Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (68 page)

At this moment of crisis, possibly the gravest in Wellesley's career, Cuesta announced his intention of remaining where he was and fighting. The British Commander immediately had it out with the old man. If with a broad river and a single bridge in his rear he chose to expose the last principal army of Spain to the attack of nearly 100,000 Frenchmen—for a
junction of Souk's and Joseph's
forces now appeared imminent—he could not be prevented. But, whatever happened, the British were going to cross by the bridge at Arzobispo at once. Having announced his resolution, Wellesley put it into execution without losing a moment. That afternoon— August
4th
—as in the insufferable heat a motley, cursing crowd of soldiers, muleteers, artillery, baggage, carts piled with wounded, mules, donkeys and screeching bullock carts poured over the bridge, a little group of field officers stood on a hill near Oropesa scanning the plain through their telescopes. Presently their leader pointed to a distant cloud of dust beginning to rise over the western hills. It was Soult's advance guard. "Mount," cried Sir Arthur Wellesley, and the cortege cantered off southwards towards the bridge to rejoin the retreating army.
¹

For the next two days the British hurried westwards across the wilderness of rugged and waterless hills that lay to the south of the Tagus. The dust was suffocating and the heat beyond conception. At points the track, such as it was, ran along the side of precipices and the guns had to be dragged up by hand. Yet none were lost; the men, who were without bread, grumbled furiously, but their officers found that they had only to put on a soothing and encouraging expression to turn their miseries to jest. Food was the main difficulty: but for plundering the few living things found on the way, the whole army would have perished. The commissaries had a particularly harassing time; Schaumann was informed by Lieu-tenant-General Payne, commanding the cavalry, that a commissary who did his duty in such a country could not possibly remain alive. "Of all my commissaries," the angry old soldier shouted, "not one has yet sacrificed his life; consequently they are not doing their duty!" Most Englishmen of high position, the worthy German noted in his journal, particularly when serving in a hot climate, were always a little mad.

By nightfall on August
7th
the main British body had reached the mountains around Deleytosa, twenty miles south of Almaraz. Here on the previous day the Marquis del Reino's troops guarding the crossing had been joined by the Light Brigade and the
87th
and
88th
Foot after a fifteen hours' march over waterless hills. They arrived just in time to prevent Ney forcing the river. For the next fortnight they remained guarding the solitary ford, camping by day on a wooded hill and marching down each night to bivouac by the water's edge. They lived on wild honey, which caused dysentery, and dough cakes made by pounding coarse corn from the fields between stones. Dough Boy or Doby Hill, as they called it,

¹
Schaumann,
198-9;
Oman, II,
583.

long lived in the memory of the Light Brigade as a kind of nightmare. A few remembered its picturesque beauty
.
but to the majority the only impression was one of aching hunger, heat, mosquitoes and noisome exhalations from the corrupting vegetation in the river flats.

The rest of the army, camping beside the cork and oak forests at Jaraicejo a day's march away, fared little better. The drought was so intense that the men's eyelids smarted perpetually, their lips split and the skin peeled off their faces. Every few days the grass would break into flames, making enormous fires that spread for miles over the rolling terrain like gigantic serpents. The bivouacs swarmed with scorpions, snakes, mosquitoes and enormous flies, and the pools were full of leeches which clung to the-nostrils of the horses and the mouths of the men. The countryside, already plundered by Victor earlier in the year, was destitute of almost every necessity; the British stores at Plasencia had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and those at Abrantes were too far away. The men, famished and discouraged, grumbled bitterly at their officers, and the officers at their Commander. Many spoke gloomily of Verdun and a French prison; Sir Arthur, it was said, could fight but could not manoeuvre.
¹
He himself wrote to his brother, Lord Wellesley, who had just relieved Frere as Ambassador at Seville, that the army would have to leave Spain if its present treatment continued. "No troops can serve to any good purpose unless they are regularly fed, and it is an error to suppose that a Spaniard or a man or animal of any country can make an exertion without food." " With the army which a fortnight ago beat double their numbers," he added in a third letter written to his brother that day, " I should now hesitate to meet a French corps of half their strength."

Yet, so long as he could, Wellesley clung to his position. For not only did it bar the southward road across the Tagus to Seville and Cadiz, but it lay on the flank of any westward advance against Beresford and Portugal. Cuesta, after losing half his rearguard at Arzibospo and thirty guns—including most of those captured by the British at Talavera—had retired into the hills on the south bank and was now holding an almost impregnable position at Mesa de Ibor, a few miles to the west of Jaraicejo. Meanwhile Joseph had withdrawn eastwards in search of Venegas, while Ney's corps had had to hurry back to the north to deal with an eruption of the Asturian and Galician patriots into the plain of Leon. As for Soult, in the barren lands between the Tagus and the Vera de

¹
"We
were then y
oung soldiers in the art of war
"—Tomkinson,
214.
See also Leith Hay, I,
174, 177-8;
Schaumann,
204-5;
Oman,
n,
600-5;
Fortescue
, VII,
276-7, 279.

Plasencia his men were growing as hungry as Wellesley's. Sooner or later they, too, would have to retreat.

