THE FRENCH ABANDON GALICIA
When, upon May 30, 1809, Ney arrived at Lugo, and met Soult in conference, it seemed that, now or never, the time had come when a serious endeavour might be made to subdue the Galician insurgents. The whole force of the 2nd and 6th Corps was concentrated in the narrow triangle between Ferrol, Corunna, and Lugo. The two marshals had still 33,000 men fit for service, after deducting the sick. If they set aside competent garrisons for the three towns that we have just named, they could still show some 25,000 men available for field operations, and with such a force Ney was of the opinion that the insurrection might be beaten down. It was true that the 2nd Corps was in a deplorable condition as regards equipment, but on the other hand Corunna and Ferrol were still full of the stores of arms and ammunition that had been captured when they surrendered. Clothing, no doubt, was lamentably deficient, and Ney could only supply hundreds where Soult asked for thousands of boots and capotes; but he refitted his colleague’s troops with muskets and ammunition, and furnished him with eight mountain-guns—field-pieces the Duke of Dalmatia would not take, though a certain number were offered him; for after his experience of the way that his artillery had delayed him in February and March he refused to accept them. Horses and mules were unattainable—nearly half Soult’s cavalry was dismounted, and he had lost most of his sumpter-beasts between Guimaraens and Montalegre. Nevertheless, the corps, after a week’s rest at Lugo, was once more capable of service. Its weakly men had been left in hospital at Oporto, or had fallen by the way in the dreadful defiles of Ruivaens and Salamonde. All that remained were war-hardened veterans, and Soult, out of his 19,000 men, had no more than 800 sick and wounded.[p. 391] He resolved to disembarrass himself of another hindrance, his dismounted cavalry, and in each regiment made the 3rd and 4th squadrons hand over their chargers to the 1st and 2nd. The 1,100 troopers thus left without mounts were armed with muskets, and formed into a column, to which were added the cadres of certain infantry battalions belonging to the regiments which had suffered most. In these the 3rd, or the 3rd and 4th, battalions turned over their effective rank and file to the others, while the officers and non-commissioned officers were to be sent home to their dép?ts to organize new units. The whole body was placed under General Quesnel, who was directed to cut his way to Astorga by the great high-road: it was hoped that he would come safely through, now that La Romana had withdrawn his army to Southern Galicia. The expedient was a hazardous one; but the column was fortunate: it was forced to fight with a large assembly of peasants at Doncos, half-way between Lugo and Villafranca, but reached its goal with no great loss, though for every mile of the march it was being ‘sniped’ and harassed by the guerrillas.
Soult’s available force, after he had sent his sick into the hospitals of Lugo, and had dismissed Quesnel’s detachment, was about 16,500 or 17,000 sabres and bayonets. Ney had about 15,000 men left. The two marshals were bound, both by the Emperor’s orders and by the mere necessities of the situation, to co-operate with each other. But there was a fundamental divergence between their aims and intentions. Ney had been given charge of Galicia, and he regarded it as his duty to conquer and hold down the province. He refused to look beyond his orders, or to take into consideration the progress of operations in other parts of the Peninsula. Soult, on the other hand, always loved to play his own game, and had no desire to stay in Galicia in order to lighten his colleague’s task. He was disgusted with the land, its mountains, and its insurgents, and was eager to find some excuse for quitting it. He had no difficulty in discovering many excellent reasons for retiring into the plains of Leon. The first was the dilapidated state of his troops: in spite of the resources which Ney had lent, the 2nd Corps still lacked clothing, pay, and transport. Soult had written to King Joseph on May 30 to ask that all these necessaries might be sent forward[p. 392] to Zamora, where he intended to pick them up. A still more plausible plea might be found in the general state of affairs in Northern Spain. The Emperor’s main object was the expulsion of the British army from the Peninsula. But if the 2nd Corps joined the 6th in a long, and probably fruitless, hunt after the evasive La Romana, Wellesley would be left free to march whithersoever he might please. He might base himself on Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo, and make a sudden inroad into Leon and Old Castile, where the small corps of Mortier would certainly prove inadequate to hold him back. Or he might go off to the south, and fall upon Victor in Estremadura, a move which might very probably lead to the loss of Madrid. Soult therefore was of opinion that his duty was to drop down into Leon, and there join with Mortier in making such a demonstration against Portugal as would compel the British army to stand upon the defensive, and to abandon any idea of invading Spain either by the valley of the Douro or that of the Tagus. ‘He could not keep his eye off Portugal,’ as Jourdan and King Joseph, no less than Ney, kept complaining[487]. There cannot be the least doubt that Soult was quite right in turning his main attention in this direction. It was the English army that was the most dangerous enemy; and it was the flanking position of Portugal that rendered the French movements toward the south of Spain hazardous or impracticable.
