Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (91 page)

¹
The her
o of the day was a forty-five
-ye
ar-old Ulsterman, Brigadier-General Rollo Gillespie—" the bravest of the brave "—who led the attack and conducted the pursuit in the throes of a fever, personally capturing two generals and killing a colonel in single combat.—Fortescue, VIII,
625.

victories of the thin red line over one after another of his best generals had given hope to all Europe; in the flashes of its musketry it seemed that the
Grande Arme
e
was not invincible after all.

Napoleon's Empire stretched from the Ems to the Adriatic and from the Baltic to the Ebro. Rome, Barcelona, Hamburg, Co
logne, Geneva, Lubeck, Osnabru
ck, Trieste, Genoa and Ragusa were all French cities. Round this immense territory stood an outer ring of subservient States, controlled by the Emperor's kinsfolk and Marshals: the Kingdoms of Italy, Spain, Naples, Westphalia and Sweden, the Swiss Confederation, the Confederation of the Rhine and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Austria was his ally, Denmark, Bavaria and Saxony his vassals, the Turks were at war with Russia—the only State in the world still able to put a great Continental army into the field against him. Except for Portugal, whose reigning House had had to fly to Brazil, there was not an established Government in Europe which openly adhered to England's cause.

Yet they nearly all sympathised with her and tried in every way open to them short of actual revolt to give expression to their feelings. Napoleon's unifying New Order seemed to ungrateful Europeans only an intolerable and tyrannic interference with their commerce and revenues: a heartless denial of spices, dyes and cottons, tea and tobacco. Confiscated sugar and coffee were burnt by French soldiers while hungry crowds silently watched in the streets; the whole of Europe seemed sunk, in Fichte's phrase, in the bottomless abyss of one arbitrary will. Everybody was needy: every one lived in fear. Trade was-at a complete standstill, and England represented the sole hope of its revival. A Dutch merchant, questioned about his allegiance, remarked that the Emperor was all but omnipotent, but there was one thing he could not do—make a Dutchman hate an Englishman.

Even in France itself and among Napoleon's own entourage rebellion had begun to lift its head. Talleyrand, ex-Foreign Minister and Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, was in the pay of Russia; Lucien Bonaparte, flying from his brother's despotism, had been captured by a British cruiser on his way to America. In August, 1811, the Secret Police in Paris discovered traces of a treasonable conspiracy to evade the Continental Decrees between the Courts of St. Petersburg and Vienna and the Emperor's brother-in-law and comrade in arms, Murat—now King Joachim of Naples. In Sweden another Marshal, Bernadotte, was turning ingrate for the sake of his adopted country's trade. In the last resort, when Napoleon tried their loyalty too high, such Imperial satraps, it was found, placed their own interests before his.

So did less ambitious men. The year that followed Torres Vedras was one of terrible scarcity in France. While Massena's starving scarecrows trudged eastwards over the Portuguese mountains, their wives and mothers stood in the snow outside empty bakeries.
¹
The peasant's fear of the return of priest and emigre to filch his fields was being slowly banished by the reality of an eternal war which, though still far from the borders of his homeland, threatened to rob him of all he possessed. Despite constantly rising taxes the deficit in the national revenues by the end of 1811 was nearly fifty millions. So acute was the shortage of money that Napoleon was forced to cheat the very dead, cancelling by Imperial Decree the arrears of pay owed to his fallen soldiers.

And the cause of all this trouble was England's refusal to loosen her sea grip or to withdraw from the Peninsula. In his darker hours Napoleon was coming to despair of Spain. If only, he was heard to say, he could get the English out and throw that country back to Ferdinand or the Cortez! It was like an open wound that was slowly draining his strength; if the obdurate islanders persisted, he did not know what he should do.

