The Age of Elegance (14 page)

For under its own momentum the war was gathering speed at a rate transcending sober political calculations. Faced by the recoil upon itself of the revolutionary maxim of making war support war, and bled white by successive conscriptions and taxations, Napoleonic France was disintegrating. Her people could not take the medicine they had so often inflicted on others. Everywhere, save in her Emperor's immediate presence, her soldiers were on the run, watched by apathetic civilians who made no response to his proclamations enjoining them to emulate the Spanish guerrilleros and fall on the invaders' rear. The only result of his injunctions in the south was the

¹
Bell,
1,
151-8; Smith, I, 175; Larpent, III, 32-3, 46, 75, 87
-9;
Gronow, I, 24-5; Pellot,
Guerre des Pyrenees, ext.
Alison, XIII, 33
.

formation of local guards to protect the villages from the depredations of these hypothetical partisans. On March 20th, two days after Wellington resumed his eastward advance against Toulouse, Lyons, the second city of France, fell to an Austrian column advancing from the Jura as Augereau's men, unsupported by the countryside, withdrew hastily before it.

As the British swept forward, in sunshine at last, across a flat, water-logged meadow-country of orchards, vineyards and trout-streams, after Soult's scarecrow army, the people flocked out of their houses to greet them. At Bagneres Spa, even before the first redcoat appeared, the National Guard turned out to present arms to a party of English civilians. When Wellington reached the outskirts of Toulouse on March 26th, he had less than a battalion guarding the two hundred miles that separated him from his ships in the Bay of Biscay. The reinforcements which should have reached him from England had been deflected by the politicians, who, in their excitement at the news from the Continent, had forgotten their hard-earned lessons and sent every available man to Holland to enable Graham to capture Bergen-op-Zoom and Antwerp—places which were bound to fall in any case if the French armies were defeated in the field. But, since Wellington's disciplin
e enabled him to dispense with li
nes-of-communication troops, it mattered little, except to Graham's unfortunate soldiers who were repelled from Bergen with heavy loss on March 8th.

Meanwhile in the confused fighting on the misty, shivering heights above the Aisne—though no news of it had yet penetrated to the south across a disorganised France—Napoleon had made his last throw and lost. As Wellington had always said, he lacked the patience for defensive operations. Having forced back the Russians in a bloody battle at Craonne but failed to prevent their junction with
Blücher
's Prussians, he was repulsed at Laon on March 9th and 10th. Three days later, in a night attack on Rheims, he took his last town. His army was by now a horde of famished desperadoes in ragged greatcoats and bare feet, its guns and wagons worn out, its units inextricably confused. More than 70,000 veterans who might have brought its depleted ranks up to strength were locked up in fortresses beyond the Rhine which Napoleon, in his insane desire to retain the unretainable, had refused to relinquish. Even Blucher's army was now twice the size of his own. And along the Seine valley,

Schwarzenberg's host, stirred into activity by the expostulations of Castlereagh and the Czar, was moving once more on Paris. On March 20th Napoleon, marching in haste to intercept it, fell on its flank at Arcis-sur-Aube and was again repulsed. Henceforward, while it pursued its way towards the capital, he was left to roam, furious but impotent, across its lines of communication with an army of ghosts; still sending hourly messages to Paris and his Marshals to resist, still summoning to his aid armies that had ceased to exist, still breathing threats of vengeance against Rhineland, Danube and Vistula.

On March 28th, ignoring these
demonstrations and driving Mar
mont's and Mortier's weak forces before them, the two Allied armies joined hands at Meaux, less than thirty miles from Paris. Two days later, while Napoleon desperately marched by way of Fontainebleau, with his men dropping in hundreds by the roadside, to rescue his capital, 180,000 invaders stormed its northern heights. Thirteen thousand fell as the Russian and Prussian columns fought their way up the slopes of Montmartre and the Butte de Chaumont and boys from the Ecole Militaire served the defenders' guns. That afternoon, with the Allied artillery commanding its streets, Paris surrendered. Its citizens had no stomach for a fight, and the bourgeois National Guard, called out to reinforce the hopelessly outnumbered regulars, was more concerned with guarding the shops from the mob than in dying for a lost cause.

