Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 25
Оглавление‘The whole ground was still covered with the wrecks of an army.’
MASSENA CAME on steadily with some 70,000 men; and Wellington, sorely outnumbered, withdrew beyond the Coa towards the valley of the Mondego, Robert Craufurd, commanding the rearguard and leading it in an unnecessarily aggressive way, repeatedly attacking the leading French columns and losing men to little purpose. After the loss of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo to Massena’s dashing second-in-command, Marshal Ney, Wellington hoped to make a stand at Almeida – a fortress twenty-five miles west of Ciudad Rodrigo on the other side of the Spanish frontier – which Massena began to bombard on 26 August 1810. But an enemy shell ignited a trail of gunpowder which had been left by a leaking barrel between the cannon on the walls and the powder magazine in Almeida Cathedral. Masonry and shattered casks were sent flying high into the sky in a thunderous explosion which killed or wounded hundreds of the men of the garrison; and Wellington was obliged to withdraw fifty miles further down the Mondego to Bussaco.
His army took up position on the ridge at Bussaco on 27 September and at dawn that day he made his rounds, removing from his command the colonel of a regiment who had drunk too much brandy in an attempt to steady his nerves. He was anxious enough himself: he remained outwardly calm as always; but it was noticed that he kept gathering up blades of grass and chewing them.
At about six o’clock the French launched their first attack on the centre of the long British line.
Facing Massena’s 65,000 men were about 25,000 British and the same number of Portuguese. Both stood their ground well, the Portuguese, in Wellington’s words, ‘worthy of contending in the same ranks as British troops’. Massena, despite his greater numbers, could not dislodge them, hard and persistently as his commanders led their men against the allies on the ridge, losing some 4,500 men in the process.1
The day after the battle, with a loss calculated at precisely 1,252 men, divided equally between British and Portuguese, Wellington withdrew towards his lines at Torres Vedras with Massena at his heels, both armies looting where they could, one British soldier struggling to carry out of Coimbra an immense looking-glass which was strung up beside him when he was hanged by order of the Provost Marshal.
On 14 October, Massena came to a halt beneath Wellington’s defensive lines in surprise and anger. Why had no one told him of this defensive system, blocking the way to Lisbon? he asked. One of his staff officers, by way of apprehensive explanation, told him that Lord Wellington had made them, as though this were an excuse for their existence. The devil he did, the Marshal angrily retorted; and did he make the mountains, too?2
The lines were far from being a single row of gun emplacements, bastions and entrenchments. Behind the first line of earthworks another stretched across the mountains; and beyond this was yet another. The French army ground to a halt. The days of October passed slowly in intermittent rain; the French, waiting for the enemy to attack them, could get their hands on little food in the inhospitable Estremaduran countryside, though more than Wellington had hoped the Portuguese would allow them to discover. ‘All is abandoned,’ Massena wrote. ‘Our soldiers find potatoes and only live to fight the enemy.’3
From time to time Wellington was tempted to attack him, feeling fairly confident that he ‘could lick those fellows any day’.4 But then he reflected it would cost him 10,000 men and, since he had been entrusted with the last army England had, he must take care of it. ‘They won’t draw me from my cautious system,’ he told a friend in England. ‘I’ll fight them only when I am pretty sure of success.’5
In England, while Lord Liverpool assured Wellington that the Government were still ‘most fully and completely satisfied with all that you have done and all that you are doing’,6 there were rumbles of discontent as there had been when the battle of Talavera had been followed by retreat. ‘The croakers about useless battles will attack me again about that of Bussaco,’ he had written to his brother William at the beginning of October; and so, indeed, they did. Lord Auckland maintained that Massena had ‘out-generalled us and turned our position’ and expressed doubts as to Wellington’s ‘truth as a writer of despatches’.7 Lord Grey thought that, as at Talavera, mistakes at Bussaco had forced the ‘necessity of an immediate retreat’.8 Lord Carlisle told Countess Spencer, ‘Ld. W. was no general at all, and fell from one blunder to another, and the most we had to hope was his being able to embark quietly and bring his troops back to England which he thought very doubtful.’9
Wellington heard that the Prince of Wales, under the influence of his Whig friends, was now amongst his critics. ‘I condole with you heartily, my dear Lord, upon poor Arthur’s retreat,’ the Prince said to Marquess Wellesley one day at Windsor. ‘Massena has quite outgeneralled him.’10 It often seemed to Wellington that, as well as the King’s eldest son, the King’s Government had lost whatever confidence in him they had formerly expressed: ministers declined to reinforce him, he complained, although there were, in fact, no reinforcements available except a corps in Ireland which Lord Liverpool promised to send out as soon as it could be relieved.
