NAPOLEON’S PURSUIT OF MOORE: SAHAGUN TO ASTORGA
We have many times had occasion in this narrative to wonder at the extreme tardiness with which news reached the Spanish and the English generals. It is now at the inefficiency of Napoleon’s intelligence department that we must express our surprise. Considering that Moore had moved forward from Salamanca as far back as December 12, and had made his existence manifest to the French on that same day by the successful skirmish at Rueda, it is astonishing to find that the Emperor did not grasp the situation for nine days. Under the influence of his pre-conceived idea that the British must be retiring on Lisbon, he was looking for them in every other quarter rather than the banks of the Upper Douro. On the seventeenth he was ordering reconnaissances to be made in the direction of Plasencia[637] in Estremadura (of all places in the world) to get news of Moore, and was still pushing troops towards Talavera on the road to Portugal. The general tendency of all his movements was in this direction, and there can be no doubt that in a few days his great central reserve would have followed in the wake of Lasalle and Lefebvre, and started for Badajoz and Elvas. On the nineteenth he reviewed outside Madrid the troops that were available for instant movement—the Imperial Guard, the corps of Ney, the divisions of Leval and Lapisse—about 40,000 men with 150 guns, all in excellent order, and with fifteen days’ biscuit stored in their wagons[638]. Of the direction they were to take we can have no doubt, when we read in the imperial[p. 540] correspondence orders for naval officers to be hurried up to reorganize the arsenal of Lisbon[639], and a private note to Bessières—the commander-in-chief of the cavalry—bidding him start his spare horses and his personal baggage for Talavera[640].
The Emperor’s obstinate refusal to look in the right direction is very curious when we remember that Moore’s cavalry was sweeping the plains as far as Valladolid from December 12 to 16, and that on the eighteenth Franceschi had abandoned that important city, while Soult had got news of Moore’s being on the move two days earlier. Clearly either there was grave neglect in sending information on the part of the French cavalry generals in Old Castile, or else the Emperor had so convinced himself that the British were somewhere on the road to Lisbon, that he did not read the true meaning of the dispatches from the north. Be this as it may, it is evident that there was a serious failure in the imperial intelligence department, and that a week or more was wasted. Bonaparte ought to have been astir two or three days after Stewart and Paget drove in Franceschi’s screen of vedettes. As a matter of fact it was nine days before any move was made at the French head quarters: yet Rueda is only ninety-five miles from Madrid.
The first definite intelligence as to the English being on the move in Old Castile reached the Emperor on the evening of December 19. Yet it was only on the twenty-first that he really awoke to the full meaning of the reports that reached him from Soult and Franceschi[641]. But when he did at last realize the situation, he acted with a sudden and spasmodic energy which was never surpassed in any of his earlier campaigns. He hurled on to Moore’s track not only the central reserve at Madrid, but troops gathered in from all directions, till he had set at least 80,000 men on the march, to encompass the British corps which had so hardily thrown itself upon his communications. Moore had been perfectly right when he stated his belief that the sight of the redcoats within reach would stir the Emperor up to such wrath, that he would abandon every other enterprise and rush upon them with every available man.
On the evening of the twenty-first the French troops from every[p. 541] camp around Madrid were pouring out towards the Escurial and the two passes over the Guadarrama. The cavalry of Ney’s corps and of the Imperial Guard was in front, then came the masses of their infantry. Lapisse’s division fell in behind: an express was sent to Dessolles, who was guarding the road to Calatayud and Saragossa, to leave only two battalions and a battery behind, and to make forced marches on the Escurial with the rest of his men. Another aide-de-camp rode to set Lahoussaye’s division of dragoons on the move from Avila[642]. Finally messengers rode north to bid Lorges’s dragoons, and all the fractions of Junot’s corps, to place themselves under the orders of Soult. Millet’s belated division of dragoons was to do the same, if it had yet crossed the Ebro.
The Emperor, once more committing the error of arguing from insufficient data, had made up his mind that the English were at Valladolid[643]. He had no news from that place since Franceschi had abandoned it, and chose to assume that Moore, or at any rate some portion of the British army, was there established. Under this hypothesis it would be easy to cut off the raiders from a retreat on Portugal, or even on Galicia, by carrying troops with extreme speed to Tordesillas and Medina de Rio Seco. This comparatively easy task was all that Napoleon aimed at in his first directions. Villacastin, Arevalo, Olmedo, and Medina del Campo are the points to which his orders of December 21 and 22 require that the advancing columns should be pushed.
