Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (84 page)

All this increased the Tory Government's prestige and lowered the sinking stock of those pessimists who wished to make peace and let Napoleon have his will of Europe. The Opposition leaders, with their expectations that Wellington w
^r
as about to be flung into the sea and their explanations that Massena's withdrawal was only a ruse, had been made to look uncommonly foolish. "How happy his retreat must make Lord Grenville," wrote Southey on the day before Sabugal. The Whig argument that, because Bonaparte had conquered Europe, he must conquer the Peninsula had been given the lie: "a child," wrote a triumphant Tory, "must see the cowardice and error." They had not been so easy to see a few months before.

One sign of the Government's growing strength was the return of the Duke of York to the Horse Guards. On May 25th he resumed his old office as Commander-in-Chief, an Opposition motion.against his reinstatement being defeated by 296 votes to
47.
The Army was delighted to be freed from what Charles Napier dubbed the offensive oppression of Sir David Dundas; during the next few weeks "Old Pivot's going to pot!" was the toast of many a Mess both in England and the Peninsula. The change was welcome, too, to Wellington, whose attempts to adapt the time-honoured administration of his army to the necessities of warfare had been consistently thwarted by the rigid old Scots martinet. On the eve of Massena's advance

1
"Saturday.—Dispatches from Lord Wellington. Park and Tower guns firing—a complete flight
...
a great number of the enemy taken and destroyed, very many guns spiked and left behind, ammunition blown up, villages burnt, roads covered with dead men and horses, hot pursuit."—
Paget Brothers,
148, 159.

²
Croker, I,
32;
Scott, II,
480;
Gomm,
224;
Granville, II,
362;
Simmons,
183.

he had been driven to complain th
at, though directing almost the
largest British army that had taken
the field for a hundred years,
he had not the power of making eve
n a corporal. He was constantly
distracted by the tyrannical stupidit
y and lack of elasticity of the
bureaucratic mind at home. No man was ever a greater practical

administrator than Wellington;
none ever more conscious of the
necessity of meticulous attention
to every minute detail: to what
he described as tracing a biscuit f
rom Lisbon into the man's mouth
on the frontier and to rememberin
g that "a soldier with a musket
cannot fight without ammunition and that in two hours he can
expend all he can carry." But he was
therefore all the more critical
of the kind of administratio
n—so dear to little minds—which
obscured clear and simple organisation by a mass of needless paper.

"My Lord," he wrote to the Secretary of State, "if I attem
pted to
answer the mass of futile corresponde
nce that surrounds me, I should
be debarred from all serious busines
s of campaigning. . . . So long
as I retain an independent position,
I shall see no officer under my
command is debarred by attending to the fu
tile drivelling of mere
quill-driving from attending to his
first duty, which is and always
has been so to train the private
men under his command that they
may without question beat any force
opposed to them in the field."
····
«

The victorious spring of 1811 brought Wellington strategic as well as administrative problems. He had liberated Portugal, but in doing so had immensely increased his own difficulties of supply. His army was now operating two hundred miles from the sea and everything it needed—food, ammunition, equipment and replacements—had to be brought up by mule and bullock-cart over the mountains.. Since its dual devastation, first by his own orders and then by the French, there was nothing to be got from the country— a wilderness in which vultures and foxes now lived their lives almost undisturbed. Though six French armies of comparable size were operating in the Peninsula, the allied force numbered only 40,000 British and 32,000 Portuguese, of whom fifteen per cent were normally on the sick list. Nothing could be looked for in the open field from the Spaniards—" that extraordinary and perverse people," as Wellington called them. His was the only army in the Peninsula capable of withstanding the French in pitched battle.

But though the strategic initiative theoretically remained Napoleon's, Wellington intended to keep the tactical initiative he had won. It still lay in Ins mighty adversary's power to return to Spain in person or to reinforce his troops on the Portuguese frontier with one or more of the armies oper
ating against the guerrillas of
the north, east, south and interior. But the British Commander-in-Chief knew that, if he did so, two things must happen. First, that those armies, by concentrating in a desert, would be faced with starvation, while his own force, supplied from the sea, would be able to exploit the defensive strength of the country until they were compelled to disperse. Second, that the foes they had left behind, both in Europe and Spain, would take advantage of their absence to raise the standard of liberation, harry their communications and attack their rear. From the enigmatic Czar in his palace on the Neva to the dispossessed peasant in his hiding-hole in the Asturian rocks, Wellington's lonely and outnumbered army had secret sympathisers and allies in every
corner of Europe. "I am glad to
hear such good accounts of affairs in the North," he wrote that spring of a rumoured quarrel between Napoleon and Alexander; " God send that they may prove true, and that we may overthrow this disgusting tyranny. Of this I am very certain that, whether true or not at present, something of the kind must occur before long."
¹

For by continuing to resist, the Anglo-Portuguese army and the Spanish guerrillas between them had made the French fight in a land where they could not maintain themselves. Inch by inch, they were draining Napoleon's man-power and money. Sooner or later they would force him to draw on the resources of Fr
ance itself; when that happened
Wellington wrote, the war could not last* long. England must therefore be patient and persist, for her own sake and that of the world. The price, however great, was well worth paying.

