The peninsular war, p.10
The Peninsular War, page 10
Once you have made yourself master of Santander by brute force, you should impose a contribution of 2,000,000 [francs], sequester the property of the bishop, disarm the town and the countryside, and make some severe examples. And with Santander and Zaragoza taken, you should march on León and Asturias … Retrograde movements … must never be adopted in people’s wars.27
Napoleon’s ardour was strengthened by the belief that the new régimes that he was implanting from one side of Europe to the other were implanted all the better for a judicious ‘whiff of grapeshot’. As early as 16 April, indeed, he had noted in a memorandum on northern Spain, ‘Marshal Bessières … should fall on any … village that rises in revolt or mistreats any soldier or courier … In a campaign one terrible example … is sufficient.’28 But in Spain in particular added zest was lent to the enterprise by the emperor’s conviction, whether real or affected, that revolt was the work of the Church; there is, for example, a certain glee in the words that he addressed to a delegation of clerics shortly after he came to Spain in November 1808. Thus: ‘Messieurs les moines, if you choose to meddle in our military affairs, I promise you that I shall cut off your ears.’29
Within a matter of days of the outbreak of revolt, then, in Old Castile, New Castile, Aragón and Catalonia alike, French columns were striking out for the nearest insurgent forces. In the event it was the Spaniards who fired the first shots, however. On 5 June two squadrons of French dragoons under a Captain Bouzat were attacked by insurgents at the northern entrance to the pass of Despeñaperros in the Sierra Morena and forced to retreat to the nearby town of Almuradiel, leaving behind a number of dead. Spain was at war.
3
Bailén
THE SUMMER CAMPAIGN OF 1808
Apart from the groans of the wounded, the battlefield had all but fallen silent in the sun of the midsummer afternoon. Along the high road that stretched towards the Spanish positions lay scattered the bodies of the last French reserves – a battalion of sailors* who had made a final heroic effort to break through – whilst what was left of the rest of the army huddled in the scanty shade provided by the olive groves and ilex trees that covered the slopes of the ridge they had breasted early that morning. Utterly exhausted and tortured by heat and thirst, the troops could fight no more. Wounded in the hip while leading forward the last charge, the French commander suddenly heard the crackle of musketry from the direction of the bridge over which his troops had marched on the way to the battlefield, and knew that the game was up. Calling a trusted aide-de-camp, he therefore dispatched him in the direction of the Spanish lines with instructions to negotiate a truce.
Four days later nearly 18,000 prisoners were marching into captivity in what became known as the capitulation of Bailén. Spain was overjoyed, Britain exultant, France dismayed, and Napoleon outraged. It was the greatest defeat the Napoleonic empire had ever suffered, and, what is more, one inflicted by an opponent for whom the emperor had affected nothing but scorn. What, then, had gone wrong?
To answer this question, we must first examine the role played by the emperor himself. At the heart of the problem was his persistent refusal to accept the possibility that he might face serious opposition in Spain. Popular risings were expected, certainly – indeed, they were almost to be welcomed – but it had throughout remained Napoleon’s conviction that the Spanish army would either remain neutral or actively put itself at his orders. To this end, Murat had been instructed to do everything that he could to win over its allegiance: ‘Take command of the Spanish troops: take some good sergeants and make them sub-lieutenants; have them fraternise with the French forces … I suppose that the French ordinances and rates of pay are more generous than their Spanish counterparts: announce that from 1 June the Spanish soldiers will be treated in the same manner as the French ones.’1 And as late as 3 June he was writing to Marshal Bessières as if the Spanish were his to command at will: ‘A battalion of either the Spanish or the Walloon Guards ought to be coming under your command; if it does, you can tell Captain General Cuesta that he may take it under his orders, and send it wherever its presence is necessary for the peace of the countryside.’2