For the maintenance of Madrid, and the ‘containing’ of the Spanish armies at Cuenca and Almaraz, the Emperor left nothing behind but the corps of Lefebvre, two-thirds of the corps of Victor, and the three cavalry divisions of Lasalle, Milhaud, and Latour-Maubourg—8,000 horse and 28,000 foot in all, with ninety guns[644]. King Joseph was left in nominal command of the whole. Such a force was amply sufficient to hold back the disorganized troops of Galluzzo and Infantado, but not to advance on Seville or on Lisbon. It was impossible that any blow should be dealt to the west or the south, till the Emperor should send back some of the enormous masses of men that he had hurled upon Moore. Thus the English general’s intention was fully carried out: his raid into Old Castile had completely disarranged all Bonaparte’s plans. It gave the Spaniards at least two months in which to rally and recover their spirits, and it drew the field-army of the Emperor into a remote and desolate corner of Spain, so that the main centres of resistance were left unmolested.
[p. 542]
Napoleon had guessed part, but by no means all, of Moore’s design. ‘The man?uvre of the English is very strange,’ he wrote to his brother Joseph; ‘it is proved that they have evacuated Salamanca. Probably they have brought their transports round to Ferrol, because they think that the retreat on Lisbon is no longer safe, as we could push on from Talavera by the left bank of the Tagus and shut the mouth of the river.... Probably they have evacuated Portugal and transferred their base to Ferrol, because it offers advantages for a safe embarkation. But while retreating, they might hope to inflict a check on the corps of Soult, and may not have made up their mind to try it till they had got upon their new line of retreat, and moved to the right bank of the Douro. They may have argued as follows: “If the French commit themselves to a march on Lisbon, we can evacuate on Oporto, and while doing so are still on our line of communications with Ferrol. Or, possibly, they may be expecting fresh reinforcements. But whatever their plan may be, their move will have a great influence on the end of this whole business.”’
The Emperor thought therefore that Moore’s main object had been to change an unsafe base at Lisbon for a safe one in Galicia, and that the demonstration against Soult was incidental and secondary. It does not seem to have struck him that the real design was to[p. 543] lure the central field-army of the French from Madrid, and to postpone the invasion of the south. Many of his apologists and admirers have excused his blindness, by saying that Moore’s plan was so rash and hazardous that no sensible man could have guessed it. But this is a complete mistake: the plan, if properly carried out, was perfectly sound. Sir John knew precisely what he was doing, and was prepared to turn on his heel and go back at full speed, the instant that he saw the least movement on the side of Madrid. It was in no rash spirit that he acted, but rather the reverse: ‘I mean to proceed bridle in hand,’ he said; ‘and if the bubble bursts, we shall have a run for it.’[645] And on this principle he acted: three hours after he got notice that Napoleon was on the march, he started to ‘make a run for it’ to Astorga, and his promptness was such that his main body was never in the slightest danger from the Emperor’s rush on Benavente, fierce and sudden though it was. The disasters of the second part of the retreat were not in the least caused by Napoleon’s intercepting movement, which proved an absolute and complete failure.
But to proceed: Ney’s corps, which led the advance against Moore, crossed the Guadarrama on the night of December 21, and had arrived safely at Villacastin, on the northern side of the passes, on the morning of the twenty-second. As if to contradict the Emperor’s statement—made as he was setting out—that ‘the weather could not be better,’ a dreadful tempest arose that day. When Bonaparte rode up from Chamartin, to place himself at the head of his Guard, which was to cross the mountains on the twenty-second, he found the whole column stopped by a howling blizzard, which swept down the pass with irresistible strength and piled the snow in large drifts at every inconvenient corner of the defile. It is said that several horsemen were flung over precipices by the mere force of the wind. The whole train of cannon and caissons stuck halfway up the ascent, and could neither advance nor retreat. Violently irritated at the long delay, Napoleon turned on every pioneer that could be found to clear away the drifts, set masses of men to trample down the snow into a beaten track, forced the officers and all the cavalry to dismount and lead their horses, and unharnessed half the artillery so as to give double teams to the rest. In this way the Guard, with the Emperor walking on foot in its midst, succeeded at last in crawling through to Villacastin by the night of December 23.[p. 544] A considerable number of men died of cold and fatigue, and the passage had occupied some sixteen hours more than had been calculated by the Emperor. The troops which followed him had less trouble in their passage, the tempest having abated its fury, and the path cleared by the Guard being available for their use.