But
there was a limit to what flesh
and blood could bear, and by the middle of August the British army had reached it. Hunger, dysentery and fever had reduced men and horses to bundles of bones, and, according to Commissary Schaumann, the soldiers' wives— usually decently clad and faithful to their husbands—went round on starved donkeys offering themselves to any one for half a loaf.
¹
After it became known that Venegas, as dilatory when threatened by disaster as when proffered victory, had been routed on August nth at Almonacid, there ceased to be any object in the British remaining in the
Spanish hinterland. There was n
o means of doing so either. "I must either move into Portugal where I know I shall be supplied," Wellesley informed General Eguia, Cuesta's deputy— for the old man had had a paralytic stroke—" or I must make up my mind to lose my army."

On August 21st, to their inexpressible relief, the troops set off to march by Trujillo and Merida to the fortress of Badajoz in the Guadiana valley, a hundred and thirty miles to the south-west. Starving and fever-stricken, they arrived on September
3rd
and entered cantonments along the Portuguese frontier. Here they could be supplied from Elvas and Lisbon. To Spanish complaints that they were betraying Spain and laying Andalusia open to invasion, Wellesley replied that the responsibility lay with those who had been acquainted with their wants and made no attempt to relieve them. In any case, with the winter approaching, Seville was almost as well secured by his new position on the French flank as it had been by his presence on the direct road south of the Tagus. With this object he agreed to remain for the time being in the Guadiana valley—at that season notoriously unhealthy—thus exposing his men to new ravages of typhus and malaria. But beyond that, protest though the Junta might, he would not go. Nothing would induce him to co-operate again with Spanish generals or rely any longer on Spanish promises for food. He had lost a third of his army by doing so, and it was enough.

¹
Schaumann,
205.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

The Fabian General

"They may do what they please. I shall not give up the game here as long as it can be played."

Wellington.

T
he
fourth of the great European coalitions which England had formed to restrain the power of France had failed. The colossus that had defied Pitt had defeated Canning too. On October 14th, 1809, Austria made her peace at Schonbrunn. She lost a fifth of her population and territory including her last outlet to the sea. The Tyrol was partitioned and enslaved. The ancient bishopric of Salzburg was ceded to the Bavarians and western Galicia to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Croatia, Carniola, Trieste and Carinthia became the Illyrian provinces of France. The latter's coastline, which England had gone to war seventeen years before to confine at the Scheldt, now stretched from the Baltic to the southern Adriatic.

The Foreign Secretary's tenure of office did not survive his humiliation. In mid-August, while the fate of the Walcheren expedition still hung in the balance, the Duke of Portland had a stroke. Though he rallied, it was plain that his Ministry's days were numbered. During the next week it became known that the attempt on Antwerp had failed and with it all hope of nominating Chatham as his successor. Sooner than serve under a more active mediocrity Canning resolved to bid for the Premiership himself. Informing his colleagues that the time had come for Castlereagh's resignation, which unknown to the latter he had been demanding since the spring, he announced his belief that the country could no longer be led from the Lords. This left the choice between himself and Perceval, the leader of the Lower Flouse and Chancellor of the Exchequer. To be sure of the issue, he threatened to resign if Perceval was preferred.

But Castlereagh and Perceval, though neither equalled Canning in eloquence and genius, were men of character. The former, hearing of the intrigue which had been going on behind his back, resigned and challenged the Foreign Secretary to a duel. Appalled by the denouement, the old Prime Minister resigned. Perceval, confronted with his brilliant colleague's sugg
estion that he should withdraw
to the Upper House as Lord President, admitted the .impossibility of Canning serving under him but refused to give up his place at the Exchequer to free the Treasury. Since precedent prevented the Administration from being led from the Foreign Office, he proposed seeking another Prime Minister from the Lords who would leave every one in his old office.

Thus it came about that in the third week of September the country, staggering under bad news from Spain, Scheldt and Danube, learnt that the Government had resigned and that two of its members had fought a duel on Putney Heath.
¹
The Tories seemed doomed. Having bungled the European invasion, the Grand Alliance and the war in Spain, they had now by their divisions lost their claim to be "the sole representatives of Mr. Pitt." The chief aspirant to that statesman's mantle had hopelessly discredited himself; honest mediocrity cried out in horror at " Canning's monkey tricks to make himself Premier."
²
Yet without Canning, his former colleagues could not hope to hold their own in debate. It came, therefore, as no surprise when it was learnt that overtures were being made to the Opposition leaders.

Yet once again hopes of a National Administration foundered. Though Grenville and Grey were summoned to London and the former—torn from his beloved Boconnoc—obeyed the call, neither was prepared to sacrifice Party scruples to the broader needs of the country. They would only, Grenville announced, co-operate with those who were ready to grant full political rights to the Irish Catholics. On that point, as every one knew, King and nation were adamant.

There was a deeper issue between the Whig aristocrats and the old Protestant, fighting England that their ancestors had led. Out of loathing for the Tories and partly because of their very virtues, they had set their faces against a war which a people that hated all foreign dictators—temporal or spiritual—had resolved to fight to the death. In their bitterness at exclusion from office it had become almost an article of faith with the Opposition chiefs that the Continent was lost. Coalitions and expeditions were in their eyes alike vain; Grey spoke of Talavcra as as much a disgrace as Walcheren. Angry though they were at the continued failure of their armies, the English could not stomach a quitter. They preferred fools and mediocrities to those whom they esteemed cowards. Walter Scott spoke for thousands

¹
Canning was wounded in the thigh. "Now, pray," he observed to his opponent, "tell me what we have been fighting about?"—
Two Duchesses,
326, 340;
Dudley,
"76-7.

²
Auckland, IV,
322.
See also Dudley,
87;
Wellesley, I,
248, 251
Plumer Ward,
206, 211, 260;
Crcevey,
95-8
.