As a result of these delusions, the first Army of Spain was remarkably weak in numerical terms – at only 90,000 men, indeed, it was heavily outnumbered by the 114,000 regular troops available to the insurgents, let alone anything else that they might raise – whilst it was also largely composed of second-line forces of a distinctly unimpressive character. Thus, presented with a mass of fresh conscripts by the combination of Tilsit and his decision to call up the conscript ‘classes’ of 1808 and 1809 in advance, Napoleon had decided to use them to form either internal security units intended to hunt down deserters – the so-called ‘legions of reserve’ – or ‘provisional’ regiments of infantry and cavalry that of necessity lacked not only esprit de corps but also the hard kernel of veterans that had allowed the French armies in Germany and Poland to assimilate large numbers of conscripts without difficulty. To hand as they were – the grande armée was still cantoned in Prussia – it was mostly these troops that were sent to Spain, though many of them were hardly better trained than the levies they were to end up fighting. Indeed, many even of the regular units contained large numbers of raw recruits, the French infantry being in the process of a major reorganisation which saw the number of field battalions in each regiment rise from two to four. Augmenting these forces, meanwhile, were a number of foreign units. Of these, some were drawn from the regular armies of the satellite states and were therefore relatively reliable, but over half the men concerned were mercenaries, prisoners of war who had taken up arms under Napoleon rather than face a long spell of imprisonment, deserters on the run from their original employers, or impressed members of the defunct armed forces of such states as Portugal. Such men being notoriously unreliable, their presence hardly suggests that war was regarded as a serious possibility. Much the same is true, if not more so, indeed, with regard to the two battalions of Paris’ municipal guard that also appeared in the French array, the most likely explanation for whose presence is that Napoleon wanted his capital to bathe in the reflected glory of what he assumed would be a mere promenade.
A particularly grim picture of the Army of Spain emerges from the writings of General Foy:
The troops … had neither the consistency nor the vigour which are requisite for high enterprises; the matériel from which they were formed was the refuse of the great armies which remained undiminished in the presence of Europe. The officers were of two kinds, the one torn from the depots where they were waiting to be disbanded or put on half pay … the others very young, just from school, whose inexperience stood in need of being guided by good examples. There were few non-commissioned officers, and few subjects from which they could be made. The cavalry consisted of nothing but young soldiers and young horses. The infantry was not composed of homogeneous elements; one battalion had only four or six companies, while another … had eight or ten. After the legions of reserve and … supplementary regiments had been created, then came ‘marching regiments’, in which were crowded together the forgotten … detachments, the returned deserters and the men from the hospitals. No corporate spirit … vivified these aggregations, formed today to be dissolved tomorrow … Unacquainted with each other, unknown to their officers, whose names, even, they knew not, taken little care of, badly subsisted and irregularly paid, [the soldiers’] existence was fluctuating and precarious, like that of the ephemeral corps of which they formed a part.3
As for the training of most of the men, this was of precisely the standard that might have been expected:
On the fifteenth of March, we held exercises on a plain outside the town [of Valladolid], and General Malher was killed by a ramrod that a soldier had foolishly left in the barrel of his musket. An immediate inspection was carried out to discover the … culprit: eighteen ramrods were missing from the section of the line the shot had been fired from.4
Just as suggestive are the generals that had been sent to Spain. Thus, of the four corps commanders, Dupont, Duhesme and Bessières had no experience of commanding anything larger than a division, whilst Moncey had a reputation for caution. Only the second two were marshals, and both of these owed their promotion to politics rather than martial prowess (the former was a crony of Napoleon’s and the latter a Republican, who only appears to have received his marshal’s baton in consequence of the need to conciliate the supporters of the disgraced General Moreau). All the real stars of the French high command were absent, whilst Murat had, or so he said, fallen sick, and was going home, thereby leaving the French with no other commander-in-chief than the distant figure of Napoleon himself (there was, true, Murat’s deputy, Savary, but he was allowed little independence, and was in any case more a courtier than a front-line soldier).