On the afternoon of April 5th, a British officer, who had set out from Paris with dispatches on the evening of March 30th, reached London via Antwerp. As men heard the news in street or counting-house, or stood breathless with the newspaper in their hands, they seemed to be in a dream. "It is the Lord's doing," wrote Sir William Pepys to Hannah More, "and it is marvellous in our eyes." All over England houses were decked with laurel, transparencies and coloured candles lit in windows, and the populace, dancing and singing, poured into the streets. The church bells rang and the mob joyously chalked rude notices on the doors of those who were supposed to have sympathised with Boney, and Wilberforce wished his old friend Pitt were alive to witness the end of the drama.

During the Easter week-end—w
ith warm sunshine thawing men's
hearts after the long frost—it became known that Napoleons Marshals had abandoned him, that his servile Senate had decreed his deposition and the recall of the Bourbons, and that the Allied Sovereigns had resolved on his abdication. "This dreadful scourge is at last removed from us," wrote Lord Auckland, who had been Ambassador at The Hague when the Revolutionary armies invaded Holland, "and after twenty years of distress and difficulty we breathe and live again." Only a handful of cantankerous radicals protested: to Lord Byron, who wrote an ode to the fallen tyrant, it seemed that the blockheads had won and Prometheus was chained. But most Englishmen at that moment could see nothing to admire in Napoleon; after keeping the world in oceans of blood, it seemed shameful that he should wish to survive the ruin he had created instead of perishing, sword in hand, at the head of his men. "This," wrote Walter Scott, "is a poor Devil!"
¹

One thing gave almost universal pleasure. The Czar, in the hour of victory, seemed to have no other thought than how to restore peace to Europe. However much the French might deserve to be punished for the injuries they had inflicted, there was to be no revenge; the war had been waged against one man, and now that he had fallen, enmity was at an end. The Allied Sovereigns had come to France, Alexander declared, neither to conquer nor to rule, but to establish peace for all. "It is like a dream," wrote Dorothy Wordsworth, "peace, peace all in a moment—prisoners let loose, Englishmen and Frenchmen brothers at once!—no treaties, no stipulations!" For one magnanimous moment humanity seemed to stand in the dawn before the Bastille fell.

But the war was not quite over. Six hundred miles away to the south, on the Languedoc plain, the British army was still fighting. Its commander did not yet know that Napoleon had abdicated, though he had learnt of the occupation of Paris. Soult, whose love of digging-in had become an obsession, had got his troops behind the walls of a fortified city with a flooded river between them and the British, and, in a dissolving world, it seemed as safe a place as any

¹
Scott, III, 451. See
idem,
428-9, 441; De Selincourt, 592-4; Moore,
Byron, 227,
334;
Two Duchesses,
386-7; Colchester, II, 482; Broughton, I, 87, 103-5; Haydon, I, 239; Lord Coleridge, 212; Gaussen, 317; Scott, I
II, 427-9; Ashton, I, 251-3; Wil
berforce, 395; Auckland, IV, 413; Robinson, 429.

he could hope to find. Wellington would have preferred to have advanced northwards from Bordeaux through the traditionally royalist Bocage to the Loire, so carrying the war which he had begun on the circumference of Napoleons empire to its heart. By doing so and making Nantes his base, he would have drawn, as in his march to the Bay of Biscay in the previous summer, towards his seaborne supplies.
¹
But with the reinforcements he should have received sent by the Cabinet to besiege fortresses in Holland, he had not the men both to advance towards the Loire and contain Soult in the east. The latter might at any time be joined by Suchet who, at last, was withdrawing from Catalonia; and, though the two Marshals hated each other, they would together constitute a formidable force.

As Wellington also feared that Napoleon might try to prolong the war by marching south to join his last two armies, and, as the capture of Toulouse might precipitate a Royalist rising throughout Languedoc, he resolved to drive Soult out of the town. It involved a grave risk, for he was in an enemy country far from his base, only slightly superior in numbers, and without any siege-train. Before he could even reach the city and attack its eastern and only superable side, he had to move the bulk of his troops across the Garonne— swollen by floods to a width of over 500 feet. "How the devil," asked the cheery Patlanders, "are we to get over that big strame of a river to leather them vagabones out o' that!"

