Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (53 page)

¹
Moore, II,
273, 325;
Fortescue, VI,
291-6;
Blakene
y,
20, 25;
Schaumann,
43, 55.

2
To add to his difficulties, the Treasury clerks had subjected his officers' "bat, baggage and forage" allowance to income tax, being unaware that it was granted to defray the cost of regimental transport. Fortescue, VI,
293.

carry the bulk of their equipment. And though he sent his engineers ahead to prospect, he was unable in the time at his disposal to discover whether any of the roads were fit for heavy artillery. The Portuguese seemed certain that none were, and, with the torrential autumn rains daily expected, Moore dared not risk it. He therefore dispatched all his guns save half a dozen light six-pounders by the Elvas and Badajoz highway to Madrid together with his transport park and an escort of 4000 troops, including his entire cavalry force, under Lieutenant-Gencral Sir John. Ho
pe. Only when they had gone too
far for recall, did Moore discover that his allies had misinformed him. On October 16th, while the foxhunters in England were riding out in their autumnal glory, the army turned its face towards Spain.
"A
more glorious set of fellows," wrote young George Napier, "never was seen." They wanted only experience in Continental warfare. Their equipment was still incomplete, but Moore could
wait no longer. "The regiments are already marching," he wrote to Lady Hester Stanhope,
"I
pray for good weather. If it rains, the torrents will swell and be impassable, and I shall be accounted a bungler. I wish you. were here with us, in your red habit
a l’
Amazone."
¹

For the next three weeks the troops pressed across the mountains into the north-east. The sand and olive trees of the Tagus plain, the crash of the muskets on the paving stones, the gloomy, stinking streets and high, shuttered houses, with barbers strumming on guitars in every doorway and loafing crowds in long brown cloaks and three-cornered hats, gave way to primitive hill villages where the corn was threshed by trampling bullocks and mules and the blowflies swarmed over the middens in the central square. The roads became goat-tracks and ravines; every few minutes a cart would sink into a hole or overturn on a stone. Presently there were precipices and gullies over which the six-pounders had to be hauled on ropes by sweating, cursing infantrymen.

After the first week the rains came down: not ordinary rain such as Englishmen knew, but cascades of huge gl
obular drops which soaked every
one to the marrow and drew clouds of steam from the dripping columns. There was no shelter save for a rare mountain farm or peasant's hut, swarming with fleas and rank with the stench of the commu
nal vessel round which the famil
y and the livestock slept. Every mile the way grew more rocky and bleak. Occasionally a ruined Moorish castle on a conical hill guarding a defile would relieve the monotony. But still the army pressed on, climbing ever higher into the cold, dripping clquds. As it approached the Spanish

¹
Hester Stanhope,
59.

frontier, all sign of human habitation vanished, save once in a glimpse through clouds a solitary convent nestling in a bunch of trees on the bosom of the mountain, a vast abrupt vale, and below, revealed in that apocalyptic second, the whole system of the waters. Then the swirling mist closed down again, and there was nothing to be seen but the bleak, rocky, wretched road with a black hill on one side and a precipice on the other, both lost in impenetrable, icy cloud. It made a young officer, with a touch of the poet, feel as if he were travelling on the bare outside of the world, "bordered by the chaotic beginning of things."
¹

With the crossing of the frontier in the second week of November spirits rose. First impressions of the new country were greatly in its favour; the houses were cleaner and the farms better stocked, the proud, courtly people more handsome and hospitable, the landscape more romantic. Ensign Boothby, who had gone ahead of the right flank of the army to Alcantara, where Trajan's viaduct over the Tagus reminded him of "the bridge of Sin and Death striding over chaos," was greeted by the Alcalde in his scarlet cloak and treated to the fandango by girls whose graceful pride, as they snapped their fingers and alternately raised and lowered their heads, awed alike their rustic partners and the watching redcoats. Later he was entertained in a capital house with curtains and clean beds by "a fine, black, animated Spaniard" with a most beautiful wife, from whose long, black mantilla, brilliant rolling eyes, Roman nose, sweet mouth, jet black hair and graceful curls he could not take his eyes. The quicker tempo of the land affected the marching columns as they hurried on through sparkling air and cork woods to Salamanca. They felt ready for anything. " We had fought and conquered and felt elated," wrote Rifleman Harris of the
95th;
"Spain was before us and every man in the Rifles seemed only too anxious to get a rap at the French again. It was a glorious sight to see our colours spread in those fields. The men seemed invincible and nothing, I thought, could beat them."
²

Meanwhile another British army had entered Spain. On the morning of October 13th, Mr. Crabb Robinson,
The Tunes
correspondent at Corunna, was startled by the report of cannon and, running to the ramparts, saw more than a hundred and fifty transports sailing

¹
Boothby,
185-6.
See
idem.,
162-3, 168-9, 188, 216;
Blakeney,
22-4, 29;
Schaumann,
11, 15, 17, 19-20, 24, 27, 35, 37, 53, 55, 63;
Moore, II,
273-6;
Oxfordshire Light Infantry Chronick
(1902), 226.

