and his 20,000 men on July 23, 1808. Higher up the defile lies another historic spot, on which Christian and Moor fought the decisive battle for the mastery of Spain in the early years of the thirteenth century, the well-known fight of Las Navas de Tolosa. The DespeÑa Perros has two side-passes close to its left and right: the former is that of San Estevan del Puerto: the latter is known as the ‘King’s Gate’ (Puerto del Rey). All these three defiles present tremendous difficulties to an assailant from the north, yet all were carried in a single rush by the armies of Soult and Sebastiani in 1810. The central pass of the Sierra Morena lies ninety miles to the left, and is of much less importance, as it starts from the most arid corner of La Mancha, and does not connect itself with any of the great roads from the north. It leads down on to Cordova from Hinojosa. Again sixty miles to the west three more passes come down on to Seville, the one by Llerena, the second by Monasterio, the third by Fregenal: they lead to Badajoz and Merida. These are easier routes through a less rugged country: they were habitually used by Soult in 1811 and 1812, when, from his Andalusian base at Seville, he used to go north to besiege or to relieve the all-important fortress of Badajoz.

Last of all the great Spanish chains is that which lies close along the Mediterranean Sea, forming the southern edge of the fertile Andalusian plain. It is the Sierra Nevada, which, though neither the longest nor the broadest of the ranges of the south, contains the loftiest peaks in Spain, MulhaÇen and La Veleta. This chain runs from behind Gibraltar along the shore, till it joins the mountains of Murcia, leaving only a very narrow coast-strip between its foot and the southern sea. Three roads cut it in its western half, which, starting from Granada, Ronda, and Antequera all come down to the shore at, or in the neighbourhood of, the great port of Malaga. The parts of the coast-line that are far from that city are only accessible by following difficult roads that run close to the water’s edge.

We have still to deal with two corners of the Iberian Peninsula, which do not fall into any of the great valleys that we have described—Galicia and Northern Portugal in the north-west, and Catalonia in the north-east. The geographical conditions of the former region depend on the Cantabrian Mountains, the western continuation of the Pyrenees. This chain, after running for many miles as a single ridge, forks in the neighbourhood of the town of Leon. One branch keeps on in its original direction, and runs by the coast till it reaches the Atlantic at Cape Finisterre. The other turns south-west and divides Spain from Portugal as far as the sea. The angle between these forking ranges is drained by a considerable river, the Minho. The basins of this stream and its tributary the Sil, form the greater part of the province of Galicia. Their valleys are lofty, much cut up by cross-spurs, and generally barren. The access to them from Central Spain is by two openings. The main one is the high road from Madrid to Corunna by Astorga; it does not follow the course of either the Sil or the Minho, but charges cross-ridge after cross-ridge of the spurs of the Galician hills, till at last it comes down to the water, and forks into two routes leading the one to Corunna, the other to the still more important arsenal of Ferrol. The other gate of Galicia is a little to the south of Astorga, where a pass above the town of Puebla de Sanabria gives access to a steep and winding road parallel to the Portuguese frontier, which finally gets into the valley of the Minho, and turns down to reach the port of Vigo. It will be remembered that Sir John Moore, in his famous retreat, hesitated for some time at Astorga between the Vigo and Corunna roads, and finally chose the latter. His judgement was undoubtedly correct, but the best alternative was bad, for in winter even the Madrid-Corunna road, the main artery of this part of Spain, is distressing enough to an army. It does not follow any well-marked valley, but cuts across four separate ranges, every one of which in January was a nursery of torrents in its lower slopes, and an abode of snow in its upper levels. Besides the roads with which we have already dealt there is a third important line of communication in Galicia, that by the narrow coast-plain of the Atlantic, from Corunna by Santiago to Vigo, and thence into Portugal as far as Oporto. This would be a good road but for the innumerable river-mouths, small and great, which it has to cross: the road passes each stream just where it ceases to be tidal, and at each is fronted at right angles by a defensible position, which, if held by a competent enemy, is difficult to force from the front, and still more difficult to turn by a detour up-stream. Nevertheless it was by this route that Soult successfully invaded Northern Portugal in the spring of 1809. It must be remembered that he was only opposed by bands of peasants not even organized into the loosest form of militia.

The geography of Catalonia, the last Iberian region with which we have to deal, is more simple than that of Galicia. The land is formed by a broad mountain belt running out from the eastern end of the Pyrenees, parallel to the Mediterranean. From this chain the slopes run down and form on the eastern side a coast-plain, generally rather narrow, on the western a series of parallel valleys drained by tributaries of the Segre, the most important affluent of the Ebro. They all unite near Lerida, an important town and a great centre of roads. But two considerable rivers, the Ter and the Llobregat, have small basins of their own in the heart of the central mountain mass, which open down into the coast-plain by defiles, the one blocked by the peak of Montserrat, the other by the town of Gerona. During the greater part of the Peninsular War the French held the larger share of the shoreland, dominating it from the great fortress of Barcelona, which they had seized by treachery ere hostilities began. In 1811 they captured Tarragona also, the second capital of the sea coast. But they never succeeded in holding down all the small upland plains, and the minor passes that lead from one to the other. Hunted out of one the Spanish army took refuge in the next, and, though it dwindled down ultimately to a mass of guerilla bands, was never caught en masse and exterminated. There were too many bolt-holes among the network of hills, and the invaders never succeeded in stopping them all, so that down to the end of the war the patriots always maintained a precarious existence inland, descending occasionally to the shore to get ammunition and stores from the English squadrons which haunted the coast. They were supplied and reinforced from the Balearic Isles, which Napoleon could never hope to touch, for his power (like that of the witches of old) vanished when it came to running water. The survival of the Catalan resistance after the French had drawn a complete cordon around the hill-country, holding the whole coast-plain on the one hand, and Lerida and the Segre valley on the other, is one of the incidents of the war most creditable to Spanish constancy.

Having dealt with the physical geography of Spain, it is necessary for us to point out the way in which the natural difficulties of the country had influenced its main lines of communication. Roads always take the ‘line of least resistance’ in early days, and seek for easy passes, not for short cuts. The idea that ‘time is money,’ and that instead of going round two sides of a triangle it may be worth while to cut a new path across its base, in spite of all engineering difficulties, was one very unfamiliar to the Spaniard. Nothing shows more clearly the state of mediaeval isolation in which the kingdom still lay in 1808 than the condition of its roads. Wherever the country presented any serious obstacles, little or no attempt had been made to grapple with them since the days of the Romans. The energetic Charles III, alone among the kings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had done something to improve the system of intercommunication. He had, for example, superseded the old break-neck road from the plains of Leon into Galicia, by building the fine new chaussÉe from Astorga to Villafranca by Manzanal; but among the line of Hapsburg and Bourbon sovereigns Charles was a rare exception. Under the imbecile rule of his son (or rather of Godoy) improvements ceased, and internal communications were as much neglected as any other branch of state management. What roads there were, when the war of 1808 broke out, were in a state of dreadful neglect. The Spaniard was still too prone to go round an intolerable distance rather than attempt a serious piece of engineering work. Let us take, for example, the northern coast of Spain: the Cantabrian range is no doubt a most serious obstacle to intercourse between Castile and Leon, on the one side, and the maritime provinces of Asturias and Biscay on the other. But who would have conceived it possible that in a length of 300 miles of mountain, there should be no more than five roads practicable for wheeled traffic and artillery? Yet this was so: to get down from the central plateau to the coast there are only available these five routes—one from Leon to Oviedo, one from Burgos to Santander, one from Burgos to Bilbao, one from Vittoria to Bilbao, and one from Vittoria to San Sebastian and Irun. There were many other points at which a division travelling in light order without guns or baggage could cross the watershed—as was shown in Blake’s flight from Reynosa and Ney’s invasion of the Asturias. But for an army travelling with all its impedimenta such bypaths were impracticable.

Let us take another part of the Peninsula—its eastern side. The ancient separation between Aragon and Castile is fully reflected by the utter isolation of the two for intercommunication. To get from Madrid to the east coast there are only three roads suitable for wheeled traffic: one goes by the main gap in the hills by Chinchilla to Murcia, another by RequeÑa to Valencia. The third passes by Calatayud to Saragossa and ultimately to Barcelona. Between it and the Valencia road there is a gap of no less than 120 miles unpierced by any good practicable line of communication[69]. This being so, we begin to understand how it was that the operations on the eastern side of Spain, during the whole of the struggle, were a sort of independent episode that never exercised any great influence on the main theatre of the war, or, on the other hand, was much affected by the progress of the strife in Castile or Portugal. Soult’s conquest of Andalusia did not help Suchet to conquer Valencia. On the other hand, when the latter did, in January, 1812, succeed in his attempt to subdue the eastern coast-line, it did not much affect him that Wellington was storming Ciudad Rodrigo and pressing back the French in the west. He was able to hold on to Valencia till the allies, in 1813, got possession of the upper valley of the Ebro and the great road from Madrid to Saragossa and Lerida, after the battle of Vittoria. It was only then that his flank was really turned, and that he was compelled to retreat and to abandon his southern conquests.

Summing up the general characteristics of the road-system of Spain, we note first that the main routes are rather at right angles to the great rivers than parallel to them. The sole exception is to be found in the valley of the Ebro, where the only good cross-road of Northern Spain does follow the river-bank from LogroÑo and Tudela on to Saragossa and Lerida.