Despite all criticism of his conduct, Wellington remained determined not to fight until he was fairly certain of winning; and he was still not sufficiently sure when, at the beginning of March 1811, Massena, his army reduced to about 46,000 men, withdrew towards Santarem. He crept after them, ‘determined to persevere in [his] cautious system’.11
His aim, he said, was ‘to operate upon the flanks and rear of the enemy with my small and light detachments, and thus force them out of Portugal by the distresses they will suffer, and do them all the mischief I can upon this retreat. Massena is an old fox, and is as cautious as I am; he risks nothing.’12
The more prudent and sensible of Wellington’s officers admired his control. ‘His ability is universally acknowledged,’ said Lowry Cole, ‘and I hope the good folks in England will do him equal justice.’13
At Santarem, Marshal Massena held his ground, to Wellington’s astonished admiration. It was, he thought, ‘an extraordinary instance of what a French army can do. It is positively a fact that they brought no provisions with them, and they have not even received a letter since they entered Portugal … I assure you that I could not maintain one division in the district in which they have maintained not less than 60,000 men and 20,000 animals for more than two months.’14 A further two months passed and Massena still stubbornly stood his ground, though the uniforms of his men were ragged now, their shoes worn out, their rations reduced to the meagre supplies that reached them by way of the long routes that stretched east for mile upon mile across the mountains or from what foraging parties could bring in from broken farms and deserted villages. Junot was badly wounded; Ney quarrelled bitterly with Massena who soon dismissed him from his command; and the French at last turned their backs on Lisbon.15
Wellington followed them cautiously. His duty was clear: he would not risk the army entrusted to his care by unnecessary fighting; he must get it across the road which led out of Spain towards the French frontier at Bayonne. Once he had cut across that road, north of Madrid at Burgos, not only Massena’s army but all the French troops in Spain would have to fall back towards the narrow gap that separated the foothills of the Pyrenees from the waters of the Bay of Biscay. Yet there must be no sudden dash towards León and old Castile. Portugal must be safe behind him; he had to retake Almeida in the north and Badajoz in the south, and, in the meantime, keep his ‘own army entire’, for if he weakened it by a rash advance he might find himself ‘so crippled as not to have the ascendant over the French troops on the frontiers’.16
The French, fighting actions when they had to, marched slowly and painfully towards the Portuguese frontier in the gently falling rain, losing hundreds of men on the way, hungry soldiers torturing peasants, women and children as well as men, to discover hidden stores of food and wine. Exhausted stragglers fell with a kind of relief as prisoners into the hands of their wily pursuers.
On 10 April 1811 Wellington felt able to issue a proclamation declaring that the ‘cruel enemy’ after suffering ‘great losses’ [of 25,000 men] had retired across the Agueda into Spain. The inhabitants of Portugal were ‘therefore at liberty to return to their homes’.
Having supervised the close investment of the French garrison in Almeida, Wellington, anxious as always to see things for himself, galloped south to reconnoitre Badajoz, killing two horses on the way, exhausting the soldiers of his escort, two of whom were swept away and drowned in a torrent, pausing to write letters and orders before leaping once more into the saddle. Leaving Beresford to besiege Badajoz, he rode back again as fast as he could towards Almeida – which Massena had determined not to lose without a fight – his arrival welcomed with relief by both officers and men who had been uneasy to be commanded in his absence by Sir Brent Spencer, as always perfectly agreeable, but less noted than ever for ‘military quickness’ and certainly not considered to be a match for ‘that old fox’, Marshal Massena.