It was Napoleon's way when thwarted to react with all the violence of his passionate nature. When that failed—and he had thrice tried to drive the English into the sea—he fell back on the other device of his Corsican forbears, guile. In the flush of his last victory over Austria two years before, and again when Perceval's Government seemed about to be extinguished in the early months of 1811, he had offered peace, hinti
ng at a possible evacuation of
Holland and the Hanse Towns in return for the abandonment of Sicily and the Peninsula and an end to the blockade. But, having been cheated by him before, his foes treated his overtures with contempt.

In the face of such maddening obstinacy Napoleon resorted to a passionate unrealism. He sent repeated orders to his Marshals for some grand sweeping advance that should clear the Peninsula, based always on information months out of date or on facts and figures that only existed in his own imagination. When they failed to carry these out, he turned on them furiously as he had turned in happier days on his admirals. At other times he issued grandiloquent proclamations assuring the world that England's end was near: that he had drained her of men and money and that her inglorious campaign in the Peninsula had bared for the final blow which, terminating a Second Punic War, should free Europe and Asia. In the autumn of 1811 he busied himself with a new invasion

¹
Alsop,
13-15.

attempt, ordering an expenditure of two million francs on his neglected flotilla and concentrating 80,000 men at Boulogne, though they had as little chance of crossing the Channel as Wellington had of descending on the Danube. It was partly a despairing hope that such preparations might bluff the British Government into withdrawing from Spain; partly the sheer escapism of a mind that was losing its grip on reality. The Emperor would allow no shadow of doubt to be cast on these chimeras, expending on them the same energy and industry that he had formerly given to the planning of his victories. Having long been accustomed to astonish and deceive mankind, Napoleon, as Wellington said, had come at last to deceive himself.
¹

As he contended with the advancing tide, the Emperor fell once more into the old fault which had vitiated his grandest achievements —overweening impatience. He would not withdraw before the flood, biding his time, but would go out at once and overwhelm it. To every sign of rebellion among his European underlings he responded with uncontrollable rage. On August nth, 1811, he broke out in one of his famous tirades against the Russian Ambassador. War he shouted, was bound to follow the Czar's repeated defiance; he would march to Moscow with half a million men and two thousand cannon; he would enforce the independence of the Occident. Yet, as it was plainly too late for an army which lived on its conquests to invade Muscovy in the winter, till the suns of 1812 melted the snows and dried the roads Napoleon had to be content with preparing for the great enterprise. Accordingly in September he cracked his whip at Prussia, ordering her timid King to stop the evasions by which she was trying to build up a short-service conscript army. Two months later he sent her an ultimatum, threatening to reoccupy Berlin unless she agreed to march by his side against Russia. At the New Year he sent Davout into Swedish Pomerania to strengthen his hold on the Baltic and punish the renegade Bernadotte for his refusal to keep Sweden's ports closed.

Yet Napoleon was back where he had been before Tilsit; where, in fact, he had been ever since Nelson's victory at the Nile thirteen years before had turned the Mediterranean into a British lake. He could not break out of the cage which British naval power to west and south and Muscovite space to east and north had made of Europe. He had sought a way by the pretended truce of Amiens, by Malta and Sicily, by attempted invasion of England, by Poland and Tilsit and, during the past three years, by Spain. And now in despair, regardless of the bloody lessons of Eylau and the sinister

¹
G. R. Gleig,
Personal Reminiscences
of
Wellington,
388
.

warnings of history, he was planning to strike eastwards once more. England's dogged enmity had left him no other road to his destiny but across the wastes of Russia.

A conqueror, like a cannon-ball, Wellington observed, must go on; if he rebounds his career is over. Before the end of 1811 Napoleon had issued his orders for the mobilisation of the Grand Army against Russia. He called up another 120,000 conscripts and recalled forty of his best battalions from Spain, filling their places with raw drafts from France. Refusing to draw in his horns—a thing he now seemed incapable of doing—he left the Peninsula to look after itself while he directed his forces elsewhere. He did not abandon it: he merely ignored it.