Nevertheless all the Duke of Dalmatia’s arguments seemed to his colleague mere excuses destined to cover a selfish determination to abandon the 6th Corps, and to shirk the duty of co-operating in the conquest of Galicia. He insisted that Soult must aid him in crushing La Romana before taking any other task in hand. And he had a strong moral claim for pressing his request, because it was from the resources which he had furnished that the 2nd Corps had been re-equipped and rendered capable of renewed service in the field. The marshals wrangled, and their followers copied them, for a fierce feud, leading to a copious exchange of recrimination and many duels, sprang up during the few days that the staffs of the two corps lay together at Lugo[488]. At last Soult yielded, or feigned to yield, to Ney’s[p. 393] instances: he promised to lend his aid for the suppression of the Galician insurrection under certain conditions. A plan for combined action was accordingly drawn up.
According to this scheme Ney was to advance from Corunna to Santiago with the 6th Corps, and was to drive the main body of the insurgents southward in the direction of Vigo and Tuy, following the line of the great coast-road. Soult meanwhile was to operate in the inland, against the enemy’s exposed flank. He was to march from Lugo down the valley of the upper Minho, pushing before him all that stood in his way, with the object of thrusting the enemy on to Orense, and then towards the sea. If all went right, La Romana’s army as well as the insurgents of the coast, would finally be enclosed between the two marshals and the Atlantic cliffs, and, as it was hoped, would be exterminated or forced to surrender. The obviously weak point of the plan was that it did not allow sufficiently for the power which the enemy possessed of escaping, by dispersion, or by taking to the mountains. Even if the details of the two movements had been carried out with perfect accuracy, it is probable that the Galicians would have crept out of some gap,[p. 394] or slipped away between the converging corps, or saved themselves by a headlong retreat into Portugal. The Marshals might have captured Vigo and Orense: it is extremely unlikely that they could have done more, especially as they had to deal with a general like La Romana, who had made up his mind that his duty was to avoid pitched battles, and to preserve his army at all costs. If Cuesta or Blake had been in command the scheme would have been much more feasible; but La Romana was the only Spanish commander then in the field who had resolved never to fight if he could help it.
On June 1 Ney and Soult parted, starting the one upon the road to Corunna, the other upon that which makes for Orense by the valley of the upper Minho. It would seem that neither of them had any great confidence in the success of the plan adopted, and that each was possessed by the strongest doubts as to the loyalty with which his colleague would support him. Soult was on the watch for any good excuse for throwing up the scheme and retiring to Zamora. Ney was determined not to risk himself and his corps overmuch, lest he should find himself left in the lurch by Soult at the critical moment[489].
Meanwhile the Spaniards had been straining every nerve to reorganize the army of Galicia, employing the short time of respite that they had gained in drafting back into the old corps the numerous stragglers who began to return to their colours as the summer drew on, and in raising new battalions of volunteers. La Romana lay in person at Orense with the main body of the original army, which had now risen to a force of about 7,000 properly equipped men, and nearly 3,000 unarmed recruits: he had still only four guns[490]. The ‘Division of the Minho’ was no longer under Carrera and Morillo: they had been superseded by the arrival of the Conde de Noro?a to whom the Central Junta had given over the command. This officer found himself at the[p. 395] head of about 10,000 men, of whom only about 2,500 were regulars, the rest were peasantry new to the career of arms, but so much exhilarated by their late successes at Vigo and the Campo de Estrella, that it was hard to hold them back from taking the offensive[491]. Fortunately Noro?a was gifted not only with tact but with caution: he knew how to keep the horde together without allowing them to get out of hand, and utterly refused to risk them in the open field[492].
On June 5 Ney arrived before Santiago with the main body of the 6th Corps—eighteen battalions, three cavalry regiments and two batteries: he had again left Corunna, Ferrol, and Lugo in the charge of very small garrisons, and was by no means without misgivings as to their fate during his absence. But he thought that his first duty was to concentrate a field force sufficiently large to face and beat the whole army of Galicia, in case La Romana should join Noro?a for a combined attack on the 6th Corps.