At the very moment at which Moore was countermanding the advance on Sahagun—about seven o’clock on the evening of the twenty-third—Napoleon was throwing himself on his couch at Villacastin, after a day of fatigue which had tried even his iron frame. For the next week the two armies were contending with their feet and not their arms, in the competition which the French officers called the ‘race to Benavente[646].’ Napoleon was at last beginning to understand that he had not before him the comparatively simple task of cutting the road between Valladolid and Astorga, but the much harder one of intercepting that between Sahagun and Astorga. For the first three days of his march he was still under some hopes of catching the English before they could cross the Esla—and if any of them had been at Valladolid this would certainly have been possible. On December 24 he was at Arevalo: on Christmas Day he reached Tordesillas, where he waited twenty-four hours to allow his infantry to come up with his cavalry. On the twenty-seventh he at last understood—mainly through a letter from Soult—that the English were much further north than he had at first believed. But he was still in high spirits: he did not think it probable that Moore also might have been making forced marches, and having seized Medina de Rio Seco with Ney’s corps, he imagined that he was close on the flank of the retreating enemy. ‘To-day or to-morrow,’ he wrote to his brother Joseph on that morning, ‘it is probable that great events will take place. If the English have not already retreated they are lost: even if they have already moved they shall be pursued to the water’s edge, and not half of them shall re-embark. Put in your newspapers that 36,000 English are surrounded, that I am at Benavente in their rear, while Soult is in their front[647].’ The announcement was duly made in the Madrid Gazette, but the Emperor had been deceived as to the condition of affairs, which never in actual fact resembled the picture that he had drawn for himself[648].
[p. 545]
Sir John had commenced his retreat from Sahagun on the twenty-fourth, with the intention of retiring to Astorga, and of taking up a position on the mountains behind it that might cover Galicia. He did not intend to retire any further unless he were obliged[649]. If Soult should follow him closely, while the Emperor was still two or three marches away, he announced his intention of turning upon the Marshal and offering him battle. He wrote to La Romana asking him to hold the bridge of Mansilla (the most northerly passage over the Esla) as long as might be prudent, and then to retire on the Asturias, leaving the road to Galicia clear for the English army[650].
At noon on the twenty-fourth Moore started off in two columns: Baird’s division marched by the northern road to Valencia de Don Juan, where the Esla is passable by a ford and a ferry: Hope and Fraser took the more southern route by Mayorga and the bridge of Castro Gonzalo. The reserve division under E. Paget, and the two light brigades, remained behind at Sahagun for twenty-four hours to cover the retreat. The five cavalry regiments were ordered to press in closely upon Soult, and to keep him as long as possible in doubt as to whether he was not himself about to be attacked.
This demonstration seems to have served its purpose, for the Marshal made no move either on the twenty-fourth or the twenty-fifth. Yet by the latter day his army was growing very formidable, as all the corps from Burgos and Palencia were reporting themselves to him: Lorges’s dragoons had reached Frechilla, and Delaborde with the head of the infantry of Junot’s corps was at Paredes, only thirteen miles from Soult’s head quarters at Carrion. Loison and Heudelet were not far behind. Yet the English columns marched for two days wholly unmolested.
On the twenty-sixth Baird crossed the Esla at Valencia: the ford was dangerous, for the river was rising: a sudden thaw on the twenty-fourth had turned the roads into mud, and loosened the snows. But the guns and baggage crossed without loss, as did[p. 546] also some of the infantry, the rest using the two ferry-boats[651]. Hope and Fraser, on the Mayorga road, had nothing but the badness of their route to contend against. The soil of this part of the kingdom of Leon is a soft rich loam, and the cross-roads were knee-deep in clay: for the whole of the twenty-sixth it rained without intermission: the troops plodded on in very surly mood, but as yet there was no straggling. It was still believed that Moore would fight at Astorga, and, though the men grumbled that ‘the General intended to march them to death first and to fight after[652],’ they still kept together.
