points; if he was game and survived their rough chaff, he was accepted; if not, he was dealt with unmercifully.
By the end of April, 1813, Wellington was in command, not of the 30,000 British troops Napoleon supposed, but of 52,000, together with 29,000 well-disciplined Portuguese—a striking-force of over 80,000 men. To these, following his appointment—grudgingly made after the liberation of Madrid—as Generalissimo of the Spanish Armies, were now added 21,000 Spaniards under his direct command. He was still, however, unable to get regular rations and pay for them out of the jealous, quarrelling Regency and Cortez.
During the winter he had made many improvements in his army. The defects of the previous campaign had been carefully corrected. The former Chief-of-Staff, George Murray, was back at his post; tents were issued for the first time; portable tin kettles substituted for heavy iron vessels; every soldier equipped with three pairs of shoes and a spare set of soles and heels in his knapsack. Discipline, too, had been tightened: a new Judge-Advocate had spent the winter speedup courts martial, hanging deserters and flogging plunderers. Even a small corps of trained sappers had arrived from England, and a properly organised siege train.
With a force embodying the accumulated experience of five years' campaigning and with his adversary facing a war on two fronts, Wellington was more hopeful than he had ever been before. "I propose," he wrote, "to take the field as early as I can and to place myself in fortune's way." Of his plans for doing so, however, he said little, even in his dispatches to the Secretary of State. They depended on surprise and on the use of sea-power. Instead of a frontal attack against the broad and easily defensible Douro as in 1812, he proposed to outflank that river by secretly transferring the bulk of his troops while still in Portugal to its northern bank and sending them, first north and thence east, to cross its mountain tributary, the Esla, and appear in the rear of the enemy's defences. To do so, with their guns and supplies, they had first to negotiate a wild and almost roadless region on the borders of northern Portugal and Spain. But for months Wellington's engineers and commissariat officers had been probing the Tras-os-Montes, and he was satisfied that it could be done.
Once across the mountains and the Esla, the British Commander planned a further surprise—one which Commodore Popham's capture of Santander had made possible. While threatening the French communications by driving round their right or northern flank towards the Bayonne trunk road, he would put it out of their power to threaten his own supply-lines
by
switching these from Portugal to the Bay of Biscay. For Lisbon and Oporto he would substitute Santander and later, perhaps, Bilbao and Passages. By doing so he would shorten his communications with England by four hundred land-miles and as many sea-miles. Instead of advancing away from his supplies, he would move towards them. And with every mile he drove into the north-east, edging nearer the sea from which his strength came, his communications would become, not more exposed, but safer. Scarcely ever had the offensive use of sea-power on land been more clearly envisaged by a soldier. Being England's, he was Neptune's general.
In the utmost secrecy and under pretence of equipping the Spanish Army of Galicia, Wellington assembled supply-ships, guns and ammunition in Corunna for transference to Santander Bay, two hundred and fifty miles to the east. The operation was attended by difficulties. For the war with the young American Republic, begun in the previous summer, had taken an unexpected course. While the long-impending American attack on the defenceless Canadian frontier had been thwarted by a few hundred regulars under the British Commander-in-Chief, Isaac Brock, American frigates, more heavily manned and gunned than their British counterparts, had triumphed in three spectacular duels which, though of little strategic importance, caused an immense sensation in both countries. Thus encouraged, American privateers had begun to appear on the Portuguese coast in search of Wellington's supply ships. The menace was never serious, for the strength of the Royal Navy was immense and the United States had not even a single capital ship. But during the early months of 1813, as the campaign which was to decide the fate of Spain took shape in his mind, Wellington waxed very bitter over naval slackness and inefficiency.
1
1
Fortescue, IX, 104; VIII, 545. See also, for an interesting illustration of naval slackness as seen through a soldier's eyes, Blakeney, 286-90. Larpent, the Judge-Advocate, took a more dispassionate view. "People here," he wrote from Wellington's headquarters on January 2nd, "are all very sore about the Americans and our taken frigates. I think we deserve it a little. Our contempt of our descendants and half-brothers has always rather disgusted me. . . . The reverse may set things right. The Americans have faults enough; we should allow them their merits. Our sailors all thought Americans would not dare look them in the face. I think the Army rather rejoice and laugh aside at all this falling on the Navy, as they bull
ied so much before." Larpent, I 7
5.