He did not even withdraw from Andalusia but, to Wellington's delight, left Joseph and Soult to persist in their fatal blunder in the south. So obstinate was Napoleon's refusal to consider the Anglo-Portuguese army as a serious menace that he ordered a concentration on the far coast of Spain. The capture of Tarragona in the summer of 1811, and of Sagunto in October opened—or seemed to open—a way not only to Valencia, where Blake, supported by British cruisers, was holding out with 30,000 troops, but to the complete elimination of organised Spanish resistance in the east of the Peninsula. Accordingly while the infatuated Emperor prepared himself to march into the heart of Russia with the greatest army the world had ever seen, he made Marmont detach a third of his force to strengthen Suchet in front of Valencia.

By this incredible act of folly Napoleon temporarily reduced the Army of Portugal to 30,000 men. Relying on British inability to move during the winter and on an utterly groundless belief that Wellington had 20,000 sick and—in the teeth of all evidence—that his Portuguese troops were worthless, the Emperor unbolted the door into northern Spain at the very moment when his greater plans depended on keeping it barred. It was the chance for which his adversary had waited so long.

Ever since the summer Wellington had been secretly preparing for' an assault on Ciudad Rodrigo. Two reasons had caused him to concentrate against the northern fortress in preference to the southern. The hill country round it, being healthier than the Guadiana valley, was more suitable for a spell of indefinite waiting, while, by leaving Badajoz alone, he avoided the risk of drawing Soult from his unprofitable ventures in the south—the sham siege of Cadiz, the pursuit of Ballasteros' phantom army over the Ronda hills, and the occupation of Andalusia. When Rodrigo had fallen and the entire Anglo-Portuguese army could be moved against Badajoz, it would be time enough to distract the Duke of Dalmatia from the honey-pot into which he had crammed his head.

So after El Bodon Wellington had cantoned Ins men in the hill villages between Guarda and the Agueda which they regarded as their natural element. "Garnerin's balloon," wrote one of them, "was never more seated in the clouds than we are at this moment."
¹
Here, watching every movement of the French like a cat its prey, he completed his preparations during the final months of 1811. Sanchez's guerrillas and Wallace's Connaught Rangers closed in unostentatiously on Rodrigo, filching more than two hundred cattle as they grazed on the glacis and, when General Renaud, the Governor, tried to recover them, capturing him too. The roads
were put in order, Dickson's sie
ge-guns were dragged from the Lower Douro over the mountains to Almeida, a new kind of bullock-cart, with iron axle-trees and brass boxes, was manufactured in hundreds, an
d mules were assembled in the u
nprecedented proportion of one for every six infantrymen and two for every four cavalrymen.
²
Meanwhile in their scattered cantonments among the clouds the regiments were busy making fascines and gabions. All this was done with such elaborate devices to deceive that scarcely any one, even in his own army, was aware of Wellington's intentions. The storming apparatus was spoken of as a sham preparation for keeping the enemy on the qui vive.
³
To those learned in such matters it scarcely seemed likely that their chief would dare to assail —at such a forbidding season—a powerful fortress in the presence of a field army which only a few weeks before he had been unable to contain.

But Wellington was no longer outnumbered. The Guadiana fevers of the summer had run their course, his hospitals were almost empty, and reinforcements, including for the first time large numbers of cavalry, had been flowing into Lisbon throughout the autumn. There were now 38,000 British and 22,000 Portuguese facing Marmont's depleted army in the north. In their bones the men knew that something was going to happen. Despite the rain, the cold, the miserable, dirty villages and wolf-haunted mountains among which their lot was cast, they were in magnificent health and spirits. Their very privations had become a matter of pride to them. "Ours," wrote Johnny Kincaid, "was an
esprit de corps
—a buoyancy of feeling animating all which nothing could quell. We were alike ready for the field or for frolic, and when not engaged in

¹
Gomm,
239.
See also Grattan,
108.
²
Fortcscue, VIII,
343-5;
Oman, IV,
584.
'Random Shots,
252;
Tomkinson,
12
;
Donaldson,
218;
Burgoyne, I,
151;
Smith, I,
55;
Napier, Book XVI, ch. iii.