Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (49 page)
It was with an army still in transition from old to new that Wellesley set sail from Cork in the broiling July of 1808. The men in the crowded transports were in the highest spirits; in the prevailing national mood they almost felt they were going to a crusade. Spain, wrote an officer, was about to import a whole family of Don Quixotes. A private described with pride how on that July 12th the armada's sails were given to the wind and with what majesty, amid the cheers of all, it sailed out of the Cove of Cork for the hostile shores.
Wellesley went ahead in a fast frigate to consult with the Junta of Galicia. His orders were to make the utmost possible diversion for Spain in Portugal and, if possible, to expel Junot. Being a methodical man who believed in doing everything possible to achieve success, he spent the voyage learning Spanish from a prayer-book. But when on July 20th he landed at Corunna he found that more than a knowledge of the language was needed to discover what was happening in Spain. He was welcomed with many stately, old-world ceremonies and by applauding mobs. But no one seemed to have any idea of what was going on in the rest of the Peninsula or
1
" Hang your black face," said the sergeant-major, " the Rifles can't be too dark; you're a strong rascal and if you mean it, we'll take you to the doctor to-morrow and make a giniril of you the next day." Harris,
164.
2
Enquiry into the Present State of the Military Forces
of
the British Empire.
even in Galicia itself.
1
All that Wellesley could gather for certain was that the northern Spanish armies had been defeated a
week before by Marshal Bessiere
s at Medina del Rioseco, two hundred miles to the south-east. Even this information was hard to come by: at first the Spaniards said that their General, Blake, had gained a great victory but had failed to follow it up, then that he had gained a victory but had thought it better to withdraw, and finally that he had suffered a slight check. " It is impossible," wrote Wellesley, " to learn the truth."
Though things were plainly not going well for the Spaniards, their chief anxiety seemed to be to keep their allies' troops away from their soil. They particularly wanted Wellesley to employ his army in Portugal, not Spain. Money and arms, they explained, they could not have enough of, but fighting men were needless, for they had plenty of their own.
2
Remembering the behaviour of their French allies and all they had suffered at British hands in the past, their attitude was perhaps natural. But it bore no relation to their military position. Dupont, advancing southwards with 15,000 troops, had just taken Cordoba, while Moncey had routed Cuesta at Cabezon and occupied Valladollid. On the very day that
Wellesley
landed at Corunna, Joseph Bonaparte was entering Madrid with 4000 Italian troops to take possession of his kingdom. Only at Saragossa, where the townsmen had barricaded the streets against a French army, and in the villages behind the advancing columns, where sullen peasants hid their food and abandoned the harvest to cheat the invader, did Spanish deeds match Spanish words.
Yet while Wellesley, after two fruitless days, was taking ship for Portugal, and Napoleon was travelling triumphantly from Bayonne to St. Cloud, the tide in the Peninsula again turned. To all appearance the resistance of Spain was ridiculous: an affair of high-sounding, empty eloquence, of fabulous armies with Don Quixote in the saddle and Sancho Panza in .the ranks, of remote provincial Juntas fantastically ignorant of one or other's activities and vainly boasting of imaginary victories,
3
of peasant mobs masquerading as regiments, and monks and romantic professors brandishing the rusty arms of '
1
Major-General Leith, who visited Santande
r on a special mission, found the same ignorance; the authorities did not even know whether there was a Spanish force between the town and the nearest French army. Leith Hay, I,
6.
2
Unknown to Wellesley, Spencer was having the same difficulty with the local Junta at Cadiz. He had been fobbed off with excuses and sent off to a lonely spot on the Portuguese border.
"I
do not believe," wrote one observer, "there is a point at which they wish an
English soldier to land." Plume
r Ward,
188.
3
"Let Spain be the grave of Napoleon," ran one proclamation, "let his mad ambition · find here an ignominous grave! Let the burial place of the mules and asses at Madrid receive into its bosom the putrified bones of the worthless Muratl" An. Reg.,
1808, 257
the Middle Ages while Napoleon's legions tramped unopposed along the highways. Yet beneath the unreality of the Spanish surface burnt the fires of Spanish pride and patriotism. So long as the hated enemy was far away—in the next province or even, in that land of natural barriers, in the next mountain valley—the average Spaniard persisted in his age
-
long complacency and his habit of putting off till to-morrow what should be done to-day. But once the tramp of alien feet sounded down his own rocky streets, he went out to kill. As Dupont's blue-coats pressed on beyond pillaged Cordoba, a grimly angry countryside rose in their rear. Unnerved by the stark hostility of the land and people, Dupont fell back towards the Sierra Morena. As he did so the patriots and the ragged army of Andalusia closed in on him. On July 23rd, faced by famine, he lost his head and capitulated to General Castanos. Such a thing had not happened to a French army for nearly a decade.
On the following day Wellesley landed at Oporto. Here he found the Bishop in control, an insurgent Junta, a few hundred ragged Portuguese regulars and a crowd of peasants with pitchforks. It appeared that the whole country north of the Tagus, enraged by robbery, sacrilege and oppression, was in insurrection, and that the French were confined to the immediate neighbourhood of Lisbon and a few fortresses east of the river. Ordering his transports to Mondego Bay, where a party of British marines had secured the fort of Figueira, Wellesley went ahead to consult with Sir Charles Cotton, the Admiral blockading the Tagus. From him he learnt that all the beaches near the capital were strongly held and that any landing on that exposed coast would be liable to interruption from westerly gales. He therefore decided to put his troops ashore in Mondego Bay —the nearest point at which he could secure an uncontested landing —and march the-intervening eighty miles to Lisbon. Summoning Spencer from the mouth of the Guadiana, he returned to his transports in Mondego Bay. Here he met with significant news.