It proved an operation of great difficulty. The troops had to trudge barefooted through knee-deep clay; at one point on the road six oxen and four horses, in addition to its own six mules, had to be fastened to Wellington's travelling carriage to drag it through the quagmires. The first attempt to cross the river below Toulouse failed owing to the inadequacy of the pontoon bridge; a second, made by Hill's corps a mile lower down, was abandoned owing to the state of the roads. But Wellington, with the resilience that always came to his aid when thwarted, chose a new crossing-place above the town, withdrew Hill's troops, and on the stormy night of April 4th renewed his attempt. While the operation was only half completed the bridge was broken by floods, and for three days 18,000 British troops under Beresford were isolated and exposed to the attack of more than double their numbers. Yet Soult refused to attack. "You do not know what stuff two British divisions are made

¹
See his conversation in Stanhope, 21.

of," he is reported to have said; "they would not be conquered so long as there was a man left to stand." Instead, he continued to dig himself in.

On three sides, where the walls were surrounded by water defences, Toulouse was impregnable. Its weakness lay in a 600-foot ridge named Mont Rave to the east from which a besieger's artillery could dominate the city. It was this that Soult had been so busy fortifying. Here, behind his field-works, he had concentrated nearly half his 42,000 troops on a two-and-a-half-mile front, with a strong reserve behind. As Toulouse was the chief magazine of southern France, he had been able to re-equip them with plentiful arms and ammunition. In artillery he out-gunned the British—a fortnight's march from their nearest base—by two to one. Thus, with 49,000 troops—only 7000 more than the defenders—Wellington had to attack a fortified city from the side farthest from his communications and with a flooded river dividing his army. His own headquarters at Grenade were guarded by less than twenty men with a French garrison at Montauban only an hour's ride away.

Yet he never hesitated. His moral ascendancy over the enemy was now complete. As one of his officers put it, six years of almost uninterrupted success had engrafted a seasoned confidence into his soldiers that made them invincible. Leaving sufficient forces to contain the defenders round the city's circumference and to act as a reserve, Wellington at dawn on April 10th—Easter Day—moved up two British and two Spanish divisions against the eastern heights. To reach their assault stations at the south end of the ridge the British had to march, or rather flounder, through three miles of swamp under heavy fire from Mont Rave, closely crossing the enemy's front with an unfordable river behind them. There was only one thing to prevent Soult descending from the hill to destroy them: his fear, founded on repeated experience, of what would happen if he did.

Before Beresford's British divisions could deploy, the Spaniards, who had begged to be allowed to share in the glory of the day, rashly attempted to storm the northern end of the ridge without waiting for orders. During the ensuing rout, as Wellington hastily plugged the gap in his line with the Light Division, he remarked that he had never before seen ten thousand men running a race. Their absence till they could be re-formed for another attack gave Soult

BATTLE
OF
TOULOUSE

two hours to complete his preparations for dealing with the British, who were still plodding across his front through the marshes. Bringing up his reserve to the south end of the ridge, he concealed it in almost Wellingtonian fashion behind the skyline, ready to fall on Cole's 4th Division—the men of Albuera—as they came toiling in a thin, extended line up the slope. But instead of driving them in rout down the hill, Soult's charging columns were stopped dead in their course. Closing their ranks and forming square on either flank, the English regiments, though taken by surprise, riddled their assailants with volley after volley. The F
rench divisional commander fell
pierced by three bullets; his men, as the redcoats resumed their advance, fled up the hill. Their panic spread to the garrison of the Sypiere redoubt on the summit. Within a few minutes the British were in possession of the southern crest of the ridge.

