The Age of Elegance (11 page)

St. Sebastian had been relieved and the British decisively defeated.
¹
Owing to his visit to St. Sebastian and the failure of his subordinates to send prompt warning of what was happening, Wellington only learnt of the French attack late that night. At four o'clock next morning he set out post-haste for the Bastan where he found Hill and Stewart with 9000 men at Irutita, ten miles south of the abandoned Maya pass. As they were now strongly posted and as there was no sign of D'Erlon, he continued his journey southwards along the wooded mountain tracks, ordering a general concentration of reserves on Pamplona. After travelling all day he learnt at eight in the evening that Cole had abandoned Roncesvalles on the previous night and had fallen back to join Picton at Zuburi, twenty miles north-east of Pamplona. He at once sent Picton orders to hold his ground at all costs, promising to join him next day.

Yet Picton had already abandoned Zuburi without a fight. This fine soldier, who normally could never bridle his ardour in the presence of the French, had joined Cole at Linzoain that morning. At the sight of his tall hat and umbrella the men had supposed their retreat at an end; "Here comes old Tommy," they cried, "now, boys, make up your minds for a fight!" But, after consulting Cole, Picton, paralysed by the responsibility, decided that it was not safe to
stand in a defile where his fla
nks might be turned. He ordered instead an immediate retreat to the foothills north of Pamplona. By doing so he needlessly abandoned a further ten miles of difficult country and placed the relief of the fortress almost within Soult's reach. It was this that caused Wellington to write to the Prime Minister that all his victories had not yet given his generals confidence in themselves, and that, though heroes when he was present, they were like children in his absence. It was the price he paid for trusting them so little.

In the race to reach Pamplona before the British, Soult had gained the initial advantage. By the morning of the 27th—two days after he started—there were only six hilly miles and 19,000 British and Spanish troops between him and his goal. But at dawn Wellington had resumed his southward ride at Almandoz, half-way down the

¹
"You had better," wrote the Emperor to his Foreign Secretary, "circulate the news that in consequence of Marshal Soult's victory on July 25th, the siege of St. Sebastian has been raised and 30 siege-guns and 200 wagons taken. The blockade of Pamplona was raised on the 27th; General Hill, who was in command at that siege, could not carry away his wounded and was obliged to burn part of his baggage. Twelve siege-guns were captured there. Send this to Prague, Leipzig and Frankfort."
Lettres de VEmpereur Napolion, non inseries dans la correspondance.
1909,
p.
3.

Maya-Pamplona road. Ten miles farther on, at Ostiz, he learnt of Picton's retreat and of what was happening ahead. Out-distancing all but a single aide, he galloped the remaining four miles to Sorauren village, reaching it just before Soult's outposts. Here he could see Cole's men spread across the heights with the French skirmishers moving towards them. He had just time before the enemy cut the road to scribble orders to his chief-of-staff for a general concentration on the spot. Then he galloped on to join Cole and Picton. It was, as he said, "a close run thing."
¹

At the sight of the erect, lithe figure on the thoroughbred, the Portuguese light infantry broke into a shout of "Douro! Douro!" Soon the whole ridge was cheering; everyone knew that there would be no more retreat. It is possible, as Napier suggests, that the familiar sound, reverberating up the mountain valleys, caused Soult to postpone his attack until the morrow. Since Albuera—indeed, since Corunna—Soult, or General Salt as the British called him, had always hesitated in the immediate presence of the redcoats. There was an Achilles-heel in this fine strategist's armour which became apparent on the day of battle, when his magnificent self-assurance always temporarily deserted him.
²
"With Pamplona only two hours' march away and his adversary for the moment outnumbered by two to one, he shrank from an immediate attack. Instead, he took his siesta and waited till next day.

By then it was too late. Wellington had made his dispositions, and four British divisions—one, at least, certain to arrive during the day —were marching on the battlefield. He had won the race after all. Within twenty-four hours he would outnumber the enemy; till then he had only to hold his position and trust to his men's proved steadiness. Soult's ensuing attack was like Busaco, with the Allied line drawn up behind the skyline of a ridge. Twice the densely packed French columns reached the summit only to be expelled by the volleys and charges of the defenders. By four o'clock the battle of Sorauren was over.
³

The French, who had lost nearly 4000 to the Allies' 2600, had shot

¹
Larpent, II, 70. See also Oman, VI, 658-62; Fortescue, IX, 269-72; Bell,
1,
106-7; Blakeney, 297-8; Smyth,
History of the XXth,
396; H. M. C. Bathurst, 234.