Just because the roads do not cling to the valleys, but strike across them at right angles, they are always crossing watersheds by means of difficult passes. And so there is hardly a route in the whole Peninsula where it is possible to find fifty miles without a good defensive position drawn across the path. Moreover, the continual passes make the question of supplies very difficult: in crossing a plain an army can live, more or less, on the supplies of the country-side; but among mountains and defiles there is no population, and therefore no food to be had. Hence an army on the move must take with it all that it consumes, by means of a heavy wagon train, or an enormous convoy of pack-mules. But only the best roads are suitable for wheeled traffic, and so the lines practicable for a large host are very restricted in number. The student is often tempted to consider the movements of the rival generals very slow. The explanation is simply that to transfer an army from one river-basin to another was a serious matter. It was necessary to spend weeks in collecting at the base food and transport sufficient to support the whole force till it reached its goal. In 1811 or 1812 the French and English were continually moving up and down the Portuguese frontier parallel to each other, the one from Salamanca to Badajoz, the other from Almeida or Guarda to Elvas. But to prepare for one of these flittings was such a serious matter that by the time that the army was able to move, the enemy had usually got wind of the plan, and was able to follow the movement on his own side of the frontier. There were months of preparation required before a few weeks of active operations, and when the concentration was over and the forces massed, they could only keep together as long as the food held out, and then had to disperse again in order to live. This was what was meant by the old epigram, that ‘in Spain large armies starve, and small armies get beaten.’

Half the strategy of the campaigns of 1811-12-13 consisted in one of the combatants secretly collecting stores, concentrating his whole army, and then dashing at some important part of his adversary’s line, before the other could mass his forces in a corresponding way. If prompt, the assailant might gain a fortnight, in which he might either try to demolish the enemy in detail before he could concentrate, or else to take from him some important position or town. In 1811 Marmont and Dorsenne played this trick on Wellington, during the short campaign of El Bodon and Aldea da Ponte. They relieved Ciudad Rodrigo, and nearly caught some divisions of the English army before the rest could join. But missing the instant blow, and allowing Wellington time to draw in his outlying troops, they failed and went home. In 1812, on the other hand, the British general successfully played off this device on the French. He first concentrated in the north, and captured Ciudad Rodrigo in eleven days, before Marmont could mass his scattered divisions; then going hastily south he took Badajoz in exactly the same way, storming it after only nineteen days of siege. Soult drew his army together at the news of Wellington’s move, but had to bring troops from such distances, and to collect so much food, that he arrived within three marches of Badajoz only to hear that the place had just fallen.

In dealing with the main geographical facts of the war it is fair to recollect that an invasion of Spain from France is one of the most difficult of undertakings, because the whole river and mountain system of the Peninsula lies across the main line of advance from Bayonne to Cadiz, which the invader must adopt. While the French conquest must be pushed from north to south, both the streams and the Sierras of Spain all run at right angles to this direction, i.e. from east to west. In advancing from the Pyrenees to Madrid, and again from Madrid to Seville and Cadiz, the invader has to cross every main river—Ebro, Douro, Tagus, Guadiana, and Guadalquivir—and to force the passes of every main range. Moreover, as he advances southward, he has to keep his flanks safe against disturbance from the two mountainous regions, Catalonia and Portugal, which lie along the eastern and western coasts of the Peninsula. Unless the whole breadth of Spain, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, be occupied step by step as the invader moves on towards the Straits of Gibraltar, he can always be molested and have his lines of communication with France threatened. In the end it may be said that Napoleon’s whole scheme of conquest was shipwrecked upon the blunder of attacking Andalusia and Cadiz while Portugal was still unsubdued. Wellington’s constant sallies out of that country upon the French flank, in Leon and Estremadura, detained such large forces to protect the valleys of the Central Douro and Tagus that enough men were never found to finish the conquest of the south and east. And finally one crushing victory at Salamanca, in the plains of Leon, so threatened the invader’s line of touch with France, that he had to abandon the whole south of Spain in order to concentrate an army large enough to force Wellington back from Burgos and the great northern road.

On the other hand, one tremendous advantage possessed by the French in the central years of the war must be remembered. It is manifest that Madrid is the only really important road-centre in Spain, and that its undisturbed possession by the French in 1809-11 gave them the advantage of being able to operate from a single point, against enemies who lay in a vast semicircle around, with no good cross-roads to join them and enable them to work together. The small ‘Army of the Centre,’ which was always kept in and around Madrid, could be used as a reserve for any other of the French armies, and transferred to join it in a few marches, while it was infinitely more difficult to unite the various forces lying on an outer circle at Astorga, Almeida, Abrantes, and Cadiz, which the Spaniards and the British kept in the field. In short, in estimating the difficulties of the two parties, the advantage of the central position must be weighed against the disadvantage of long and exposed lines of communication.

One of the cardinal blunders of Napoleon’s whole scheme for the conquest of the Peninsula was that he persisted in treating it as if it were German or Italian soil, capable of supporting an army on the march. His troops were accustomed to live on the country-side while crossing Central Europe, and therefore made no proper preparations for supplying themselves by other means than plunder. But in Spain there are only a few districts where this can be done: it may be possible to get forward without an enormous train of convoys in Andalusia, the coast plain of Valencia, and certain parts of the rather fertile plateau of Leon, the wheat-bearing Tierra de Campos. But over four-fifths of the Peninsula, an army that tries to feed on the country-side will find itself at the point of starvation in a few days, and be forced to disperse in order to live.

Till he had seen Spain with his own eyes Napoleon might perhaps have been excused for ignoring the fact that his ordinary method of ‘making war support itself’ was not in this case possible. But even after he had marched from Bayonne to Madrid, and then from Madrid to Astorga, in 1808, he persisted in refusing to see facts as they were. We find him on his way back to Paris from the campaign uttering the extraordinary statement that ‘Spain is a much better country than he had ever supposed, and that he had no idea what a magnificent present he had made to his brother Joseph till he had seen it[70].’ Of his utter failure to grasp the difficulties of the country we may get a fair conception from his orders, given at the same time, to Marshal Soult, who was at that moment occupied in pushing Sir John Moore towards Corunna. He told the Duke of Dalmatia that if he reached Lugo on January 9, and the English got away safely by sea, he was to march on Oporto, where he ought to arrive on the first of February; after seizing that city he was to go on to Lisbon, which he might reach on or about February 10. As a matter of fact Soult saw the English depart, and occupied Corunna on January 19, but his army was so utterly worn out, and his stores so entirely exhausted, that with the best will in the world he could not move again till February 20, only took Oporto on March 29, and had not yet started for Lisbon when Wellesley suddenly fell on him and drove him out of the country on May 12, 1809. The Emperor, in short, had given Soult orders executable perhaps, according to the distance, in Lombardy or Bavaria, but utterly absurd when applied to a country where roads are few and bad, with a defile or a river crossing the path at every few miles, and where food has to be carefully collected before a move, and taken on with the army by means of enormous convoys. Moreover the month was January, when every brook had become a raging mountain stream, and every highland was covered with snow! With such conceptions of the task before him, it is not wonderful that Napoleon was continually issuing wholly impracticable orders. The one that we have just quoted was sent out from Valladolid: how much worse would the case be when the Emperor persisted in directing affairs from Paris or Vienna, the last news that had reached him from the front being now several weeks old! With all his genius he never thoroughly succeeded in grasping the state of affairs, and to the very last continued to send directions that would have been wise enough in Central Europe, but happened to be inapplicable in the Iberian Peninsula.

It is only fair to Napoleon to add that his Spanish enemies, who ought at least to have known the limitations of their own road-system, and the disabilities of their half-starved armies, used habitually to produce plans of operations far more fantastically impossible than any that he ever drafted. They would arrange far-reaching schemes, for the co-operation of forces based on the most remote corners of the Peninsula, without attempting to work out the ‘logistics’ of the movement. The invariable result was that such enterprises either ended in disaster, or at the best came to a stop after the first few marches, because some vital point of the calculation had already been proved to have been made on erroneous data.

---

SECTION II: CHAPTER II

THE SPANISH ARMY IN 1808

When the English student begins to investigate the Peninsular War in detail, he finds that, as regards the Spanish armies and their behaviour, he starts with a strong hostile prejudice. The Duke of Wellington in his dispatches, and still more in his private letters and his table-talk, was always enlarging on the folly and arrogance of the Spanish generals with whom he had to co-operate, and on the untrustworthiness of their troops. Napier, the one military classic whom most Englishmen have read, is still more emphatic and far more impressive, since he writes in a very judicial style, and with the most elaborate apparatus of references and authorities. When the reader begins to work through the infinite number of Peninsular diaries of British officers and men (for there are a very considerable number of writers from among the rank and file) the impression left upon him is much the same. It must be confessed that for the most part they had a very poor opinion of our allies.

Before allowing ourselves to be carried away by the almost unanimous verdict of our own countrymen, it is only fair to examine the state and character of the Spanish army when the war broke out. Only when we know its difficulties can we judge with fairness of its conduct, or decide upon its merits and shortcomings.

The armed force which served under the banners of Charles IV in the spring of 1808 consisted of 131,000 men, of whom 101,000 were regulars and 30,000 embodied militia. The latter had been under arms since 1804, and composed the greater part of the garrisons of the seaports of Spain, all of which had to be protected against possible descents of English expeditions[71].

Of the 101,000 men of the regular army, however, not all were available for the defence of the country. While the war with Russia was still in progress, Bonaparte had requested the Spanish government to furnish him with a strong division for use in the North [March, 1807], and in consequence the Marquis of La Romana had been sent to the Baltic with 15,000 men, the picked regiments of the army. There remained therefore only 86,000 regulars within the kingdom. A very cursory glance down the Spanish army-list of 1808 is sufficient to show that this force was far from being in a satisfactory condition for either offensive or defensive operations.