2
" We had some of as desperate fellows in the Rifles as had ever toiled under the burning sun of an enemy's country." Harris,
71.
See also Boothby,
163, 173, 176, 180, 182-3;
Blakeney,
27-8, 33;
Schaumann,
65;
Journal of a Soldier,
50-1.

in a double line before a gentle breeze; it made him proud to see them. It was Baird with the first 12,000 from England. Unfortunately there was a hitch, for no one had given authority for them to land, and the "Provincial Junta was either unable or unwilling to do
so.
In the end a special messenger had to be sent to Madrid to obtain the Su
preme Junta's leave. Hookham Fre
re, however, who landed at Corunna a few days later as British Envoy, was given a tremendous reception. His carriage was dragged through the streets amid vivas, crackers and rockets, he was feasted at a banquet of countless dishes highly flavoured with garlic and treated to a theatrical performance at which Pluto appeared trampling Bonaparte under foot while the whole audience rose and sang "God Save the King" and "Rule Britannia."
¹

But not till October 25th was any reply received from Madrid. It then only gave authority for Baird to land if he insisted and strongly urged that he and his transports should remove themselves to some point on the coast less dangerously near the naval arsenal of Ferrol. Baird, a blunt Anglo-Indian soldier, however insisted, and next day his troops began to put ashore. But his difficulties had only just begun. The authorities objected to their disembarking in any but the smallest detachments and failed to make any arrangements for their feeding. It was not till November 4th that they were all ashore. Even then their progress over the two hundred miles of mountain road to Astorga was painfully slow. As in Portugal, the Treasury had omitted to provide bullion to hire forage waggons and draught cattle. There was not even money to pay the troops.

All this took place in an atmosphere of complete unreality. Nobody in Corunna seemed to have the slightest idea what was happening elsewhere in Spain. The only information that could be obtained from the local leaders was that the French were flying; questioned as to where they were flying or from whom, they took refuge in vague generalities and evasions. Moore was faced by precisely the same difficulties: there was no Spanish Commander-in-Chief or General Staff, and the only authority to whom he could appeal was a Supreme Junta of thirty-four persons, all possessing equal powers and all apparently equally unpractical. So far as they gave their minds to military matters—most of their time was spent in discussing theoretical constitutions and quarrelling with the Provincial Juntas about their powers—they were obsessed by a fantastic plan for encircling the French with a converging movement of three almost

¹
Crabb Robinson, I,
275;
Jackson, II,
271-9.
About the same time Captain Leith Hay witnessed in Madrid a "representation of the union between Great Britain and Spain, depicting a flaringly-colourcd transparency in which figured His Majesty King George III and the amiable Fernando Septimo locked in a close embrace." Leith Hay, I,
57.

completely unco-ordinated armies whose numbers in their own imaginations they exaggerated as much as their fighting capacity. Any anxiety Moore might feel for the junction of his own forces, now moving across Spain in widely separated columns, he was assured, was entirely needless, since the enemy was securely hemmed in by immensely superior strength. The British Government seemed to share this illusion; misled by the uncritical optimism of its military agents with the Spanish armies,
¹
Castlereagh wrote on November ist that the French—a bare 50,000—were threatened from Saragossa to Bilbao by forces more than twice as large and that Napoleon's reinforcements could never reach them.

The Spanish leaders gave little thought to Napoleon. That he was likely to strike before their schemes eventuated never crossed their minds. Yet since the disaster at Baylen he had increased the year's levee of conscripts to a quarter of a million and transferred the pick of his veterans from Germany and Italy to Bayonne, using continuous relays of waggons to move them quickly. Within four weeks of leaving the Danube and Elbe they were concentrated on the Spanish frontier.

At the same time the Emperor took steps to safeguard his rear. Putting his jack-boot down on underground patriotic activities in Prussia and browbeating the Austrian Ambassador, he summoned his ally, the Emperor Alexander, to Erfurt. Here at the end of September, amid servile princes and splendid pageantry, he secured a promise of Russian military aid against any uprising in the east. Then he hurried back home to Paris and told his Legislative Assembly that he was on his way to Spain to crown his brother in Madrid and plant his eagles on the towers of Lisbon. As his berlin drove southwards, the long columns of the Grand Army were already pouring along the trunk road to Vittoria. By November ist, 1808, 120,000 troops were already on the Ebro.

Had the Spanish armies, though outnumbered, acted on the defensive, they might have been able to hold the French until the arrival of Moore's troops. But, having wasted three months in controversy, they chose the moment of the Grand Army's appearance for their long-advertised attack. On the last day of October Blake with the Army of Galicia, advancing without the sligh
t
est support from his colleagues, walked
into Ney's lines at Durango. H
ere his

¹
One of them, Colonel Doyle—an enthusiastic and rather unbalanced Irishman who was given the rank of General in the Spanish Service—wrote hopefully to his British employers of "pouring all the energies of the different provinces into one stream, the tide of which will be a torrent which will sweep away from the face of Spain the
remnant of the French army." See
Fortescue, VI,
259, 226;
Moore, II,
281, 381;
Ann. Reg.
(1809),
Hist.
3;
Earl Stanhope,
Miscellanies
(1863), 53.

troops, half naked and starving, were trounced and driven back to Bilbao. "Intractable as swine, obstinate as mules and unmanageable as bullocks," as a disgusted British officer wrote, they were cut up like rations or dispersed in all directions like a flock of sheep.

A week later Napoleon reached Vittoria. He found himself in the centre of a horseshoe, with a compact force of the finest troops in Europe facing three widely separated bodies of peasant levies whose total numbers were inferior to his own. He struck immediately. In two successive days Blake was routed again at Espinosa, only escaping annihilation by a precipitate flight over the Cantabrian mountains, and the Army of Estremedura—theoretically in reserve —was utterly shattered at Gamonal village north of, Burgos. On November 9th Burgos was a busy military base, supposedly far behind the lines and swarming with cheerful Spanish soldiers. A day later it was a deserted city full of untidy corpses and sacked houses while around it the French cavalry hunted Count Belvedere's men over the Castilian plain. Belvedere himself—a youth of twenty completely unaccustomed to command—fled with his Staff to Aranda, 60 miles in the rear. The Spanish centre had ceased to exist. On the 13th the French occupied Valladollid—the intended rendezvous of the British army—while the Supreme Junta was still debating the possibility of . their being able to advance at all.
¹