²
Maximillien Lamarque, II, 182. "He loved vigorous enterprises," wrote one of his aides, possibly a little unfairly, "provided they did not involve too much personal danger."
Mimoires de St.-Chamans.
See also Lemonnier-Delafasse, 219,
cit.
Oman, VI, 590-1, 663; Cooper,
Rough Notes,
24.

³
"Nothing could stand against the ragged redcoats of old England." Bell,
1,
107-8. See Oman, VI, 667-80; Fortescue, IX, 275-80; Larpent, II, 20-1; Gurwood; Maxwell,
Peninsular Sketches,

their bolt. They had failed either to relieve Pamplona or capture supplies. They had now either to retreat or starve. In an effort to save something from the wreck, Soult ordered a march across Wellington's flank towards the Pamplona-Tolosa road, hoping to raise the siege of St. Sebastian. By doing so he gave his adversary, whom he had already presented with a Busaco, the opportunity for a Salamanca. During the 30th Wellington struck at his rearguard and all but annihilated it. Famished and demoralised, Soult's troops abandoned all pretence of order and ran for safety. Scarcely half of them regained France with the colours.

Had Wellington chosen to pursue he could probably have reached the Garonne. But the truce in Germany was still continuing and, for all he knew, might already have culminated in a peace, freeing Napoleon's full strength for operations against him. At that moment his was the only Allied army actively engaged. It amounted, after its Vittoria and Pyrenean casualties, to little more than 80,000 men, of whom 25,000 were ill-fed and ill-disciplined Spaniards. To have invaded France with the latter—unpaid by their politicians and burning with a savage desire to revenge themselves on their country's oppressors—might have provoked a partisan resistance which the British commander was resolved to avoid. He therefore forwent his chance of glory and halted his army once more on the summit of the Pyrenees.

Throughout August, while the Spaniards resumed the blockade of Pamplona, he completed his preparations for a second assault on St. Sebastian. On the last day of the month, while Soult from beyond the Bidassoa vainly strove to relieve it, his men stormed the fortress in daylight. The casualties were appalling; one British brigade lost more than half its number, another a third and another a quarter. But by the early afternoon, after Graham's artillery had opened fire on the curtain only a few feet above the heads of the stormers, the little fortress town, blazing to the stormy summer sky, was in British hands. "Such was the ardour and confidence of our army," wrote one of its officers, "that if Lord Wellington had told us to attempt to carry the moon we should have done it." Next day Soult, having lost nearly 4000 men in his attempt to raise the siege, fell back across the Bidassoa.

Again the Fabian Wellington refrained from following up his success. He was still awaiting news from the North. It came two days later, on September 3 rd, when a fast vessel, which had been waiting at Portsmouth, entered Passages with the tidings—brought to London on the 27th and semaphored at once to the south coast— that Austria had joined with Russia and Prussia in war against France. Napoleon had refused to accept the Rhine frontier; on August 12th the ten weeks' armistice had ended. Of the course of the new campaign Wellington knew nothing save for a rumour from the French lines of Napoleonic victory at Dresden on the 27th. He was unaware that the Emperor's success had been offset by two disasters: the def
eat of Marshal Macdonald by Blü
cher at Katzbach on the 26th, and Vanda me*s surrender at Kulm on the 30th.

Without furthe
r
delay, however, he decided to invade France. Though nothing
c
ould induce him to risk his army need
lessly, he knew that a
attack on Napoleon could on
ly succeed if pressure was simult
aneously exerted at every point on the circumference. He therefore
prepared for an assault on Soult
's mountain defences. He had to face the price of his earlier prudence: the time given to the Duke of Dalmatia to reorganise his troops and defence. For weeks that officer had been constructing an immense line of redoubts running southwards from the sea—a substitute for the offensive spirit his men had lost and a strange reversion for a Revolutionary general to eighteenth-century practice. But they were too extended; all but 8000 of his 47,000 infantry had to be strung along them, leaving too small a reserve to repel a concentrated attack. In this Soult was the victim of his country's political system; he dared not shorten his lines by a withdrawal because he knew that Napoleon would visit his wrath on any subordinate who retreated or gave up anything. He was also afraid that his troops, accustomed to living on the countryside, would provoke a rebellion in France by their excesses.