It is well worth while to look at the details of its composition. The infantry consisted of three sorts of troops—the Royal Guard, the line regiments, and the foreign corps in Spanish pay. For Spain, more than any other European state, had kept up the old seventeenth-century fashion of hiring foreign mercenaries on a large scale. Even in the Royal Guard half the infantry were composed of ‘Walloon Guards,’ a survival from the day when the Netherlands had been part of the broad dominions of the Hapsburg kings. The men of these three battalions were no longer mainly Walloons, for Belgium had been a group of French departments for the last thirteen years. There were Germans and other foreigners of all sorts in the ranks, as well as a large number of native Spaniards. There were also six regiments of Swiss mercenaries—over 10,000 bayonets—and in these the men in the ranks did really come from Switzerland and Germany, though there was a sprinkling among them of strangers from all lands who had ‘left their country for their country’s good.’ There were also one Neapolitan and three Irish regiments. These latter were survivals from the days of the ‘Penal Laws,’ when young Irishmen left their homes by thousands every year to take service with France or Spain, in the hope of getting some day a shot at the hated redcoats. The regiments bore the names of Hibernia, Irlanda, and Ultonia (i.e. Ulster). They were very much under their proper establishment, for of late years Irish recruits had begun to run short, even after the ’98: they now took service in France and not in Spain. The three Irish corps in 1808 had only 1,900 men under arms, instead of the 5,000 which they should have produced; and of those the large majority were not real Irish, but waifs of all nationalities. Of late native Spaniards had been drafted in, to keep the regiments from dying out. On the other hand we shall find that not only the foreign regiments but the whole Spanish army was still full of officers of Irish name and blood, the sons and grandsons of the original emigrants of two generations back. An astounding proportion of the officers who rose to some note during the war bore Irish names, and were hereditary soldiers of fortune, who justified their existence by the unwavering courage which they always showed, in a time when obstinate perseverance was the main military virtue. We need only mention Blake, the two O’Donnells, Lacy, Sarsfield, O’Neill, O’Daly, Mahony, O’Donahue. If none of them showed much strategical skill, yet their constant readiness to fight, which no series of defeats could tame, contrasts very well with the spiritless behaviour of a good many of the Spanish generals. No officer of Irish blood was ever found among the cowards, and hardly one among the traitors[72].

The ten foreign corps furnished altogether about 13,000 men to the Spanish regular army. The rest of the infantry was composed of thirty-five regiments of troops of the line, of three battalions each, and twelve single-battalion regiments of light infantry. They were theoretically territorial, like our own infantry of to-day, and mostly bore local names derived from the provinces—Asturias, Toledo, Estremadura, and so forth. All the light infantry corps belonged to the old kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre, which were therefore scantily represented in the nomenclature of the ordinary line regiments. There were altogether 147 battalions of Spanish infantry, excluding the foreign troops, and if all of these had been up to the proper establishment of 840 men, the total would have amounted to 98,000 bayonets. But the state of disorganization was such that as a matter of fact there were only 58,000 under arms. The regiments which Napoleon had requisitioned for service in the North had been more or less brought up to a war-footing, and each showed on an average 2,000 men in the ranks. But many of the corps in the interior of Spain displayed the most lamentable figures: e.g. the three battalions of the regiment of Estremadura had only 770 men between them, Cordova 793, and Navarre 822—showing 250 men to the battalion instead of the proper 840. Theoretically there should have been no difficulty in keeping them up to their proper strength, as machinery for recruiting them had been duly provided. Voluntary enlistment was the first resource: but when that did not suffice to keep the ranks full, there was a kind of limited conscription called the Quinta[73] to fall back upon. This consisted in balloting for men in the regimental district, under certain rules which allowed an enormous number of exemptions—e.g. all skilled artisans and all middle-class townsfolk were free from the burden—so that the agricultural labourers had to supply practically the whole contingent. Substitutes were allowed, if by any means the conscript could afford to pay for them. The conscription therefore should have kept the regiments up to their proper strength, and if many of them had only a third of their complement under arms, it was merely due to the general demoralization of the times. Under Godoy’s administration money was always wanting, more especially since Napoleon had begun to levy his monthly tribute of 6,000,000 francs from the Spanish monarchy, and the gaps in the ranks probably represented enforced economy as well as corrupt administration.

The 30,000 embodied militia, which formed the remainder of the Spanish infantry, had been under arms since 1804, doing garrison duty; they seem in many respects to have been equal to the line battalions in efficiency. They bore names derived from the towns in whose districts they had been raised—Badajoz, Lugo, Alcazar, and so forth. Their officering was also strictly local, all ranks being drawn from the leading families of their districts, and seems to have been quite as efficient as that of the line. Moreover their ranks were, on the average, much fuller than those of the regular regiments—only two battalions in the total of forty-three showed less than 550 bayonets on parade.

It is when we turn to the cavalry that we come to the weakest part of the Spanish army. There were twelve regiments of heavy and twelve of light horse, each with a nominal establishment of 700 sabres, which should have given 16,800 men for the whole force. There were only about 15,000 officers and troopers embodied, but this was a small defect. A more real weakness lay in the fact that there were only 9,000 horses for the 15,000 men. It is difficult for even a wealthy government, like our own, to keep its cavalry properly horsed, and that of Charles IV was naturally unable to cope with this tiresome military problem. The chargers were not only too few, but generally of bad quality, especially those of the heavy cavalry: of those which were to be found in the regimental stables a very large proportion were not fit for service. When the five regiments which Napoleon demanded for the expedition to Denmark had been provided with 540 horses each and sent off, the mounts of the rest of the army were in such a deplorable state that some corps had not the power to horse one-third of their troopers: e.g. in June, 1808, the Queen’s Regiment, No. 2 of the heavy cavalry, had 202 horses for 668 men; the 12th Regiment had 259 horses for 667 men; the 1st Chasseurs—more extraordinary still—only 185 horses for 577 men. It resulted from this penury of horses that when Napoleon made a second demand for Spanish cavalry, asking for a division of 2,000 sabres to aid Junot in invading Portugal, that force had to be made up by putting together the mounted men of no less than ten regiments, each contributing two or at the most three squadrons and leaving the rest of its men dismounted at the dÉpÔt.

Even if the cavalry had all been properly mounted, they would have been far too few in proportion to the other arms, only 15,000 out of a total force of 130,000—one in eight; whereas in the time of the Napoleonic wars one in six, or even one in five, was considered the proper complement. In the Waterloo campaign the French had the enormous number of 21,000 cavalry to 83,000 infantry—one to four. What with original paucity, and with want of remounts, the Spaniards took the field in 1808, when the insurrection began, with a ridiculously small number of horsemen. At Medina de Rio Seco they had only 750 horsemen to 22,000 foot-soldiers, at Baylen only 1,200 to 16,000. Later in the war they succeeded in filling up the ranks of the old cavalry regiments, and in raising many new ones. But the gain in number was not in the least accompanied by a gain in efficiency. For the whole six years of the struggle the mounted arm was the weakest point of their hosts. Again and again it disgraced itself by allowing itself to be beaten by half its own numbers, or by absconding early in the fight and abandoning its infantry. It acquired, and merited, a detestable reputation, and it is hard to find half a dozen engagements in which it behaved even reasonably well[74]. When Wellington was made generalissimo of the Spanish armies in 1813 he would not bring it up to the front at all, and though he took 40,000 Spaniards over the Pyrenees, there was not a horseman among them. It is hard to account for the thorough worthlessness of these squadrons, even when we make allowance for all the difficulties of the time: Spain was notoriously deficient in decent cavalry officers when the war began. The horses were inferior to the French, and the equipment bad. From early disasters the troopers contracted a demoralization which they could never shake off. But granting all this, it is still impossible to explain the consistent misbehaviour of these evasive squadrons. The officers, no doubt, had a harder task in organizing their new levies than those of the infantry and artillery, but it is curious that they should never have succeeded in learning their business even after four or five years of war.