If all this was unencouraging, the French did at least enjoy a strong position. Whilst the Spaniards were dispersed around the country in half-a-dozen separate masses, the French were grouped around Madrid, Burgos and Barcelona. Realising his advantage, Napoleon therefore decided to attack the insurgents before they had got their forces ready for action. Thus, on the march to secure Seville and Cádiz since as early as 23 May, Dupont was directed to conquer Andalucía with the first of his three infantry divisions, his single cavalry division, the ill-fated marins and a new brigade composed of two regiments of Swiss infantry that had been caught in Madrid. Back in the capital, Moncey was ordered to march on Valencia with one infantry division and one cavalry brigade. Further north, meanwhile, Bessières was to strike at both Zaragoza and Santander simultaneously from his base at Burgos, whilst in Catalonia the isolated Duhesme, who had only 13,000 men, was expected not only to hold down Barcelona and keep open his communications with France, but to send forces to subject Lérida and Tarragona and then go on to join in the attack on Zaragoza and Valencia.*
That such a plan was wildly over-confident is with hindsight obvious, but at first all seemed to go well enough. Given the disposition of the Spanish forces, the first insurgents that were encountered were necessarily for the most part improvised levies rather than regular troops and these proved no match even for the distinctly unimpressive Army of Spain. Thus, on 6 June troops of Bessières’ corps stormed insurgent Logroño and Torquemada, whose only defenders were a few armed civilians, whilst on 7 June it was the turn of Segovia, strengthened though the inhabitants were by the cannons and cadets of the artillery academy situated in the castle. Also on 7 June Dupont defeated a small force of regulars supported by a mass of levies outside Córdoba, which was then sacked without mercy, whilst on 8 June troops bound for Zaragoza took the town of Tudela in the face of an attempt to defend it on the part of the inhabitants and a number of levies sent up from Zaragoza under the command of Palafox’s brother, the Marqués de Lazan. On 12 June Cuesta was defeated at Cabezón when he attempted to defend the approaches to Valladolid, and on 13 and 14 June Palafox was defeated at Mallén and then again at Alagón, where he was lightly wounded. Finally, slightly delayed by the fact that some of the forces involved were recalled so as to assist in the defeat of Cuesta, on 21 June two more French columns stormed the passes of the Cantabrian mountains that led to Santander.
In all these actions events assumed a common pattern. Excited and uncontrollable, the raw levies that formed the bulk of the Spanish forces proved incapable of manoeuvring in the face of the enemy, whilst many of them barely knew how to use their weapons, having sometimes only been issued with muskets the day before they went into action. Happy enough to fire away at the French so long as they remained at a safe distance, the latter had usually no more than to make an offensive move for them to flee in panic, throwing away their arms, accusing their commanders of treason and leaving the few regulars involved to fend for themselves as best they could. Having run away, meanwhile, the levies invariably exposed themselves to the French cavalry, which were unleashed amongst them with terrible effect, sabring them unmercifully and taking hundreds of them prisoner. French casualties, meanwhile, in no case numbered more than a few dozen. Typical enough was the experience of Girón at Alcolea:
After having for some time subjected us to a fairly heavy bombardment … the enemy attacked the bridgehead. The small detachment that had been posted to hold the entrenchment having run out of ammunition, they had to fall back … Though caught at a disadvantage, the battalions of grenadiers and the half-battalion of the [regiment of] Campomayor … detained the enemy for some time, but, as was to be expected from their number and quality alike, they had soon forced the bridge, and … we had to retreat … At the bridge there appeared … neither General Echavarrí, nor any of the other figures who had made such a noise in Córdoba, whilst the battalions of armed civilians who were with us fled at the first cannon shots.5
So far so good, then. Severe punishment had been administered to the insurgents, whilst major towns that had fallen to the French included not just Córdoba and Segovia but also Valladolid and Santander. Yet all was not what it seemed. As early as 6 June, indeed, the French experienced an embarrassing check in Catalonia. Thus, the force of troops mustered by Duhesme to march on Lérida and Zaragoza amounted to a mere 3,200 men, all of them Italian troops drawn from Naples and the Kingdom of Italy. Immediately available to the Spaniards were no more than a desperately understrength regiment of line infantry and a handful of strays from Barcelona. Unlike most other parts of Spain, however, Catalonia had other forces on which it could rely. Thus, in common with Galicia and the Basque provinces, it could count upon the services of an irregular home guard known in this particular instance as the somatén. Organised on a parish basis and controlled by the civil authorities, this could be called out in the event of invasion and had gained much experience of fighting the French in the course of the invasion of 1794–95. No sooner had the Lérida column set out from Barcelona than a swarm of irregulars began to gather in its path. Commanded by a General Schwartz, the Italians at first made good time along the Barcelona–Lérida highroad, but on 6 June they were attacked at the defile of El Bruch. Convinced that he was under attack by regular troops – the somaténes were hidden amongst trees and rocks and accompanied by two young drummerboys who were later fused into the single figure of the legendary tambor de Bruch – Schwartz decided to retreat, only for his command to become so demoralised that it eventually lost all cohesion and dissolved in a sauve qui peut. Much alarmed, Duhesme then sent word to the troops he had sent southwards to fall back on the capital, and by 11 June his entire force was back in Barcelona.