Wellington's plan was to attack the seaward end of the enemy line and, by pinching out a westward bulge on Spanish soil, capture the frontier town of Hendaye on the lower Bidassoa and advance his line to the Nivelle. By doing so he hoped to secure the little port of St.-Jean-de-Luz for his supply-ships. His objectives, as always, were carefully attuned to his resources—a fact which assisted his project, since Soult, who attributed to him the more daring designs he himself would have favoured, had concentrated his reserves at the other end of his line to guard against a
n enveloping drive from Ronces
valles to the sea. As a result, only 10,000 men were holding the mouth of the Bidassoa.

During the early days of October, Wellington unobtrusively moved unit after unit to his seaward flank until more than 25,000 were concentrated near the river. At dawn on the 7th the light companies of the 5 th Division opened the battle of the Bidassoa by wading, armpit deep, across the estuary. They reached the northern bank before the French were even aware of what was happening. When Soult arrived from the other end of his long line, the British were firmly established inside the frontier. Farther inland the Light Division and Freire's Spaniards simultaneously assaulted the mountain bastion of the Grande Rhune. By the evening of the next day all Wellington's objectives had been gained, and the French right was in retreat to the Nivelle. The operation, giving him possession of a whole chain of carefully prepared entrenchments,
¹
had cost less than 1500 casualties.

Though the French had shown little of their old spirit and had abandoned the strongest positions as soon as their flanks were turned, Wellington again made no pursuit. He was still waiting for more certain news from Germany and for the fall of Pamplona to release more troops. He contented himself, therefore, with consolidating the rocky ledge of France he had won and preparing for the next move.

Looking down from the Pyrenean heights in those days of waiting, the way ahead—the final straight of the long race begun twenty years before—was already visible to the British. To the right ran a great wall of peaks stretching into the remote distance towards the Mediterranean: to the left the Bay of Biscay, with the warships of the Royal Navy perpetually on the move. In front lay France. "From these stupendous mountains," wrote Simmons of the Rifles, "we had a most commanding view of a vast extent of highly cultivated French territory, innumerable villages, and the port and town of St.-Jean-de-Luz. We could also see our cruisers sailing about near the French coast which gave an additional interest to the view before us. . . . One morning one of our ships was observed to be chasing a brig of war and got between her and the shore. As the boats from the English went to board her, the Frenchmen got into

¹
"We found the soldiers' huts very comfortable; they were built of trees and furze and formed squares and streets, which had names placarded up such as Rue de Paris, Rue de Versailles, etc." Gronow, I, 4.

theirs and made for the shore. A short time after she was one mass of fire and blew up. It was a beaut
iful morning and some thousands
of veteran Englishmen, having a bird's-eye view of the whole affair, took a lively interest in the manner our brave tars performed their duty."

Had the vision of the watching soldiers been able to penetrate the October horizon, they would have seen beyond the Biscay bay the sails of British battleships in the swell of Brest and Lorient; the transports bearing men and supplies to feed the battlefields; the ocean merchantmen coming and going with the tribute of trade which sustained their country's alliances; the smoking chimneys of the North Country towns and Midland forges; the tax-collectors gathering their harvest and the money-lenders at their ledgers; the politicians debating in the forum at Westminster; the semaphore watchers on the Admiralty roof gazing across the river to the wooded Surrey heights. And far away in the north-east beyond the Alps they might have seen, amid the wooded folds of great rivers serpentining across the Saxon plains, the steely glint of marching armies set in motion by British faith and fortitude and paid by British gold, as they converged from north and east and south on the city of Leipzig, where Napoleon, clinging to his conquests, stood at bay with an army of veteran marshals and young, sickly conscripts.

For on October 16th, 1813, three hundred thousand Russians, Austrians, Prussians and Swedes, with more than 1300 guns, closed in on a hundred and ninety thousand Frenchmen, Italians and Saxons under the greatest captain of all time. Three days later the battle of Leipzig ended with the desertion of Napoleon's last German allies and the utter rout of his army, scarcely a third of it escaping. Britain's part in the victory was confined to the doings of a single battery of Congreve rockets, commanded by a young officer who a generation later was to fall fighting against his country's Russian allies. Yet, though its scale made the battles of the Peninsular War seem insignificant-, it was the redcoated watchers on the Pyrenean heights and their sea-going comrades in the Bay who had laid its foundations.