But already signs were beginning to be visible that their discipline was about to break down. A good deal of wanton damage and a certain amount of plunder took place at the halting-places for the night—Mayorga, Valderas, and Benavente. A voice from the ranks explains the situation. ‘Our sufferings were so great that many of the men lost their natural activity and spirits, and became savage in their dispositions. The idea of running away, without even firing a shot, from the enemy we had beaten so easily at Vimiero, was too galling to their feelings. Each spoke to his fellow, even in common conversation, with bitterness: rage flashed out on the most trifling occasion of disagreement. The poor Spaniards had little to expect from such men as these, who blamed them for their inactivity. Every man found at home was looked upon as a traitor to his country. “Why is not every Spaniard under arms and fighting? The cause is not ours: are we to be the only sufferers?” Such was the common language, and from these feelings pillage and outrage naturally arose[653].’ The men began to seize food in the towns and villages without waiting for the regular distribution, forced their way into houses, and (the country being singularly destitute of wood) tore down sheds and doors to build up their bivouac fires. The most deplorable mischief took place at Benavente, where the regiment quartered in the picturesque old castle belonging to the Duchess of Osuna burnt much of the mediaeval furniture, tore down the sixteenth-century tapestry to make bed-clothes, and lighted fires[p. 547] on the floors of the rooms, to the destruction of the porcelain friezes and alcoves[654]. Moore issued a strongly-worded proclamation against these excesses on December 27, blaming the officers for not keeping an eye upon the men, and pointing out that ‘not bravery alone, but patience and constancy under fatigue and hardship were military virtues[655].’ Unfortunately, such arguments had little effect on the tired and surly rank and file. Things were ere long to grow much worse.
The infantry, as we have seen, accomplished their march to Benavente without molestation, and all, including the rearguard, were across the Esla by the twenty-seventh. Paget’s cavalry, however, had a much more exciting time on the last two days. Finding that he was not attacked, Soult began to bestir himself on the twenty-sixth: he sent Lorges’s dragoons after the British army, in the direction of Mayorga, while with Franceschi’s cavalry and the whole of his infantry he marched by the direct road on Astorga, via the bridge of Mansilla.
Lorges’s four regiments were in touch with the rearguard of Paget’s hussars on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, but they were not the only or the most important enemies who were now striving to drive in Moore’s cavalry screen. The advanced guard of the Emperor’s army had just come up, and first Colbert’s brigade of Ney’s corps and then the cavalry of the Guard began to press in upon Paget: Lahoussaye’s dragoons arrived on the scene a little later. It is a splendid testimonial to the way in which the British horsemen were handled, that they held their own for three days against nearly triple forces on a front of thirty miles[656]. No better certificate could be given to them than the fact that the Emperor estimated them, when the fighting was over, at 4,000 or 5,000 sabres, their real force being only 2,400. He wrote, too, in a moment of chagrin when Moore’s army had just escaped from him, so that he was not at all inclined to[p. 548] exaggerate their numbers, and as a matter of fact rated the infantry too low.
But under the admirable leading of Paget the British cavalry held its own in every direction. Moore was not exaggerating when he wrote on the twenty-eighth that ‘they have obtained by their spirit and enterprise an ascendency over the French which nothing but great superiority of numbers on their part can get the better of[657].’ The 18th Light Dragoons turned back to clear their rear six times on December 27, and on each occasion drove in the leading squadrons of their pursuers with such effect that they secured themselves an unmolested retreat for the next few miles. At one charge, near Valencia de Don Juan, a troop of thirty-eight sabres of this regiment charged a French squadron of 105 men, and broke through them, killing twelve and capturing twenty. The 10th Hussars, while fending off Lorges’s dragoons near Mayorga, found that a regiment of the light cavalry of Ney had got into their rear and had drawn itself up on a rising ground flanking the high-road. Charging up the slope, and over soil deep in the slush of half-melted snow, they broke through the enemy’s line, and got off in safety with 100 prisoners. Every one of Paget’s five regiments had its full share of fighting on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, yet they closed in on to Benavente in perfect order, with insignificant losses, and exulting in a complete consciousness of their superiority to the enemy’s horse. Since the start from Salamanca they had in twelve days taken no less than 500 prisoners, besides inflicting considerable losses in killed and wounded on the French. They had still one more success before them, ere they found themselves condemned to comparative uselessness among the mountains of Galicia.
On the twenty-eighth Robert Crawfurd’s brigade had waited behind in the mud and rain, drawn up in front of the bridge of Castro Gonzalo, ‘standing for many hours with arms posted, and staring the French cavalry in the face, while the water actually ran out of the muzzles of their muskets[658].’ At last our hussars retired, and Crawfurd blew up two arches of the bridge when Paget had passed over, and moved back on Benavente, after some trifling skirmishing with the cavalry of the Imperial Guard, who had come up in force and tried to interrupt his work. The inde[p. 549]fatigable British horsemen left pickets all along the river on each side of the broken bridge, ready to report and oppose any attempt to cross.
After resting for a day in Benavente Moore had sent on the divisions of Fraser and Hope to Astorga, by the highway through La Baneza. The division of Baird, ............