During the remainder of the day Beresford's two divisions, exploiting their success, fought their way northwards along the ridge, enfilading successive redoubts. Though the French fought fiercely back, repeatedly counter-attacking, the issue was never in doubt. The battle ended with a magnificent charge by General Pack's 42nd and 79th Highlanders with the 91st in support. By five o'clock, twelve hours after the first shot, the whole ridge was in British hands. Though the guns had still to be brought up, Toulouse was at Wellington's mercy. Of the attackers 4568 had fallen, to the French 3236, the Black Watch alone losing more than half and the Camerons nearly half their strength. Four hundred of the casualties were needlessly contributed by Picton, who, haunted by the memories of his achievement at Badajoz, disobeyed his orders and converted a sham diversion against the city's water defences into a real attack.
¹

On the following evening Soult began the evacuation of the city, withdrawing southwards, to the immense relief of its inhabitants, to join Suchet along the only road remaining open. He left behind 1600 wounded and half his guns. Next day Wellington entered amid scenes of, to him, rather distasteful jubilation. When at dinner the leading royalists of the place hailed him as the Liberator of Spain, France and Europe, he bowed shortly and called for coffee. His troops, on the other hand, were charmed with their reception as they marched in their tattered coats through the city, their colours flying, drums beating, and the ladies waving to them from the balconies and throwing garlands. They supposed, after their victory, that they were now to enjoy this garden of Eden with its flowers and pretty girls. A smirking aide-de-camp in a cocked-hat soon undeceived them, and by nightfall they were marching along the Carcassone road after the old familiar stink of tobacco and onions. It appeared that, having boxed them round the compass, they had now to chase the
parlez-vous
back to Spain.

But that evening Colonel Frederick Ponsonby of the 12th Light

¹
The account of the battle is based on Oman, VII, 465-95; Fortescue, X, 79-80; and a brilliant article by Colonel Alfred Burne,
The Enigma of Toulouse,
in
The Army Quarterly
for January, 1927. See also Lapene, 370-85; Bell, I, 164-9; Seaton, 205; George Napier, 257-9; Gurwood; Vidal de la Blache,
UEvacuation de I'E
spagne et Vinvasion dans le midi

Dragoons galloped into the town with dispatches from Bordeaux. He found Wellington in his lodgings pulling on his boots. "Ay,
I
thought so," he said, as Ponsonby broke the news, "I knew we should have peace." "Napoleon has abdicated." "You don't say so, upon my honour. Hurrah!" And, spinning on his heel, the British Commander-in-Chief snapped his fingers.
¹

Yet even now it was not quite over. After a day or two of argument, Soult laid down his arms. His rival, Suchet, had already done so. But at Bayonne the Governor decided to fight on. On the night of April
13
th, three days after the battle of Toulouse, General James Hay, going the round of the besieging trenches, told his men that the war was finished and that they would soon be home with their wives and sweethearts. Two hours later he was dead, slain with several hundred British and French soldiers after a sortie as wanton as it was useless. Among those taken prisoner was the British commander, Sir John Hope, whose love of fighting drew him into the trenches as soon as firing began. Not till April 26th did the French Governor condescend to do like the rest of the world and make peace.

Thereafter the British army took its ease. The cavalry, by arrangement with the new Bourbon Government, rode home across France to Boulogne and Calais, feasting off champagne at a shilling a bottle and delighting in a countryside unravaged by war. The infantry marched to Bordeaux to await transportation to England or America, where war with the United States was still continuing. As the troops tramped the sunny roads of southern France or glided in barges down the silver stream, a new world of peace seemed to be opening before them and mankind: a world in which there should be no more parades and piquets, no more midnight alerts, no more broken bones, no more slaying and being slain. After hard commons for so long they found it difficult to accustom themselves to down beds and no danger; an officer of the Rifles, who had never lost a piquet in six years' campaigning, woke in a cold sweat in his chateau bed with dreams of sentries unposted and lines surprised.
²

Here at the camp of Blanquefort, among fruit, flowers, wines and friendly people, the veterans who had begun the liberation of Europe bade farewell to one another and, as an army, dissolved. Their skill and comradeship and hard-won experience were no longer needed.

¹
Broughton, I, 189-00. See Oman, VII, 498; Bell,
1,
170; Larpent,
m,
137; Fortescue, X, 91.
²
Smith, I, 189-90; Costello, 183, 186; Bell, I, 173-4.