THE TACTICS OF THE FRENCH AND THEIR ADVERSARIES DURING THE PENINSULAR WAR

An account of the numbers and the organization of an army is of comparatively little interest, unless we understand the principles on which its leaders are accustomed to handle it on the day of battle, and its value as a fighting machine.

Speaking generally, the tactics of the French infantry during the Peninsular War were those which had been developed fifteen years before, during the first struggles of the Revolution. They nearly always attacked with a thick cloud of tirailleurs covering one or two lines of battalions in column. The idea was that the very numerous and powerful skirmishing line would engage the enemy sufficiently to attract all his attention, so that the massed battalions behind arrived at the front of battle almost without sustaining loss. The momentum of the columns ought then to suffice to carry them right through the enemy’s lines, which would already have suffered appreciably from the fire of the tirailleurs. This form of attack had won countless victories over Prussian, Austrian, and Russian; and many cases had been known where a hostile position had been carried by the mere impetus of the French columns, without a shot having been fired save by their skirmishers. But this method, which Wellington called ‘the old French style,’ never succeeded against the English. It had the fatal defect that when the column came up through the tirailleurs and endeavoured to charge, it presented a small front, and only the first two ranks could fire. For the normal French battalion advanced in column of companies, or less frequently of double companies, i.e. with a front of forty or at most of eighty men, and a depth of nine or of eighteen, since the company was always three deep, and there were six companies to a battalion. The rear ranks only served to give the front ranks moral support, and to impress the enemy with a sense of the solidity and inexorable strength of the approaching[p. 115] mass. Sometimes a whole regiment or brigade formed one dense column. Now if the enemy, as was always the case with the British, refused to be impressed, but stood firm in line, held their ground, and blazed into the head of the mass, the attack was certain to fail. For 800 men in the two-deep line, which Wellington loved, could all use their muskets, and thus poured 800 bullets per volley into a French battalion of the same strength, which only could return 160. The nine-deep, or eighteen-deep, column was a target which it was impossible to miss. Hence the front ranks went down in rows and the whole came to a standstill. If, as was often the case, the French battalion tried to deploy in front of the English line, so as to bring more muskets to bear, it seldom or never succeeded in accomplishing the man?uvre, for each company, as it straggled out from the mass, got shot down so quickly that the formation could never be completed. No wonder that Foy in his private journal felt himself constrained to confess that, for a set battle with equal numbers on a limited front, the English infantry was superior. ‘I keep this opinion to myself,’ he adds, ‘and have never divulged it; for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate the enemy, but also despise him[88].’ Foy kept his opinion so closely to himself that he did not put it in his formal history of the Peninsular War: it has only become public property since his journals were published in 1900.

But the fact that with anything like equal numbers the line must beat the column was demonstrated over and over again during the war. It had first been seen at Maida in 1806, but that obscure Calabrian battle was hardly known, even by name, save to those who had been present. It was at Talavera, and still more at Busaco and Albuera, that it became patent to everybody that the attack in battalion column, even if preceded by a vigorous swarm of skirmishers, could never succeed against the English. At the two former fights the French attacked uphill, and laid the blame of their defeat upon the unfavourable ground. But when at Albuera three English brigades drove double their own numbers from the commanding ridge on which Soult had ranged them, simply by the superiority of their musketry fire, there was no longer any possibility of disguising the moral. Yet to the end of the war, down to Waterloo itself, the French stuck to their old formation: at the great battle in 1815, as Wellington tersely[p. 116] said, ‘The French came on once more in the old style, and we beat them in the old style.’

But when Napoleon’s armies were opposed to troops who could not stand firm to meet them in a line formation, they generally succeeded. The Spaniards, in their earlier battles, often tried to resist in a line of deployed battalions, but their morale was not good enough when the attacking column drew close to them, and they generally gave way at the critical moment and let their assailants break through[89]. The same had often been the case with the Austrians and Prussians, who in their earlier wars with Napoleon used the line formation which Frederick the Great had popularized fifty years before. The great king had accustomed his troops to fight in a three- or four-deep line, with a comparatively small provision of skirmishers to cover their front, for it was by the fire of the whole battalion that his troops were intended to win. The masses of tirailleurs which the French sent forward in front of their columns generally succeeded in engaging the Prussian or Austrian line so closely, that the columns behind them came up without much loss, and then broke the line by their mere momentum and moral effect. Hence in their later wars the German powers copied their enemies, and took to using a very thick skirmishing line backed by battalion columns in the French style.