For awaiting him were official dispatches from England and a private letter from Castlereagh. It appeared that he had been superseded. Learning that Sir John Moore's army, denied a landing by the mad King of Sweden, was returning home,
1
the Government had decided to send it on to Portgual. But resolved to prevent the command in the Peninsula devolving on Moore, who had made himself
1
Though threatened by attack from Russia in the east and France and Denmark in the south, Gustavus Adolphus had rejected all defensive proposals and insisted on an offensive campaign to recover Finland and Pomerania. When Moore refused to commit his army to certain destruction, he was arrested, and had to escape to his ships disguised as a peasant. See George Napier,
41.
unpopular in Downing Street by his criticisms of Ministerial strategy, it had hastily posted to the expedition two exceedingly senior officers. Then, on his arrival in London, it had allowed Moore to learn in a chance conversation with the War Secretary that he was to be employed only in a subordinate capacity. As was expected, Moore flared up and told Castlereagh what he thought of such treatment. But as, contrary to Ministerial hopes, his sense of duty stopped him from resigning, Wellesley, at the outset of his campaign, was presented with the prospect of being joined not only by 16,000 additional troops but by three superior officers. One of them, Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Dalrymple, the Governor of Gibraltar, had not seen active service since 179
4. His second-in-command, Lieute
nant-General Sir Harry Burrard, was a Guardsman celebrated for his good nature, excellent table and unassuming intellect.
1
In a
private note to Wellesley Castle
reagh explained the situation as best he could. Consistent with the employment of the necessary amount of force, he had made every effort to keep in his hands the greatest number of men and for the longest time the circumstances would permit. "I shall rejoice if it shall have befallen to your lot to place the Tagus in our hands; if not, I have no fear that you will find many opportunities of doing yourself honour and your country service."
2
Wellesley kept his temper and replied that he would do nothing rash to secure the credit of success before his seniors arrived. He then gave orders for the troops to disembark.
For the next five days the beaches of Mondego Bay presented an unusual spectacle. Directed by naval signals from the headlands, relays of flat-bottomed boats put off from the transports, the redcoats sitting tightly wedged on the bucking thwarts with their packs and muskets between their legs. As each boat was rowed towards the rocky, sandy shore, huge breakers, sweeping out of the Atlantic, tossed it high into the air and flung it into a sheet of foam. Here gangs of naked sailors with ropes were waiting to haul it ashore before the next wave should dash it to pieces. When the boats grounded, the sailors seized the soldiers and carried them dry-shod to land. Other boats discharged unsaddled horses who, dazed after their confinement, struggled wildly ashore and then galloped up and down; snorting, neighing and kicking at their pursuers. Every now and then the waves overturned a boat and, despite the efforts of the sailors, later threw up a cluster of stiff, red-coated bodies.
1
"A
very good sort of man, and if he was unfit to command an army, they who gave him the command ought to have known that, for I am sure every one else knew it." Mrs. Jackson to George Jackson. Jackson,
n,
379.
2 Castle
reagh, VI,
385.
Along the beaches tumult raged, incongruous in that wild and unfrequented place; of naval and military officers bellowing orders above the thunder of the surf, dazed and sea-sick soldiers dressing and drying themselves, working-parties reassembling and limbering-up guns; of mountains of ships' biscuits, meat barrels and trusses of hay being loaded into primitive-looking Portuguese bullock-carts while sweating German commissaries entered the details on their writing-tablets; of detachments marching off under sergeants with rattling kettles and cans to bivouac among the rocks. Ail this was enacted under a burning sun, with the heat striking up from the sand and every one from generals downwards walking about bare-footed and occasionally paddling in the surf to cool themselves. In the afternoon peasants with dark faces and shaggy hair appeared peddling melons, grapes and peaches which were eagerly bought up by the parched troops, and, as darkness fell, camp fires were lit in the dunes. Later many of the men went down to bathe in the moonlight, while the lights of the transports encircled the bay with an arc of tossing stars.
1
On the fifth day, whe
n the disembarkation of Wellesle
y's original 9000 troops was complete, Spencer arrived with 4000 more from the south. It was not till the morning of August
8th
that the last man was ashore and the army ready to advance. During all that week the general, with memories of moving troops through Indian jungles, worked furiously, reducing his chaotic transport service and commissariat to order. The men at the head of the latter—nominees of the Treasury—were incapable, he told Castlereagh, of managing anything outside a counting-house. For this reason he gave up the idea of using the Portuguese levies; there was no point in straining the commissariat further to supply troops whose only military accomplishment appeared to be picking the lice off their breeches.
2
Their discipline was so bad that their rulers were even more afraid of them than of the French.
On one of his first nights ashore Wellesley was kept awake by the lamentations of the monks of Batalha who were convinced that his intrusion into Napoleon's Europe would be terribly avenged. Don Fernadim Freire de Andrada, the Portuguese Commander-in-Chief, seemed equally sure of it.
3
Yet, though he could hope for
little from his allies, Wellesle
y was confident that if he struck quickly enough he could destroy the French before they could unite their forces. The highest estimate of their strength—and he believed it exaggerated— was 20,000, and with this they had to hold down a capital city, meet
1
'Schaumann,
1-8;
Harris,
19;
Fortescue, VI,
203;
Leslie,
31-2.
2
Schaumann,
26.
3
Stanhope,
Conversations,
3, 40.