The artillery of the Spanish army, on the other hand, earned on the whole a good reputation. This was not the result of proper preparation. When the struggle began it consisted of thirty-four batteries of field artillery, six of horse, and twenty-one garrison batteries (compaÑias fijas), with a total of 6,500 men. Forty batteries—that is to say 240 guns or somewhat less, for in some cases there seem to have been only four instead of six pieces in the battery—was according to the standard of 1808 a mediocre allowance to an army of 130,000 men, only about two-thirds of what it should have been[75]. But this was not the worst. Deducting four fully-horsed batteries, which had been taken off by Napoleon to Denmark, there remained in Spain four horse and thirty-two field batteries. These were practically unable to move, for they were almost entirely destitute of horses. For the 216 guns and their caissons there were only in hand 400 draught animals! When the war began, the artillery had to requisition, and more or less train, 3,000 horses or mules before they could move from their barracks! I do not know any fact that illustrates better the state of Spanish administration under the rule of Godoy. The raising of the great insurrectionary armies in the summer of 1808 ought to have led to an enormous increase to the artillery arm, but the trained men were so few that the greatest difficulty was found in organizing new batteries. Something was done by turning the marine artillery of the fleet into land troops, and there were a few hundreds of the militia who had been trained to work guns. But the officers necessary for the training and officering of new batteries were so scarce, that for many months no fresh forces of the artillery arm could take the field. In the autumn of 1808, at the time of the battles of Espinosa and Tudela, if we carefully add up the number of guns brought into action by the five armies of Galicia, Estremadura, Aragon, the ‘Centre’ (i.e. Andalusia and Castile), and Catalonia, we do not find a piece more than the 240 which existed at the outbreak of the war. That is to say, the Spaniards had raised 100,000 new levies of infantry, without any corresponding extension of the artillery arm. During the campaign the conduct of the corps seems on the whole to have been very good, compared with that of the other arms. This was to be expected, as they were old soldiers to a much greater extent than either the infantry or the cavalry. They seem to have attained a fair skill with their weapons, and to have stuck to them very well. We often hear of gunners cut down or bayonetted over their pieces, seldom of a general bolt to the rear. For this very reason the personnel of the batteries suffered terribly: every defeat meant the capture of some dozens of guns, and the cutting up of the men who served them. It was as much as the government could do to keep up a moderate number of batteries, by supplying new guns and amalgamating the remnants of those which had been at the front. Each batch of lost battles in 1808-10 entailed the loss and consequent reconstruction of the artillery. If, in spite of this, we seldom hear complaints as to its conduct, it must be taken as a high compliment to the arm. But as long as Spanish generals persisted in fighting pitched battles, and getting their armies dispersed, a solid proportion of artillery to infantry could never be established. Its average strength may be guessed from the fact that at Albuera the best army that Spain then possessed put in line 16,300 men with only fourteen guns, less than one gun per thousand men—while Napoleon (as we have already noted) believed that five per thousand was the ideal, and often managed in actual fact to have three. In the latter years of the war the pieces were almost always drawn by mules, yoked tandem-fashion, and not ridden by drivers but goaded by men walking at their side—the slowest and most unsatisfactory form of traction that can be imagined. Hence came, in great part, their inability to manoeuvre.

Of engineers Spain in 1808 had 169 officers dispersed over the kingdom. The corps had no proper rank and file. But there was a regiment of sappers, 1,000 strong, which was officered from the engineers. There was no army service corps, no military train, no organized commissariat of any kind. When moving about a Spanish army depended either on contractors who undertook to provide horses and wagons driven by civilians, or more frequently on the casual sweeping in by requisition of all the mules, oxen, and carts of the unhappy district in which it was operating. In this respect, as in so many others, Spain was still in the Middle Ages. The fact that there was no permanent arrangement for providing for the food of the army is enough in itself to account for many of its disasters. If, like the British, the Spaniards had possessed money to pay for what they took, things might have worked somewhat better. Or if, like the French, they had possessed an organized military train, and no scruples, they might have contrived to get along at the cost of utterly ruining the country-side. But as things stood, depending on incapable civil commissaries and the unwilling contributions of the local authorities, they were generally on the edge of starvation. Sometimes they got over the edge, and then the army, in spite of the proverbial frugality of the Spanish soldier, simply dispersed. It is fair to the men to say that they generally straggled back to the front sooner or later, when they had succeeded in filling their stomachs, and got incorporated in their own or some other regiment. It is said that by the end of the war there were soldiers who had, in their fashion, served in as many as ten different corps during the six years of the struggle.

Summing up the faults of the Spanish army, its depleted battalions, its small and incompetent cavalry force, its insufficient proportion of artillery, its utter want of commissariat, we find that its main source of weakness was that while the wars of the French Revolution had induced all the other states of Europe to overhaul their military organization and learn something from the methods of the French, Spain was still, so far as its army was concerned, in the middle of the eighteenth century. The national temperament, with its eternal relegation of all troublesome reforms to the morrow, was no doubt largely to blame. But Godoy, the all-powerful favourite who had also been commander-in-chief for the last seven years, must take the main responsibility. If he had chosen, he possessed the power to change everything; and in some ways he had peddled a good deal with details, changing the uniforms, and increasing the number of battalions in each regiment. But to make the army efficient he had done very little: the fact was that the commander-in-chief was quite ignorant of the military needs and tendencies of the day: all his knowledge of the army was gained while carpet-soldiering in the ranks of the royal bodyguard. It was natural that the kind of officers who commended themselves to his haughty and ignorant mind should be those who were most ready to do him homage, to wink at his peculations, to condone his jobs, and to refrain from worrying him for the money needed for reforms and repairs. Promotion was wholly arbitrary, and was entirely in the favourite’s hands. Those who were prepared to bow down to him prospered: those who showed any backbone or ventured on remonstrances were shelved. After a few years of this system it was natural that all ranks of the army became demoralized, since not merit but the talents of the courtier and the flatterer were the sure road to prosperity. Hence it came to pass that when the insurrection began, the level of military ability, patriotism, and integrity among the higher ranks of the army was very low. There were a few worthy men like CastaÑos and La Romana in offices of trust, but a much greater proportion of Godoy’s protÉgÉs. One cannot condone the shocking way in which, during the first days of the war, the populace and the rank and file of the army united to murder so many officers in high place, like Filanghieri, the Captain-General of Galicia, Torre del Fresno, the Captain-General of Estremadura, and Solano, who commanded at Cadiz. But the explanation of the atrocities is simple: the multitude were resenting the results of the long administration of Godoy’s creatures, and fell upon such of them as refused to throw in their lot immediately with the insurrection. The murdered men were (rightly or wrongly) suspected either of an intention to submit to Joseph Bonaparte, or of a design to hang back, wait on the times, and make their decision only when it should become obvious which paid better, patriotism or servility. The people had considerable justification in the fact that a very large proportion of Godoy’s protÉgÉs, especially of those at Madrid, did swear homage to the intruder in order to keep their places and pensions. They were the base of the miserable party of Afrancesados which brought so much disgrace on Spain. The misguided cosmopolitan liberals who joined them were much the smaller half of the traitor-faction.

Godoy and his clique, therefore, must take the main responsibility for the state of decay and corruption in which the Spanish army was found in 1808. What more could be expected when for so many years an idle, venal, dissolute, ostentatious upstart had been permitted to control the administration of military affairs, and to settle all promotions to rank and office? ‘Like master like man’ is always a true proverb, and the officers who begged or bought responsible positions from Godoy naturally followed their patron’s example in spreading jobs and peculation downwards. The undrilled and half-clothed soldiery, the unhorsed squadrons, the empty arsenals, the idle and ignorant subalterns, were all, in the end, the result of Godoy’s long domination. But we do not wish to absolve from its share of blame the purblind nation which tolerated him for so long. In another country he would have gone the way of Gaveston or Mortimer long before.

When this was the state of the Spanish armies, it is no wonder that the British observer, whether officer or soldier, could never get over his prejudice against them. It was not merely because a Spanish army was generally in rags and on the verge of starvation that he despised it. These were accidents of war which every one had experienced in his own person: a British battalion was often tattered and hungry. The Spanish government was notoriously poor, its old regiments had been refilled again and again with raw conscripts, its new levies had never had a fair start. Hence came the things which disgusted the average Peninsular diarist of British origin—the shambling indiscipline, the voluntary dirt, the unmilitary habits of the Spanish troops. He could not get over his dislike for men who kept their arms in a filthy, rusty condition, who travelled not in orderly column of route but like a flock of sheep straggling along a high road, who obeyed their officers only when they pleased. And for the officers themselves the English observer had an even greater contempt: continually we come across observations to the effect that the faults of the rank and file might be condoned—after all they were only half-trained peasants—but that the officers were the source and fount of evil from their laziness, their arrogance, their ignorance, and their refusal to learn from experience. Here is a typical passage from the Earl of Munster’s Reminiscences:—

‘We should not have been dissatisfied with our allies, malgrÉ their appearance and their rags, if we had felt any reason to confide in them. The men might be “capable of all that men dare,” but the appearance of their officers at once bespoke their not being fit to lead them in the attempt. They not only did not look like soldiers, but even not like gentlemen, and it was difficult from their mean and abject appearance, particularly among the infantry, to guess what class of society they could have been taken from. Few troops will behave well if those to whom they should look up are undeserving respect. Besides their general inefficiency we found their moral feeling different from what we expected. Far from evincing devotion or even common courage in their country’s cause, they were very often guilty, individually and collectively, of disgraceful cowardice. We hourly regretted that the revolution had not occasioned a more complete bouleversement of society, so as to bring forward fresh and vigorous talent from all classes. Very few of the regular military showed themselves worthy of command. Indeed, with the exception of a few self-made soldiers among the Guerillas, who had risen from among the farmers and peasantry, it would be hard to point out a Spanish officer whose opinion on the most trivial military subject was worth being asked. We saw old besotted generals whose armies were formed on obsolete principles of the ancien rÉgime of a decrepit government. To this was added blind pride and vanity. No proofs of inferiority could open their eyes, and they rushed from one error and misfortune to another, benefiting by no experience, and disdaining to seek aid and improvement’ [pp. 194-5].

A voice from the ranks, Sergeant Surtees of the Rifle Brigade, gives the same idea in different words.

‘Most of the Spanish officers appeared to be utterly unfit and unable to command their men. They had all the pride, arrogance, and self-sufficiency of the best officers in the world, with the very least of all pretension to have a high opinion of themselves. It is true they were not all alike, but the majority were the most haughty, and at the same time the most contemptible creatures in the shape of officers that ever I beheld’ [p. 109].