He possessed, however, another asset. Thanks to the guerrillas he knew the enemy's dispositions while having his own concealed. When the campaign started, 55,000 men under King Joseph and Marshal Jourdan were strung out across a front of nearly two hundred miles from the Douro to the Tagus. Far behind them, as many more were hunting partisans in the tangled mountains near the French frontier or garrisoning fortresses and blockhouses. And four hundred miles away, on the east coast, cut off from the rest of Spain by mountain and desert, Marshal Suchet with 68,000 troops was holding down Valencia and Catalonia. To make sure that no reinforcements from this quarter should reach Joseph through the Ebro valley, Wellington made a further use of his country's command of the sea. In April he ordered Lieutenant-General Sir John Murray, who had just successfully repulsed Suchet at Castalla, to embark his force of 18,000 Britons, Germans, Italians and Spaniards for an attack on Tarragona two hundred miles up the coastal road to the north. Confronted by such a threat to his communications, as well as by the unpredictable movements of the Spanish Army of Murcia and the guerrillas of Catalonia and Aragon, Suchet, a selfish man at the best of times, was unlikely to spare any help for his colleagues.
Yet everything depended on the British striking quickly. Clausel and Foy were bound before long to disperse the northern guerrillas and rejoin King Joseph. And events in Europe might soon release far larger French forces. On April 15th Napoleon had left Paris to join his army on the Rhine; on the 24th he reached Erfurt, intending to fall on the Prussians and Russians before the Austrians could intervene. It was, therefore, irritating for Wellington to be delayed by a late spring and consequent lack of green forage; it had been a bitter winter all over Europe, and in London the Thames had been frozen for eight weeks. Accidents, due to fraudulent contractors, had also held up the pontoon bridge on its way from Tagus to Douro. And with a succession of rivers to cross, Wellington's plan depended on pontoons.
During the second week of May the main British army began its northward march through the Tras-os-Montes. To distract the enemy's attention, Wellington and Hill with the remaining 30,000 moved on the 22nd on Salamanca. As he crossed the frontier the British Commander-in-Chief turned in his stirrups and bade farewell to Portugal. He and his men were leaving for ever the rocky upland villages, the stunted trees and stony fields, the boggy woods and heaths; the smoky, flea-ridden billets, the dances with ivory-teethed peasant girls in bat-haunted, windy barns, the hunts and horse-races among the vineyards and olive trees, the days after partridge, snipe and hare; the gallina and garlic sausages, the black bread and sour country wine, the rain and mountain wind in the desolate square of lonely Frenada.
1
The French were taken completely by surprise. On May 25th, Hill's troops drove in their outposts before Salamanca. The single French division in the neighbourhood of the town, after losing two hundred prisoners, withdrew towards the Douro. Everything pointed to a British advance in that direction, and orders were given at Joseph's headquarters to meet it, between Toro and Tordesillas, as Marmont had done in the previous summer.
On reaching the Tormes, however, Wellington and Hill halted. Screened by their cavalry, they remained there for a week, while to the north the main body under Graham completed its two-hundred-mile outflanking march through the Tras-os-Montes. Guns had to be lowered over precipices by ropes, and the infantry to climb at times on hands and knees. But by May 28th the entire force was across the frontier and marching in three columns on the Esla. They reached the river on the 29th and 30th, and, finding it in flood, crossed it on the last day of the month, partly by pontoons and partly by fords waded chin-deep. Except from a few scattered cavalry patrols, there was no resistance. Next day the advance-guard entered Zamora. Before Joseph and his Chief-of-Staff could realise what had happened their entire line had been taken in flank.
By that time Wellington himself had joined the northern wing of his army. Leaving Hill to direct the southern part, he had left Salamanca at dawn on the 29th, ridden all day, and crossed the swollen Douro at Miranda in a basket slung from ropes. Everything was happening as he had intended. The French now knew that his army was across the Esla, but it was too late for them to do anything about it. On June 2nd, realising that their Douro defences were useless, they evacuated Toro. Here on the following day, covered by Graham, Hill's 30,000 also crossed the river. By June 4th the whole
1
Simmons, 277-8,281; Costello, i48;Kincaid, 89,203-4; Schaumann, 317-18; Tomkinson, 22; Grattan, 223; Gronow, II, 205-6; Larpent, I, 12, 17, 21, 44, 63, 75; Boothby, 162-3;
Johnny Newcome,
40.
British army, 81,000 strong, was concentrated north of the Douro.