Wellington never found any reason to do so. His method was to conceal his main line as long as possible by a dip in the ground, a hedge, or a wall, or to keep it behind the crest of the position which it was holding. To face the tirailleurs each battalion sent out its light company, and each brigade had assigned to it several detached companies of riflemen: from 1809 onward some of the 60th Rifles and one or two foreign light corps[90] were broken up and distributed round the various divisions for this special purpose. This gave a line of skirmishers strong enough to hold back the tirailleurs for a long time, probably till the supporting columns[p. 117] came up to help them. It was only then that the British skirmishing line gave way and retired behind its main body, leaving the deployed battalions in face of the French column, of which they never failed to give a satisfactory account. The covering screen of light troops often suffered terribly; e.g., at Barossa, Brown’s ‘light battalion’ lost fourteen out of twenty-one officers and more than half its rank and file[91], while holding off the French advance from the line which was forming in its rear. But the combat always went well if the enemy’s skirmishers could be kept back, and his supporting columns forced to come to the front, to engage with the regiments in two-deep formation which were waiting for them.

Charges with the bayonet are often heard of in narratives—especially French narratives—of the Peninsular War. But it was very seldom that the opposing troops actually came into collision with the white weapon. There were occasions, almost invariably in fighting in villages or enclosed ground, on which considerable numbers of men were killed or wounded with the bayonet, but they were but few. It is certain, however, that the 43rd at Vimiero, the 71st and 88th at Fuentes d’O?oro, and the 20th at Roncesvalles, engaged in this fashion[92]; and other cases could be quoted. But as a rule a ‘bayonet charge’ in a French historian merely means the advance of a column up to the enemy’s position without firing: it does not imply actual contact or the crossing of weapons. An English charge on the other hand was practically an advance in line with frequent volleys, or independent file-firing. At Albuera, or Barossa, or Salamanca it was the ball not the bayonet which did the work; the enemy was shot down, or gave way without any hand-to-hand conflict.

French cavalry tactics had by 1808 developed into as definite a system as those of the infantry. Napoleon was fond of massing his horsemen in very large bodies and launching them at the flank, or even at the centre, of the army opposed to him. He would occasionally use as many as 6,000 or 8,000, or (as at Waterloo) even 12,000 men for one of these great strokes. Two or three of his[p. 118] famous battles were won by tremendous cavalry charges—notably Marengo and Dresden, while Eylau was just saved from falling into a disaster by a blow of the same kind. But cavalry must be used at precisely the right moment, must be skilfully led and pushed home without remorse, and even then it may be beaten off by thoroughly cool and unshaken troops. It is only against tired, distracted, or undisciplined battalions that it can count on a reasonable certainty of success. All through the war the Spanish armies supplied the French horsemen with exactly the opportunities that they required: they were always being surprised, or caught in confusion while executing some complicated man?uvre; and as if this was not enough, they were often weak enough in morale to allow themselves to be broken even when they had been allowed time to take their ground and form their squares. The battles of Gamonal (1808), Medellin, Alba de Tormes, and Oca?a (1809), the Gebora, and Saguntum (1811) were good examples of the power of masses of horse skilfully handled over a numerous but ill-disciplined infantry.

On the other hand, against the English the French cavalry hardly ever accomplished anything worthy of note. It is only possible to name two occasions on which they made their mark: the first was at Albuera, where, profiting by an opportune cloud-burst which darkened the face of day, two regiments of lancers came in upon the flank of a British brigade (Colborne’s of the second division), and almost entirely cut it to pieces. The second incident of the kind was at Fuentes d’O?oro, in the same summer, when Montb............