As a matter of fact the class of officers in Spain was filled up in three different ways. One-third of them were, by custom, drawn from the ranks. In an army raised by conscription from all strata of society excellent officers can be procured in this way. But in one mainly consisting of the least admirable part of the surplus population, forced by want or hatred of work into enlisting, it was hard to get even good sergeants. And the sergeants made still worse sub-lieutenants, when the colonel was forced to promote some of them. No wonder that the English observer thought that there were ‘Spanish officers who did not look like gentlemen.’ This class were seldom or never allowed to rise above the grade of captain. The remaining two-thirds of the officers received their commissions from the war office: in the cavalry they were supposed to show proofs of noble descent, but this was not required in the infantry. There was a large sprinkling, however, of men of family, and for them the best places and the higher ranks were generally reserved—a thing feasible because all promotion was arbitrary, neither seniority nor merit being necessarily considered. The rest were drawn from all classes of society: for the last fifteen years any toady of Godoy could beg or buy as many commissions for his protÉgÉs as he pleased. But a large, and not the worst, part of the body of officers was composed of the descendants of soldiers of fortune—Irishmen were most numerous, but there were also French and Italians—who had always been seen in great numbers in the Spanish army. They held most of the upper-middle grades in the regiments, for the promoted sergeants were kept down to the rank of captain, while the nobles got rapid promotion and soon rose to be colonels and generals. On the whole we cannot doubt that there was a mass of bad officers in the Spanish army: the ignorant fellows who had risen from the ranks, the too-rapidly promoted scions of the noblesse, and the nominees of Godoy’s hangers-on, were none of them very promising material with which to conduct a war À outrance for the existence of the realm.

In 1808 there was but one small military college for the training of infantry and cavalry officers. Five existed in 1790, but Godoy cut them down to one at Zamora, and only allowed sixty cadets there at a time, so that five-sixths of the young men who got commissions went straight to their battalions, there to pick up (if they chose) the rudiments of their military education. From want of some common teaching the drill and organization of the regiments were in a condition of chaos. Every colonel did what he chose in the way of manual exercise and manoeuvres. A French officer says that in 1807 he saw a Spanish brigade at a review, in which, when the brigadier gave the order ‘Ready, present, fire!’ the different battalions carried it out in three different times and with wholly distinct details of execution.

Not only was the Spanish army indifferently officered, but even of such officers as it possessed there were not enough. In the old line regiments there should have been seventy to each corps, i.e. 2,450 to the 105 battalions of that arm. But Godoy had allowed the numbers to sink to 1,520. When the insurrection broke out, the vacant places had to be filled, and many regiments received at the same moment twenty or thirty subalterns taken from civil life and completely destitute of military training. Similarly the militia ought to have had 1,800 officers, and only possessed 1,200 when the war began. The vacancies were filled, but with raw and often indifferent material.

Such were the officers with whom the British army had to co-operate. There is no disguising the fact that from the first the allies could not get on together. In the earlier years of the war there were some incidents that happened while the troops of the two nations lay together, which our countrymen could never forgive or forget. We need only mention the midnight panic in Cuesta’s army on the eve of Talavera, when 10,000 men ran away without having had a shot fired at them, and the cowardly behaviour of La PeÑa in 1811, when he refused to aid Graham at the bloody little battle of Barossa.

The strictures of Wellington, Napier, and the rest were undoubtedly well deserved; and yet it is easy to be too hard on the Spaniards. It chanced that our countrymen did not get a fair opportunity of observing their allies under favourable conditions; of the old regular army that fought at Baylen or Zornoza they never got a glimpse. It had been practically destroyed before we came upon the field. La Romana’s starving hordes, and Cuesta’s evasive and demoralized battalions were the samples from which the whole Spanish army was judged. In the Talavera campaign, the first in which English and Spanish troops stood side by side, there can be no doubt that the latter (with few exceptions) behaved in their very worst style. They often did much better; but few Englishmen had the chance of watching a defence like that of Saragossa or Gerona. Very few observers from our side saw anything of the heroically obstinate resistance of the Catalonian miqueletes and somatenes. Chance threw in our way Cuesta and La PeÑa and Imaz as types of Peninsular generals, and from them the rest were judged. No one supposes that the Spaniards as a nation are destitute of all military qualities. They made good soldiers enough in the past, and may do so in the future: but when, after centuries of intellectual and political torpor, they were called upon to fight for their national existence, they were just emerging from subjection to one of the most worthless adventurers and one of the most idiotic kings whom history has known. Charles IV and Godoy account for an extraordinary amount of the decrepitude of the monarchy and the demoralization of its army.

It is more just to admire the constancy with which a nation so handicapped persisted in the hopeless struggle, than to condemn it for the incapacity of its generals, the ignorance of its officers, the unsteadiness of its raw levies. If Spain had been a first-rate military power, there would have been comparatively little merit in the six years’ struggle which she waged against Bonaparte. When we consider her weakness and her disorganization, we find ourselves more inclined to wonder at her persistence than to sneer at her mishaps.

---

SECTION II: CHAPTER III

THE FRENCH ARMY IN SPAIN

§ 1. The Army of 1808: its Character and Organization.

In dealing with the history of the imperial armies in the Peninsula, it is our first duty to point out the enormous difference between the troops who entered Spain in 1807 and 1808, under Dupont, Moncey, and Murat, and the later arrivals who came under Bonaparte’s personal guidance when the first disastrous stage of the war was over.

Nothing can show more clearly the contempt which the Emperor entertained, not only for the Spanish government but for the Spanish nation, than the character of the hosts which he first sent forth to occupy the Peninsula. After Tilsit he was the master of half a million of the best troops in the world; but he did not consider the subjugation of Spain and Portugal a sufficiently formidable task to make it necessary to move southward any appreciable fraction of the Grand Army. The victors of Jena and Friedland were left in their cantonments on the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Oder, while a new force, mainly composed of elements of inferior fighting value, was sent across the Pyrenees.

This second host was at Napoleon’s disposition mainly owing to the fact that during the late war he had been anticipating the conscription. In the winter of 1806-7 he had called out, a year too soon, the men who were due to serve in 1808. In the late autumn of 1807, while his designs in Spain were already in progress, he had summoned forth the conscription of 1809. He had thus under arms two years’ contingents of recruits raised before their proper time. The dÉpÔts were gorged, and, even after the corps which had been depleted in Prussia and Poland had been made up to full strength, there was an enormous surplus of men in hand.

To utilize this mass of conscripts the Emperor found several ways. Of the men raised in the winter of 1806-7 some thousands had been thrown into temporary organizations, called ‘legions of reserve,’ and used to do garrison duty on the Atlantic coast, in order to guard against possible English descents. There were five of these ‘legions’ and two ‘supplementary legions’ in the army sent into Spain: they showed a strength of 16,000 men. None of them had been more than a year under arms, but they were at any rate organized units complete in themselves. They formed the greater part of the infantry in the corps of Dupont.

A shade worse in composition were twenty ‘provisional regiments’ which the Emperor put together for Spain. Each regimental dÉpÔt in the south of France was told to form four companies from its superabundant mass of conscripts. These bodies, of about 560 men each, were united in fours, and each group was called a ‘provisional regiment.’ The men of each battalion knew nothing of those of the others, since they were all drawn from separate regiments: there was not a single veteran soldier in the ranks: the officers were almost all either half-pay men called back to service, or young sub-lieutenants who had just received their commissions. These bodies, equally destitute of esprit de corps and of instruction, made up nearly 30,000 men of the army of Spain. They constituted nearly the whole of the divisions under BessiÈres and Moncey, which lay in Northern Spain at the moment of the outbreak of the war.

But there were military units even less trustworthy than the ‘provisional regiments’ which Napoleon transferred to Spain in the spring of 1808. These were the five or six rÉgiments de marche, which were to be found in some of the brigades which crossed the Pyrenees when the state of affairs was already growing dangerous. They were formed of companies, or even smaller bodies, hastily drawn together from such southern dÉpÔts, as were found to be still in possession of superfluous conscripts even after contributing to the ‘provisional regiments.’ They were to be absorbed into the old corps when the pressing need for instant reinforcements for the Peninsula should come to an end. In addition to all these temporary units, Bonaparte was at the same moment making a vast addition to his permanent regular army. Down to the war of 1806-7 the French regiments of infantry had consisted of three battalions for the field and a fourth at the dÉpÔt, which kept drafting its men to the front in order to fill up the gaps in the other three. Napoleon had now resolved to raise the establishment to five battalions per regiment, four for field service, while the newly created fifth became the dÉpÔt battalion. When the Peninsular War broke out, a good many regiments had already completed their fourth field-battalion, and several of these new corps are to be found in the rolls of the armies which had entered Spain. The multiplication of battalions had been accompanied by a reduction of their individual strength: down to February, 1808, there were nine companies to each unit, and Junot’s corps had battalions of a strength of 1,100 or 1,200 bayonets. But those which came later were six-company battalions, with a strength of 840 bayonets when at their full establishment.

All the troops of which we have hitherto spoken were native Frenchmen. But they did not compose by any means the whole of the infantry which the Emperor dispatched into Spain between October, 1807, and May, 1808. According to his usual custom he employed great numbers of auxiliaries from his vassal kingdoms: we note intercalated among the French units seven battalions of Swiss, four of Italians, two each of Neapolitans and Portuguese[76], and one each of Prussians, Westphalians, Hanoverians, and Irish. Altogether there were no less than 14,000 men of foreign infantry dispersed among the troops of Junot, Dupont, BessiÈres, Moncey, and Duhesme. They were not massed, but scattered broadcast in single battalions, save the Italians and Neapolitans, who formed a complete division under Lecchi in the army of Catalonia.