On the news of the Marshal’s approach the Spanish general drew back all his forces behind the estuary known as the Octavem (or Oitaben), a broad tidal stretch of water where several small mountain torrents meet at the head of a long bay. Noro?a might have disputed the lines of the Ulla and the Vedra, but neither of these rivers affords such a good defensive position as the Oitaben. Here the hills of the interior come down much nearer to the sea than they do at the mouths of the Ulla and the Vedra, so that there is a much shorter line to defend, between low-water mark and the foot of the inaccessible Sierra de Suido. There was no road inland by which the position could be turned, so that the Galicians had only to guard the six miles of river-bank between the sea and the mountain. There were two bridges to be watched: the more important was that of Sampayo, where the main chaussée to Vigo passes the Oitaben just where it narrows down and ceases to be tidal. The second was that of Caldelas, four miles further inland, where a side-road to the village of Sotomayor crosses the Verdugo, the most northern of the three torrents which unite to form the Oitaben. Noro?a had broken down four arches of the great Sampayo bridge.[p. 396] That of Caldelas he had not destroyed, but had barricaded: he had drawn a double line of trenches on the hillside that dominates it, and placed there a battery containing some of his small provision of artillery—he had but nine field-guns and two mortars taken from the walls of Vigo. Morillo was given charge of this part of the position, Noro?a took post himself at Sampayo. He had neglected no minor precaution that was possible—some gunboats, one of which was manned by English sailors drawn from the two frigates in the bay, patrolled the tidal part of the Oitaben, and flanked the broken bridge. Winter, the senior naval officer present, put his marines on shore: along with sixty stragglers from Moore’s army, who had been liberated by the peasants from French captivity, they garrisoned Vigo, which lies a few miles beyond the Oitaben.
On June 7 Ney reached the front of the position and ascertained that the bridge of Sampayo was broken. His artillery exchanged some objectless salvos with that of Noro?a, while his cavalry rode inland to look for possible points of passage. They could find none save the fortified bridge of Caldelas, and a very difficult ford just above it, commanded, like the bridge, by the Spanish trenches on the hillside. The Marshal was also informed that at the Sampayo itself there was another ford, passable only at low tide for three hours at a time.
These reports were by no means encouraging: the Spanish position was almost impregnable, and there was no way of turning it. Indeed the only road by which the enemy could be taken in flank or rear was that from Orense to Vigo, along the Minho. This Ney could not reach: but supposing that Soult had carried out the plan of operations to which he had assented on June 1, it was just possible that he might appear, sooner or later, on that line, and so dislodge the enemy. However it was equally possible that he might be still far distant, and so Ney resolved to make an attempt to force the passage of the Oitaben. On the morning of June 8 therefore, after a long but fruitless cannonade, one body of infantry endeavoured to pass at the ford opposite the village of Sampayo[493], while another, with some cavalry,[p. 397] attempted to cross the other ford at Caldelas, and to storm its bridge. At both places the Galicians stood their ground, and the heads of the column were exposed to such a furious fire that they suffered heavily and failed to reach the further bank. The Marshal therefore drew them back, and refused to persist in an attack which would only have had a chance of success if the enemy had misbehaved and given way to panic. The French lost several hundred men[494], the Galicians, safe in their trenches, suffered far less.
That evening Ney received news which convinced him that Soult had left him in the lurch, and had no intention of prosecuting his march on Orense, to turn the enemy’s flank. It was reported that the 2nd Corps, after making only two days’ march from Lugo, had stopped short at Monforte de Lemos, and showed no signs of moving forward. Indeed the Duke of Dalmatia had put the regiments into cantonments and was evidently about to make a lengthy halt.
Since the Duke of Elchingen was now convinced that the enemy could not be dislodged from behind the Oitaben without his colleague’s aid, and since that colleague showed no signs of appearing within any reasonable time, the game was up. On the morning of the ninth Ney gave orders for his troops to draw off, and to retire by the road to Santiago and Corunna. He made no secret of his belief that Soult had deliberately betrayed him, and had never intended to keep his promise[495]. Without the aid of the 2nd Corps he had no hopes of being able to suppress the Galician insurrection. But till he should learn precisely what his colleague was doing, he could not make up his mind to abandon the province. He therefore sent off on June 10 an aide-de-camp with a large escort, by the circuitous route via Lugo. This officer bore a dispatch, which explained the situation, reported the check at Sampayo, and demanded[p. 398] that the 2nd Corps should not move any further away, but should return to lend aid to the 6th in its ti............