It at once set out north-eastwards towards the Carrion and Pisuerga. For the next ten days it marched without a halt in parallel columns across the great corn plain of Old Castile—the waving Tierra de Campos—its cavalry screen interposing between it and the retreating French. "The sun shone brilliantly," wrote an officer, "the sky was heavenly blue, the clouds of dust marked the line of march of the glittering columns. The joyous peasantry hailed our approach and came dancing to meet us, singing and beating time on their tambourines; and when we passed through the principal street of Palencia the nuns, from the upper windows of a convent, showered down rose-leaves upon our dusty heads."
1
Thanks to Murray's staff work, supplies were plentiful. All was cheerfulness and anticipation.
Against this unexpected march the French were powerless. They had either to retreat or be cut off. Valladolid was evacuated on June 2nd, Palencia on the 7th, Burgos itself on the 12th. Fear of hunger sped their steps, for, unlike the rich corn-lands of the Douro, the country along the royal
chaussee
to the north-east was a desert. Though their fighting troops still mustered less than 60,000, they were impeded by a vast host of useless courtiers, officials, and refugees as well as by thousands of wagons laden with ladies of pleasure and loot.
"We
were a travelling bordel," a French officer complained.
On June 13 th, the British were awakened by a tremendous explosion reverberating through the mountains. It was the end of Burgos castle, which the retreating French had blown up in despair. Yet even had it been defended, it could no longer have stopped Wellington. For, having outflanked the Douro and its tributaries, he had already turned north again to encircle the French defences in yet another river valley, the Ebro. His staff, seeing they had covered more than two hundred miles from the Portuguese frontier, were in favour of a halt; the French were falling back on reinforcements, and the news from Germany was bad. On May 2nd Napoleon had defeate
d the Russo-Prussian army at Lü
tzen on the Saxon plain; on the 8th he had entered Dresden, and, two days before Wellington set out from Portugal, had won a second, though not decisive, victory at Bautzen. The possibility of another Continental peace
1
Maxwell,
Peninsular Sketches
(1845), II, 37. See also Tomkinson, 239; Schaumann, 371; Oman, VI, 352-3; Smith, I, 93-4; Gomm, 301; Simmons, 285-d; Fortescue, IX, 147. For a rhymed description of this wonderful march
see Johnny Newcome,
213-15.
was in every mind; in fact, though the news had still to reach the Peninsula, a five weeks' armistice
had already been signed at Plas
witz. Yet Wellington knew that, whatever happened on the Elbe, time must elapse before its effect would be felt on the Ebro. His safest plan now was to go forward. For once on the Pyrenees, whatever the French might do, he would have an easier front to defend than a Spanish river.
Without a halt, therefore, the advance continued. Once more the army struck out across desert and mountain. Only the cavalry screen remained in the neighbourhood of the Burgos-Bayonne highway to deceive and shadow King Joseph. Wellington's plan was to cross the headwaters of the Ebro between Rocamonde and Puenta Arenas, and thence, turning eastwards, to strike the road at Vittoria twenty miles in rear of the French defences. By this sweep to the north he would link up with Giron's Galicians and Longa's guerrillas and open his new communications with Santander and the Bay of Biscay.
For the next three days the footsore, dusty army toiled northwards through iron-bound hills and defiles which no artillery had ever passed. Again the guns had to be brought down precipices by hand with locked wheels; the sweating infantry, spoiling for a fight, muttered that they would make the French pay for it. By the 14th, the marching columns found themselves looking down from the stony plateau to the green and wooded valley of the infant Ebro. By nightfall tents were rising among the cherry trees and the men were garlanded with blossom by dancing peasant girls. Next day, having crossed the river, they turned once more into the east, marching in torrential rain through richly cultivated valleys and along the base of forest-clad mountains. They had covered three hundred miles through enemy territory and had scarcely fired a shot. "It was a most wonderful march," wrote Harry Smith, "the army in great fighting order, and every man in better wind than a trained pugilist."
1
On June 17th, two days after crossing the Ebro, the army regained touch with the French. The men, in high spirits, began to fix their flints, for they could smell, they said, the frog-eaters' baccy and onions. Next day the Light Division was in action at San Milan. As the French outposts fell back, Jourdan, still waiting for Clausel
1
Smith, I, 97; Tomkinson, 256. See also Bell, I, 82-3; Kincaid, 209-10; Simmons. 305; Gomm, 306;
Pakenham Letters,
211-14.