The cavalry of the army of Spain was quite as heterogeneous and ill compacted as the infantry. Just as ‘provisional regiments’ of foot were patched up from the southern dÉpÔts of France, so were ‘provisional regiments’ of cavalry. The best of them were composed of two, three, or four squadrons, each contributed by the dÉpÔt of a different cavalry regiment. The worst were escadrons de marche, drawn together in a haphazard fashion from such of the dÉpÔts as had a surplus of conscripts even after they had given a full squadron to the ‘provisional regiments.’ There were also a number of foreign cavalry regiments, Italians, Neapolitans, lancers of Berg, and Poles. Of veteran regiments of French cavalry there were actually no more than three, about 1,250 men, among the 12,000 horsemen of the army of Spain.

When we sum up the composition of the 116,000 men who lay south of the Pyrenees on the last day of May, 1808, we find that not a third part of them belonged to the old units of the regular French army. It may be worth while to give the figures:—

Of veterans we have—

Napoleon, then, intended to conquer Spain with a force of about 110,000 men, of which no more than 34,000 sabres and bayonets belonged to his regular army; the rest were conscripts or foreign auxiliaries. But we must also note that the small body of veteran troops was not distributed equally in each of the corps, so as to stiffen the preponderating mass of conscripts. If we put aside the division of Imperial Guards, we find that of the remaining 25,000 infantry of old organization no less than 17,500 belonged to Junot’s army of Portugal, which was the only one of the corps that had a solid organization. Junot had indeed a very fine force, seventeen old line battalions to two battalions of conscripts and three of foreigners. The rest of the veteran troops were mainly with Duhesme in Catalonia, who had a good division of 5,000 veterans. In the three corps of Dupont, Moncey, and BessiÈres on the other hand old troops were conspicuous by their absence: among the 19,000 infantry of Dupont’s corps, on which (as it chanced) the first stress of the Spanish war was destined to fall, there was actually only two battalions (1,700 men) of old troops. In Moncey’s there was not a single veteran unit; in BessiÈres’, only four battalions. This simple fact goes far to explain why Dupont’s expedition to Andalusia led to the capitulation of Baylen, and why Moncey’s march on Valencia ended in an ignominious retreat. Countries cannot be conquered with hordes of undrilled conscripts—not even countries in an advanced stage of political decomposition, such as the Spain of 1808.

§ 2. The Army of 1808-14: its Character and Organization.

Baylen, as we shall see, taught Napoleon his lesson, and the second army which he brought into the Peninsula in the autumn of 1808, to repair his initial disasters, was very differently constituted from the heterogeneous masses which he had at first judged to be sufficient for his task. It was composed of his finest old regiments from the Rhine and Elbe, the flower of the victors of Jena and Friedland. Even when the despot had half a million good troops at his disposition, he could not be in force everywhere, and the transference of 200,000 veterans to Spain left him almost too weak in Central Europe. In the Essling-Wagram campaign of 1809 he found that he was barely strong enough to conquer the Austrians, precisely because he had left so many men behind him in the Peninsula. In the Russian campaign of 1812, vast as were the forces that he displayed, they were yet not over numerous for the enterprise, because such an immense proportion of them was composed of unwilling allies and disaffected subjects. If the masses of Austrians, Prussians, Neapolitans, Portuguese, Westphalians, Bavarians, and so forth had been replaced by half their actual number of old French troops from Spain, the army would have been far more powerful. Still more was this the case in 1813: if the whole of the Peninsular army had been available for service on the Elbe and Oder at the time of LÜtzen and Bautzen, the effect on the general history of Europe might have been incalculable. Truly, therefore, did the Emperor call the Spanish War ‘the running sore’ which had sapped his strength ever since its commencement.

A word as to the tactical organization of the French army in 1808 is required. The infantry regiments of normal formation consisted, as we have seen, of four field battalions and one dÉpÔt battalion; the last named never, of course, appeared at the front. Each field battalion was composed of six companies of 140 men: its two flank companies, the grenadiers and voltigeurs, were formed of the pick of the corps[77]: into the grenadiers only tall, into the voltigeurs only short men were drafted. Thus a battalion should normally have shown 840 and a regiment 3,360 men in the field. But it was by no means the universal rule to find the whole four battalions of a regiment serving together. In the modern armies of France, Germany, or Russia, a regiment in time of peace lives concentrated in its recruiting district, and can take the field in a compact body. This was not the case in Napoleon’s ever-wandering hosts: the chances of war were always isolating single battalions, which, once dropped in a garrison or sent on an expedition, did not easily rejoin their fellows. Many, too, of the new fourth battalions raised in 1807 had never gone forward to Germany to seek the main body of their regiments. Of the corps which were brought down to Spain in the late autumn of 1808 there were more with three battalions than with four concentrated under the regimental eagle. Some had only two present, a few no more than one[78]. But the Emperor disliked to have single isolated battalions, and preferred to work them in pairs, if he could not get three or four together. The object of this was that, if one or two battalions got much weakened in a campaign, the men could be fused into a single unit, and the supernumerary officers and sergeants sent back to the dÉpÔt, where they would form a new battalion out of the stock of conscripts. But the fresh organization might very likely be hurried, by some sudden chance of war, to Flushing, or Italy, or the Danube, while the eagle and the main body remained in Spain—or vice versa.

There was therefore, in consequence of the varying strength of the regiments, no regularity or system in the brigading of the French troops in Spain: in one brigade there might be five or six isolated battalions, each belonging to a separate regiment; in another three from one regiment and two from a second; in a third four from one regiment and one from another. Nor was there any fixed number of battalions in a brigade: it might vary from three (a very unusual minimum) up to nine—an equally rare maximum. Six was perhaps the most frequent number. A division was composed of two, or less frequently of three, brigades, and might have any number from ten up to sixteen or eighteen battalions—i.e. it varied, allowing for casual losses, from 6,000 to 10,000 men. This irregularity was part of Napoleon’s system: he laid it down as an axiom that all military units, from a brigade to an army corps, ought to differ in strength among themselves: otherwise the enemy, if he had once discovered how many brigades or divisions were in front of him, could calculate with accuracy the number of troops with which he had to do.

Much confusion is caused, when we deal with Napoleon’s army, by the strange system of numeration which he adopted. The infantry, whether called ‘line regiments’ or ‘light infantry regiments,’ were drilled and organized in the same way. But the Emperor had some odd vagaries: he often refused to raise again a regiment which had been exterminated, or taken prisoners en masse. Hence after a few years of his reign there were some vacant numbers in the list of infantry corps. The regiments, for example, which were garrisoning the colonies at the time of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, fell one after another into the hands of the English as the war went on. They were never replaced, and left gaps in the army list. On the other hand the Emperor sometimes raised regiments with duplicate numbers, a most tiresome thing for the military historian of the next age. It is impossible to fathom his purpose, unless he was set on confusing his enemies by showing more battalions than the list of existing corps seemed to make possible. Or perhaps he was thinking of the old legions of the Roman Empire, of which there were always several in existence bearing the same number, but distinguished by their honorary titles. Those who wish to read the story of one of these duplicate regiments may follow in the history of Nodier the tale of the raising and extermination of Colonel Oudet’s celebrated ‘9th Bis’ of the line[79].

There is another difficulty caused by a second freak of the Emperor: all regiments ought, as we have said, to have shown four field battalions. But Bonaparte sometimes added one or even two more, to corps which stood high in his favour, or whose dÉpÔts produced on some occasions a very large surplus of conscripts. Thus we find now and then, in the morning state of a French army corps, a fifth or even a sixth[80] battalion of some regiment. But as a rule these units had not a very long existence: their usual fate was to be sent home, when their numbers ran low from the wear and tear of war, in order to be incorporated in the normal cadres of their corps. On the authority of that good soldier and admirable historian, Foy, we are able to state that on the first of June, 1808, Napoleon had 417 field battalions, over and above the dÉpÔts, on his army rolls. If the 113 regiments of the line, and the thirty-two light infantry regiments had all been in existence and complete, there should have been 580 field battalions. Clearly then some corps had disappeared and many others had not more than three battalions ready. But the units were always being created, amalgamated, or dissolved, from week to week, so that it is almost impossible to state the exact force of the whole French army at any given moment. The most important change that was made during the year 1808 was the conversion of those of the provisional regiments which escaped Dupont’s disaster into new permanent corps. By combining them in pairs the 114th-120th of the line and the 33rd lÉger were created[81]. In the succeeding five years more and more corps were raised: the annexation of Holland and Northern Germany in 1810-11 ultimately enabled the Emperor to carry the total of his line regiments up to 156 [1813], and of his light infantry regiments up to thirty-six[82].

Of the French cavalry we need not speak at such length. When the Spanish war broke out, Bonaparte was possessed of about eighty regiments of horsemen, each taking the field with four squadrons of some 150 to 200 men. There were twelve regiments of cuirassiers, two of carabineers, thirty of dragoons, twenty-six of chasseurs À cheval, ten of hussars, i.e. fourteen regiments of heavy, thirty of medium, and thirty-six of light horse. The cuirassiers were hardly ever seen in Spain—not more than two or three regiments ever served south of the Pyrenees[83]. On the other hand the greater part of the dragoons were employed in the Peninsula—there were in 1809 twenty-five of the thirty regiments of them in the field against the English and Spaniards. More than half of the hussars also served in Spain. To the veteran corps of regulars there were added, at the outset of the war, as will be remembered, a great number of ‘provisional regiments,’ but these gradually disappeared, by being incorporated in the older cadres, or in a few cases by being formed into new permanent units. There was also a mass of Polish, German, and Italian cavalry; but these auxiliaries did not bear such a high proportion to the native French as did the foreign part of the infantry arm. By far the most distinguished of these corps were the Polish lancers, whom the English came to know only too well at Albuera. The Italians were almost exclusively employed on the east coast of Spain, in the army of Catalonia. The Germans—mostly from Westphalia, Berg, and Nassau—were scattered about in single regiments among the cavalry corps of the various armies. They were always mixed with the French horse, and never appeared in brigades (much less in divisions) of their own.