The travails of the Corps of Observation of the Eastern Pyrenees were not yet over. Duhesme having now resolved to concentrate on securing his communications with the French frontier, which were protected only by a single battalion that had been left to hold the fortress of Figueras, he therefore headed for Gerona, whilst taking advantage of the opportunity to cow the somaténes by sacking many towns and villages along the way. The city, however, was well fortified and possessed of a proper garrison of infantrymen and gunners. Attacked on 20 June, it therefore repulsed two assaults, and forced the invaders to fall back on Barcelona. The capital was found to have been blockaded by the somaténes of the coastal districts, but these were soon driven away. More than that, though, Duhesme could not do. Recognising this, Napoleon sent a fresh division to the frontier under General Reille, but this was able to do no more than keep the highroad open as far as Figueras, the situation for the time being therefore sliding into stalemate.
Nor was Catalonia the only region where the French were baulked. In Aragón the commander of the 6,000-strong French force bearing down on Zaragoza, Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes, had decided to rush the city. At first sight this looked easy enough, for setting aside the miserable perfomance of the Aragonese levies in the Ebro valley, it was protected by no more than its old medieval wall and possessed little in the way of artillery. Indeed, even Palafox did not think it could be held, abandoning the city to its own devices on the pretext of the need to organise a relief force outside the city. What nobody counted on, however, was the populace. Unwilling to join the regular army and in practice not much interested in the war, the latter would nevertheless often put up a fierce fight when it came to the defence of their own homes, for not only were life and hearth at stake, but also powerful notions of community and local pride. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Zaragoza had been particularly radicalised by the events of the motín de Aranjuez, had a certain tradition of anti-French feeling and possessed immense faith in the city’s Virgén del Pilar. Thanks to much braggadocio on the part of Palafox, whose mediocre talents as a general were somewhat counteracted by a genius for propaganda, they were also sure of victory. Stiffened by the usual straggle of regulars, several thousands of the inhabitants therefore lined the walls and prepared to give a good account of themselves.
When the French appeared before the city on 15 June, they were therefore walking into a hornets’ nest. Covered by a few field guns, columns charged the various gates and in several places got inside the walls, but there were many casualties in the process and they were unable to subjugate the defenders, who, ensconced behind walls, on rooftops, or in fortress-like convents, were fighting in conditions that were near perfect. After several hours the attackers were therefore forced to retreat in disorder. They did not go far, setting up camp in the plain to the west of the city, appealing for help to Bessières, and in the night of 23–24 June heavily defeating a rather foolhardy effort on the part of Palafox to drive them away at Epila. However, it was hardly an auspicious start, and one, moreover, that was soon to be repeated a third time.
Beaten off at Zaragoza and Gerona, the French still had troops marching on Valencia. However, they were lucky to reach it at all: not only were Moncey’s troops almost entirely composed of raw conscripts, but the Levante was possessed of a reasonable garrison. In short, there was a good chance that the French might have been defeated en route, but nevertheless Moncey managed to outwit the Spanish commander, a nonentity named the Conde de Cervellón, and reach Valencia by a route that was guarded only by the lightest of forces. Easily brushing these aside, on 26 June Moncey appeared before the city and drove in a substantial force of regulars and levies that was sent out in an attempt to fend him off at San Onofre. However, the Spaniards escaped more or less unscathed, protected by the irrigation ditches, cactus hedges and fruit trees with which the whole area was covered. Moreover, when Moncey tried a storm the next day he found that the defences – a wall even weaker than that of Zaragoza – had been much strengthened, that part of the approaches had been flooded and that the defenders – a mixture of levies and civilian volunteers – were enthusiastic and determined. Once again, everything possible was done, but by nightfall Moncey had lost over a thousand of his eight thousand men, in consequence of which he was left with no option but to retreat.