Three weeks later, as the first authentic news of Leipzig chilled the hearts of France's southern army, the British stormed the heights of the Nivelle and broke into the G
ascony plain. Pamplona, reduced t
o its last rat, had surrendered at the end of October; early in November a spell of cold and storm was succeeded by brilliant sunshine. The French, brought by conscript drafts up to 62,000 men, were holding the hilly south bank of the Nivelle, their redoubts and entrenchments bristling with guns. Confident in this wall of rock and iron, which was reputed as strong as the Lines of Torres Vedras, Soult boasted that it would cost the attackers a third of their force to dislodge him. But Wellington, unbending over the port, told his generals that he meant to prod the fat Marshal till he came to terms.
¹
"Those fellows think themselves invulnerable," he remarked, "but I will beat them out with ease."

Once again the French were holding lines longer than they could man, and the British commander could bring a force against any point greater than they could concentrate to meet it. And he had an instrument with which to do so which, as he said, could go anywhere and do anything: "the finest army," in the words of one of its officers, "in better order, better discipline, in better health and more effective than any British one on the Continent ever was before." On November 10th, a month after the battle of the Bidassoa, he put it to the test as "the two game-cocks of England and France" grappled all day on the hills to the south of the Nivelle. The British columns, which had moved up to their stations overnight, waded the river in the half-light of dawn and, scaling the heights, broke through the redoubts of Soult's centre like a screen of reeds. "Nor did we ever meet a check," wrote Harry Smith, "but carried the enemy's work by one fell swoop of irresistible victory." There is a lyrical quality in all the eye-witness accounts of that day; in no engagement of the war was the supremacy of Wellington's army shown more clearly than in that of the Nivelle. "The fierce and continued charge of the British was irresistible," recalled one who, wounded in the heather, watched his comrades storm the incredible crags of the Petite Rhune; "onwards they bore nor stopped to breathe, rushing forward through glen, dale and forest. . . . The star of three united nations shone victorious on the summits of the lofty Pyrenees, gilding the tall pines which capped their heads and foreboding downfall to Imperial France."
²
By sundown the British spearheads were

¹
Blackwood's,
Dec, 1946.
"a
Gallant Pack," by Peter Carew. No. 1574, Vol. 260.

²
Blakeney, 320-3; see also Bell, I, 119-25; Granville, II, 471-8; Smith, I, 145-6; Simmons, 321-5; Larpent, II, 155-7; Smith, I, 125-6, 142-54;
MS. Diary of Robert Blake,
5-6; Schaumann, 390-4; William Napier, I, 132; Kincaid, 272.

many miles behind the French lines, pressing after the fugitives with a running fire till nature could do no more, when the tired men stretched their limbs on the sod, pulled out their captured rations of cheese and onions and went to roost.

Once the chain of Soult's line was broken, no link could hold. Units in almost impregnable fortresses, finding themselves surrounded, surrendered without a shot; others, fearful for their flanks, fell back leaving their comrades isolated. The morale of France's southern army could no longer withstand the attack of the British infantry.
¹
Only the shortness of the November day saved Soult's right between the hills and the sea. It fled from encirclement towards Bayonne, leaving the port of St.-Jean-de-Luz, over fifty guns and 1200 prisoners in the attackers' hands. The latter's casualties, which Soult had expected to number 25,000, were less than half the defenders'.

The tidings of these victories set the hearts of the British people rocketing. From the Prince Regent, who hugged the Speaker when he announced the news of Sorauren, to the smock-frocks around the ale-house fire, they were kept that winter in a state of continuous excitement. The harvest had been good, the opening of the European ports had revived trade, and the hopes of twenty years of endurance were being suddenly fulfilled. The guns sounded for triumphs in France, Germany and Italy; day after day the clanging bells of the mails, as they dashed by in a bower of laurel branches, set country folk along the highways cheering. Oxen were roasted in provincial market-squares, transparencies lit on Georgian balconies, and crackers and bonfires in London streets amid the roar of mobs: "the tumult and train-oil and transparent flippancies," wrote the scornful Byron, "and all the noise and nonsense of victory!" On October 18th a chaise-and-four with a flag waving from the window dashed on to the Horse Guards Parade with the news of Wellington's crossing of the Bidassoa; a fortnight later the Tower salvoes proclaimed the victory of Leipzig.
²
Boney, men told one another, was back on the Rhine; his routed army, dripping with typhus, was crawling like a dying beast from the Europe it had ravaged. On November 4th the Allied Sovereigns entered Frankfurt; a few days