The average strength of a French cavalry regiment during the years 1809-14 was four squadrons of about 150 men each. It was very seldom that a corps showed over 600 men in the ranks: not unfrequently it sank to 450[84]. When it grew still further attenuated, it was usual to send back the cadres of one or two squadrons, and to complete to full numbers the two or three which kept the field. These figures do not hold good for the raw ‘provisional regiments’ which Bonaparte used during the first year of the war: they sometimes rose to 700 or even 800 strong, when the dÉpÔts from which they had been drawn chanced to be exceptionally full of recruits[85]. But such large corps are not to be found in the later years of the war. By 1812, when Napoleon, busied in Central Europe, ceased to reinforce his Spanish armies, the average of a cavalry regiment had shrunk to 500 men. In 1813 it was seldom that 400 effective sabres could be mustered by any mounted corps.

As to the scientific arms of the French service, the artillery and engineers, there is no doubt that throughout the war they deserved very well of their master. Artillery cannot be improvised in the manner that is possible with infantry, and the batteries which accompanied Dupont’s and Moncey’s conscripts into Spain in 1808 were veterans. Without them the raw infantry would have fared even worse than it did, during the first year of the struggle. The proportion of guns which the French employed during the wars of the Empire was generally very large in comparison with the size of their armies—one of the many results of the fact that Bonaparte had originally been an artillery officer. He raised, as was remarked, the number of gunners in the French service to a figure as large as that of the whole regular army of Louis XVI at the moment when the Revolution broke out. But in Spain the difficulties of transport and the badness of the roads seem to have combined to keep down the proportion of guns to something very much less than was customary in the more favourable terrain of Italy or Germany. A large part, too, of the pieces were of very light metal—four- and even three-pounders, which were found easier to transport across the mountains than six- or eight-pounders, though much less effective in the field. In many of the campaigns, therefore, of the Peninsular War the French artillery stood in a proportion to the total number of men present, which was so low that it barely exceeded that customary among the British, who were notoriously more ‘under-gunned’ than any other European army save that of Spain. Junot at Vimiero had twenty-three guns to 13,500 men: Victor at Talavera had eighty guns to about 50,000 men: MassÉna in 1810 invaded Portugal with some 70,000 men and 126 guns; at Fuentes d’OÑoro he only showed forty-two guns to 40,000 bayonets and sabres[86]. Soult at Albuera had (apparently) forty guns to 24,000 men: in the autumn campaign of 1813 the same marshal had 125 guns to 107,000 men. It will be noted that the proportion never rises to two guns per thousand men, and occasionally does not much exceed one gun per thousand[87]. This contrasts remarkably with the 350 guns to 120,000 men which Bonaparte took out for the campaign of Waterloo, or even with the 1,372 guns to 600,000 men of the Russian expedition and 1,056 guns to 450,000 men of the ill-compacted army of 1813.

SECTION II: CHAPTER IV

THE TACTICS OF THE FRENCH AND THEIR ADVERSARIES DURING THE PENINSULAR WAR

An account of the numbers and the organization of an army is of comparatively little interest, unless we understand the principles on which its leaders are accustomed to handle it on the day of battle, and its value as a fighting machine.

Speaking generally, the tactics of the French infantry during the Peninsular War were those which had been developed fifteen years before, during the first struggles of the Revolution. They nearly always attacked with a thick cloud of tirailleurs covering one or two lines of battalions in column. The idea was that the very numerous and powerful skirmishing line would engage the enemy sufficiently to attract all his attention, so that the massed battalions behind arrived at the front of battle almost without sustaining loss. The momentum of the columns ought then to suffice to carry them right through the enemy’s lines, which would already have suffered appreciably from the fire of the tirailleurs. This form of attack had won countless victories over Prussian, Austrian, and Russian; and many cases had been known where a hostile position had been carried by the mere impetus of the French columns, without a shot having been fired save by their skirmishers. But this method, which Wellington called ‘the old French style,’ never succeeded against the English. It had the fatal defect that when the column came up through the tirailleurs and endeavoured to charge, it presented a small front, and only the first two ranks could fire. For the normal French battalion advanced in column of companies, or less frequently of double companies, i.e. with a front of forty or at most of eighty men, and a depth of nine or of eighteen, since the company was always three deep, and there were six companies to a battalion. The rear ranks only served to give the front ranks moral support, and to impress the enemy with a sense of the solidity and inexorable strength of the approaching mass. Sometimes a whole regiment or brigade formed one dense column. Now if the enemy, as was always the case with the British, refused to be impressed, but stood firm in line, held their ground, and blazed into the head of the mass, the attack was certain to fail. For 800 men in the two-deep line, which Wellington loved, could all use their muskets, and thus poured 800 bullets per volley into a French battalion of the same strength, which only could return 160. The nine-deep, or eighteen-deep, column was a target which it was impossible to miss. Hence the front ranks went down in rows and the whole came to a standstill. If, as was often the case, the French battalion tried to deploy in front of the English line, so as to bring more muskets to bear, it seldom or never succeeded in accomplishing the manoeuvre, for each company, as it straggled out from the mass, got shot down so quickly that the formation could never be completed. No wonder that Foy in his private journal felt himself constrained to confess that, for a set battle with equal numbers on a limited front, the English infantry was superior. ‘I keep this opinion to myself,’ he adds, ‘and have never divulged it; for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate the enemy, but also despise him[88].’ Foy kept his opinion so closely to himself that he did not put it in his formal history of the Peninsular War: it has only become public property since his journals were published in 1900.

But the fact that with anything like equal numbers the line must beat the column was demonstrated over and over again during the war. It had first been seen at Maida in 1806, but that obscure Calabrian battle was hardly known, even by name, save to those who had been present. It was at Talavera, and still more at Busaco and Albuera, that it became patent to everybody that the attack in battalion column, even if preceded by a vigorous swarm of skirmishers, could never succeed against the English. At the two former fights the French attacked uphill, and laid the blame of their defeat upon the unfavourable ground. But when at Albuera three English brigades drove double their own numbers from the commanding ridge on which Soult had ranged them, simply by the superiority of their musketry fire, there was no longer any possibility of disguising the moral. Yet to the end of the war, down to Waterloo itself, the French stuck to their old formation: at the great battle in 1815, as Wellington tersely said, ‘The French came on once more in the old style, and we beat them in the old style.’

But when Napoleon’s armies were opposed to troops who could not stand firm to meet them in a line formation, they generally succeeded. The Spaniards, in their earlier battles, often tried to resist in a line of deployed battalions, but their morale was not good enough when the attacking column drew close to them, and they generally gave way at the critical moment and let their assailants break through[89]. The same had often been the case with the Austrians and Prussians, who in their earlier wars with Napoleon used the line formation which Frederick the Great had popularized fifty years before. The great king had accustomed his troops to fight in a three- or four-deep line, with a comparatively small provision of skirmishers to cover their front, for it was by the fire of the whole battalion that his troops were intended to win. The masses of tirailleurs which the French sent forward in front of their columns generally succeeded in engaging the Prussian or Austrian line so closely, that the columns behind them came up without much loss, and then broke the line by their mere momentum and moral effect. Hence in their later wars the German powers copied their enemies, and took to using a very thick skirmishing line backed by battalion columns in the French style.

Wellington never found any reason to do so. His method was to conceal his main line as long as possible by a dip in the ground, a hedge, or a wall, or to keep it behind the crest of the position which it was holding. To face the tirailleurs each battalion sent out its light company, and each brigade had assigned to it several detached companies of riflemen: from 1809 onward some of the 60th Rifles and one or two foreign light corps[90] were broken up and distributed round the various divisions for this special purpose. This gave a line of skirmishers strong enough to hold back the tirailleurs for a long time, probably till the supporting columns came up to help them. It was only then that the British skirmishing line gave way and retired behind its main body, leaving the deployed battalions in face of the French column, of which they never failed to give a satisfactory account. The covering screen of light troops often suffered terribly; e.g., at Barossa, Brown’s ‘light battalion’ lost fourteen out of twenty-one officers and more than half its rank and file[91], while holding off the French advance from the line which was forming in its rear. But the combat always went well if the enemy’s skirmishers could be kept back, and his supporting columns forced to come to the front, to engage with the regiments in two-deep formation which were waiting for them.

Charges with the bayonet are often heard of in narratives—especially French narratives—of the Peninsular War. But it was very seldom that the opposing troops actually came into collision with the white weapon. There were occasions, almost invariably in fighting in villages or enclosed ground, on which considerable numbers of men were killed or wounded with the bayonet, but they were but few. It is certain, however, that the 43rd at Vimiero, the 71st and 88th at Fuentes d’OÑoro, and the 20th at Roncesvalles, engaged in this fashion[92]; and other cases could be quoted. But as a rule a ‘bayonet charge’ in a French historian merely means the advance of a column up to the enemy’s position without firing: it does not imply actual contact or the crossing of weapons. An English charge on the other hand was practically an advance in line with frequent volleys, or independent file-firing. At Albuera, or Barossa, or Salamanca it was the ball not the bayonet which did the work; the enemy was shot down, or gave way without any hand-to-hand conflict.