In the meantime his policy remained what it had always been: to avoid needless risks and husband every man and weapon until they could be used offensively. "If we adhere strictly to our objects," he wrote, " and carry on our operations in conformity to directions and plans laid down, we shall preserve our superiority over the French, particularly if they should be involved in disputes in the north of Europe."
²
Portugal was still to be the coping stone of his strategy; nothing was to be based on Spain and her unpredictable leaders. The army must rely on the Tagus, the Mondego and the Douro for everything it needed. Only thus could it maintain itself in a barren and chaotic Peninsula or be able to strike, when the hour was ripe, across the plains of Leon at the French life-line froni Madrid to Bayonne.

Yet so long as Almeida and the Spanish frontier-fortresses of

¹
To Liverpool,
23rd
May,
1811.
Gurwood.
²
To Charles Stuart,
21st*
April,
1811.
Gurwood.

Cuidad Rodrigo and Badajoz were in the enemy's hands, Wellington's base for the future was insecure. Without them he could not advance into Spain, as he had done in 1809 and his predecessor had done in 1808. With the French in Badajoz dominating the Guadiana a
nd the southern road into Alemte
jo, he could not strike at their northern communications without exposing his own in the south. The temporary loss of Cuidad Rodrigo and Almeida had been allowed for in his original plan. He had sacrificed them to draw the French into his trap. He had also planned their early recapture—a feat which, in Massena's exhausted state at the end of his big retreat, would have been well within the power of a British-Portuguese army of nearly 60,000 men.

But the unexpected surrender of the great southern fortress at the moment when his projects were coming to fruition had thrown out Wellington's calculations. "It is useless now," he wrote sadly, " to speculate upon the consequences which would have resulted from a more determined and protracted resistance at Badajoz." Because of its loss he had had to divide his army and send
22
,000 troops, including two British divisions and a brigade of cavalry, to Estremadura. This left him, even after reinforcements had come up from Lisbon, with only 38,000 in the north—a force insufficient to reduce Ciudad Rodrigo before 'Massena could reinforce and re-equip his army.

. The only remedy was to recapture Badajoz before its fortifications could be repaired. Yet so long as Massena held Almeida—the key to northern Portugal—Wellington could neither reinforce his southern army for this purpose nor lead it in person. A hundred and forty miles of villainous, winding mountain-track separated Badajoz from his headquarters on the Coa, and none of his lieutenants in Portugal were fit to direct major operations. Rowland Hill, Cotton, Leith and Craufurd were all on sick leave in England, Graham was at Cadiz. Sir Brent Spencer, the senior divisional commander in the north, lacked nerve in any independent situation and could not be left alone for more than a few days. Beresford, who in Hill's absence had been appointed to the southern army, was a fine administrator and trainer of men but had had comparatively little expe
rience in the field and was only
a mediocre tactician. And the situation before Badajoz, if it was to be retrieved in time, called for genius.

It did not get it. Be
resford succeeded in recapturing the little fortress of Campo Mayer, taken four days earlier after a gallant stand bv its Portuguese garrison, and forced the 11,000 troops left behind by Soult to retreat hastily
into Spanish Estremadura. In a
skirmish with their rearguard outside the town on March
25th
two hundred men of the
13th
Light Dragoons routed three squadrons of French horse and chased them for seven miles right up to the walls of Badajoz, riding over the enemy's siege-train on the way. Had they been supported by the rest of Beresford's cavalry, sixteen invaluable heavy guns would have fallen into their hands with incalculable consequences to the rest of the campaign. But, as Wellington complained, there was hardly an officer in the Army who knew how to handle two cavalry regiments together. The Dragoons' charge, he pointed out in a stinging, order of the day, was merely the indisciplined stampede of a rabble galloping as fast as their mounts could carry them; he even threatened, if they ever behaved in such a manner again, to take away their horses.
¹

Meanwhile the fortifications of Badajoz were being rapidly restored under the energetic direction of its Governor, General Phillipon. All hope of a speedy
coup
vanished when it was found that the Spaniards, in spite of repeated warnings, had allowed the only regular bridge of boats in the allies' possession to fall into enemy hands. As a result Beresford was unable until April
6th
to cross to the south bank of the Guadiana—the essential preliminary to a siege. By that time the fortress, provisioned for several months, was sufficiently strong to withstand anything short of a full-scale attack by experienced sappers and heavy battering-guns. And Beresford had neither.

Nor had Wellington. The British Army, being designed for colonial and amphibious operations, had never been equipped or trained for the elaborate business of reducing Continental fortresses. It relied for this on its allies. No siege-train had been sent to Portugal, which the Government looked on as a purely defensive theatre of war. The only heavy guns in the country, apart from a few which had been landed from the Fleet to hold the lines of Torres Vedras,
w
ere
the antiquated cannon in the Portuguese fortresses. A
numbe
r of the latter were laboriously brought up during April from Elvas, the great frontier fortress of Alemtejo, fifteen miles away. Meanwhile Beresford followed Mortier's rearguard into southern Estremadura, recapturing Olivenza and advancing along the Andalusian highway as far as Zafra. H
is cavalry even penetrated to Ll
erena, seventy miles north of Seville.

At this point Wellington arrived from the north to study the situation. Calculating that Massena was in no state to resume the offensive for some weeks, he left his headquarters at Villa Fermosa on April
16th
and reached Elvas on the
20th,
wearing out two horses