French cavalry tactics had by 1808 developed into as definite a system as those of the infantry. Napoleon was fond of massing his horsemen in very large bodies and launching them at the flank, or even at the centre, of the army opposed to him. He would occasionally use as many as 6,000 or 8,000, or (as at Waterloo) even 12,000 men for one of these great strokes. Two or three of his famous battles were won by tremendous cavalry charges—notably Marengo and Dresden, while Eylau was just saved from falling into a disaster by a blow of the same kind. But cavalry must be used at precisely the right moment, must be skilfully led and pushed home without remorse, and even then it may be beaten off by thoroughly cool and unshaken troops. It is only against tired, distracted, or undisciplined battalions that it can count on a reasonable certainty of success. All through the war the Spanish armies supplied the French horsemen with exactly the opportunities that they required: they were always being surprised, or caught in confusion while executing some complicated manoeuvre; and as if this was not enough, they were often weak enough in morale to allow themselves to be broken even when they had been allowed time to take their ground and form their squares. The battles of Gamonal (1808), Medellin, Alba de Tormes, and OcaÑa (1809), the Gebora, and Saguntum (1811) were good examples of the power of masses of horse skilfully handled over a numerous but ill-disciplined infantry.

On the other hand, against the English the French cavalry hardly ever accomplished anything worthy of note. It is only possible to name two occasions on which they made their mark: the first was at Albuera, where, profiting by an opportune cloud-burst which darkened the face of day, two regiments of lancers came in upon the flank of a British brigade (Colborne’s of the second division), and almost entirely cut it to pieces. The second incident of the kind was at Fuentes d’OÑoro, in the same summer, when Montbrun’s cavalry charged with some effect on Houston’s division and hustled it back for some two miles, though they never succeeded in breaking its squares.

On the other hand the cases where the French horsemen found themselves utterly unable to deal with the British infantry were very numerous—we need only mention Cacabellos (during Moore’s retreat), El Bodon, Salamanca, and several skirmishes during the retreat from Burgos in 1812. After such experiences it was no wonder that Foy, and other old officers of the army of Spain, looked with dismay upon Napoleon’s great attempt at Waterloo to break down the long line of British squares between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, by the charges of ten or twelve thousand heavy cavalry massed on a short front of less than a mile[93]. The Emperor had never seen the British infantry fight, and was entirely ignorant of their resisting power.

Of fights between cavalry and cavalry, where the two sides were present in such equal numbers as to make the struggle a fair test of their relative efficiency, there were but few in the Peninsular War. In the early years of the struggle Wellington was very scantily provided with horsemen, and never could afford to engage in a cavalry battle on a large scale. Later on, when he was more happily situated in this respect, he showed such a marked reluctance to risk great cavalry combats that the old saying that he was ‘pre-eminently an infantry general’ seems justified. That he could use his horsemen vigorously enough, when he saw his opportunity, he showed at Assaye, long before he had made his name known in Europe. Yet the only one of his great battles in Spain where his dragoons took a prominent part in the victory was Salamanca, where Le Marchant’s brigade struck such a smashing blow on the flank of the French army. We have his own authority[94] for the fact that he hesitated to mass great bodies of horse, because he doubted the tactical skill of his officers, and the power of the regiments to manoeuvre. ‘I considered our cavalry,’ he wrote ten years after the war was over, ‘so inferior to the French from want of order, that although I considered one squadron a match for two French, I did not like to see four British opposed to four French: and as the numbers increased and order, of course, became more necessary, I was the more unwilling to risk our men without having a superiority in numbers. They could gallop, but could not preserve their order.’

Foy, in his excellent history of the Spanish War, emits an opinion in words curiously similar to those of Wellington, stating that for practical purposes the English troopers were inferior to the French on account of their headlong impetuosity and want of power to manoeuvre[95]. When two such authorities agree, there must clearly have been some solid foundation for their verdict. Yet it is hard to quote many combats in their support: there were cases, no doubt, where English regiments threw their chances away by their blind fury in charging, as did the 23rd Light Dragoons at Talavera, the 13th Light Dragoons near Campo Mayor on March 25, 1811, and Slade’s brigade at Maguilla on June 11, 1812. Yet with the memory before us of Paget’s admirable operations at Sahagun and Benavente in December, 1808, of Lumley’s skilful containing of Latour Maubourg’s superior numbers at Albuera, and his brilliant success at Usagre over that same general in 1811, as well as Cotton’s considerable cavalry fight at Villa Garcia in 1812, it seems strange to find Wellington disparaging his own troopers. No doubt we must concede that the British horsemen did not show that marked superiority over their rivals of the same arm which Wellington’s infantry always asserted. But fairly balancing their faults and their merits, it would seem that there was something wanting in their general no less than in themselves. A lover of the cavalry arm would have got more profit out of the British horse than Wellington ever obtained. It is noticeable that not one of the successful fights cited above took place under the eye or the direction of the Duke.

As to the Spanish cavalry, it was (as we have already had occasion to remark) the weakest point in the national army. In the first actions of the war it appeared on the field in such small numbers that it had no chance against the French. But later on, when the juntas succeeded in raising large masses of horsemen, their scandalous conduct on a score of fields was the despair of Spanish generals. We need only mention Medellin and OcaÑa as examples of their misbehaviour. No French cavalry-general ever hesitated to engage with double of his own number of Spanish horse. When vigorously charged they never failed to give way, and when once on the move it was impossible to rally them. It was often found on the night of a battle that the mass of the cavalry was in flight twenty miles ahead of the infantry, which it had basely deserted.

Napoleon, as every student of the art of war knows, had started his career as an officer of artillery, and never forgot the fact. He himself has left on record the statement that of all his tactical secrets the concentration of an overwhelming artillery fire on a given point was the most important. ‘When once the combat has grown hot,’ he wrote, ‘the general who has the skill to unite an imposing mass of artillery, suddenly and without his adversary’s knowledge, in front of some point of the hostile position, may be sure of success.’ His leading idea was to secure an overwhelming artillery preparation for his infantry attacks: for this reason his typical battle began with the massing of a great number of guns on the points of the enemy’s line which he intended ultimately to break down. In this respect he abandoned entirely the vicious tactics that prevailed in the earlier years of the revolutionary war, when the cannon, instead of being concentrated, were distributed about in twos and threes among the infantry battalions. We shall find that his method had been perfectly assimilated by his subordinates: when the ground allowed of it, they were much given to collecting many guns at some salient point of the line, and bringing a concentrated fire to bear on the weak spot in the enemy’s position. At OcaÑa a battery of this kind had a great share in the credit of the victory; at Albuera it saved Soult’s routed troops from complete destruction. The names of artillery generals like Senarmont and Ruty need honourable mention for such achievements. If the French artillery had less effect against the English than against most of Napoleon’s foes, it was because of Wellington’s admirable custom of hiding his troops till the actual moment of battle. Austrian, Russian, or Prussian generals occupied a hillside by long lines drawn up on the hither slope, of which every man could be counted. Hence they could be thoroughly searched out and battered by the French guns, long before the infantry was let loose. Wellington, on the other hand, loved to show a position apparently but half-defended, with his reserves, or even his main line, carefully hidden behind the crest, or covered by walls and hedges, or concealed in hollows and ravines. Hence the French artillery-preparation was much embarrassed: there were no masses to fire at, and it was impossible to tell how any part of the line was held. By the end of the war the French marshals grew very chary of attacking any position where Wellington showed fight, for they never could tell whether they were opposed by a mere rearguard, or by a whole army skilfully concealed.

The English armies, unlike the French, always took with them a comparatively small proportion of artillery, seldom so much as two guns to the thousand men, as Foy remarks. But what there was was excellent, from its high discipline and the accuracy of its fire. The Duke preferred to work with small and movable units, placed in well-chosen spots, and kept dark till the critical moment, rather than with the enormous lines of guns that Bonaparte believed in. His horse artillery was often pushed to the front in the most daring way, in reliance on its admirable power of manoeuvring and its complete steadiness. At Fuentes d’OÑoro, for example, it was made to cover the retreat of the right wing before the masses of French cavalry, in a way that would have seemed impossible to any one who was not personally acquainted with Norman Ramsay and his gunners. Hence came the astounding fact that during the whole war the Duke never in the open field lost an English gun. Several times cannon were taken and retaken; once or twice guns not belonging to the horse or field batteries were left behind in a retreat, when transport failed. But in the whole six years of his command Wellington lost no guns in battle. Foy gives an unmistakable testimony to the English artillery in his history, by remarking that in its material it was undoubtedly superior to the French[96]: the same fact may be verified from the evidence of our own officers, several of whom have left their opinion on record, that after having inspected captured French cannon, limbers, and caissons they much preferred their own.

This statement, it must be remembered, only applies to the field and horse artillery. The English siege artillery, all through the war, was notably inferior to the French. Wellington never possessed a satisfactory battering train, and the awful cost at which his sieges were turned into successes is a testimony to the inadequacy of his resources. The infantry were sent in to win, by sheer courage and at terrible expense of life, the places that could not be reduced by the ill-equipped siege artillery. There can be no doubt that in poliorcetics the enemy was our superior: but with a very small number of artillery officers trained to siege work, an insignificant body of Royal Engineers[97], and practically no provision of trained sappers[98], what was to be expected? It was not strange that the French showed themselves our masters in this respect. But the fault lay with the organization at head quarters, not with the artillery and engineer officers of the Peninsular army, who had to learn their trade by experience without having received any proper training at home.