South of the town, the two armies met at Fuentes de Oñoro on 3 May 1811. It was a hard and savage battle, in which Craufurd’s Light Division performed brilliantly executed service in rescuing the shattered battalions of the 7th Division from what seemed for a time almost certain defeat. The British infantry, drawn up in squares, held firm against the charges of the French cavalry; but the outnumbered British cavalry were no match for Massena’s lancers and hussars.17 The British line did not break, however, and Almeida fell, though its garrison was allowed to escape through the incompetence of several officers, among them the brave, unbalanced Sir William Erskine and the commanding officer of the 4th Foot, Colonel Bevan, who, late in obeying orders then losing his way, was selected as a scapegoat by Erskine, and, rather than face a court-martial, blew his brains out.18 Another officer behaved so recklessly that Wellington decided that ‘there was nothing on earth so stupid as a gallant officer’.19 It was all very well ‘to want to be forward in engaging the enemy’; what was wanted was ‘cool, discriminating judgement in action’.*20
The whole operation outside Almeida had left Wellington furiously angry and bitterly dissatisfied. It was ‘the most disgraceful military event that has yet occurred’.21 He was driven to conclude that the Prime Minister was ‘quite right not to move thanks for the battle at Fuentes’.22 ‘It was the most difficult one I was ever concerned in,’ he told his brother William.23 ‘We had very nearly three to one against us engaged; above four to one in cavalry; and moreover our cavalry had not a gallop in them; while some of that of the enemy were fresh and in excellent order. If Boney had been there, we should have been beaten.’†24
Wellington was just as displeased when he learned how Beresford had fared south of Badajoz at Albuera. There had been a fierce fight here, too. Beresford’s men had held their ground under heavy bombardment from Soult’s artillery, and had withstood the attacks which his infantry and cavalry had launched against them. But so many men had been killed or wounded – 4,000 out of 10,000 engaged – that Wellington felt obliged to complain that another such battle would ruin his army.25 As for this one, he refused to allow the ‘croakers’ in England to make capital out of it. When Beresford’s gloomy dispatch arrived at headquarters he declined to send it on. ‘This won’t do,’ he said to the staff officer who brought it to him. ‘Write me down a victory.’ ‘The dispatch was altered accordingly.’26 ‘If it had not been for me,’ he explained, ‘they would have written a whining report upon it, which would have driven the people in England mad. However, I prevented that.’27
At the same time, to comfort and reassure Beresford, he wrote him a kind letter: ‘You could not be successful in such an action without a large loss, and we must make up our minds to affairs of this kind sometimes, or give up the game.’28
Just how terrible the slaughter at Albuera had been was brought home vividly to Wellington when he went there himself to supervise another siege of Badajoz. The men of one regiment were ‘literally lying dead in their ranks as they stood’, a phenomenon he had never encountered elsewhere.29 A French officer had already seen the bloodstained bodies of hundreds of his countrymen, ‘all of them naked, the peasants having stripped them in the night’. An English officer who visited the ground a year later found it was still covered with white bones. A soldier recalled that the ‘whole ground was still covered with the wrecks of an army, bonnets, cartridge boxes, pieces of belts, old clothes and shoes; the ground in numerous ridges, under which lay many a heap of mouldering bones. It was a melancholy sight; it made us all very dull for a short time.’30
With another large French army not far away, Wellington did not have long to conduct his operations against Badajoz; and he felt compelled to order an assault upon its walls before his guns, antiquated brass cannon removed from the obsolete fortifications of Elvas, had made adequate breaches. Mistakes were made similar to those which had enraged Wellington outside Almeida: officers again lost their way, and, when the breaches were at last reached, the scaling ladders proved too short.
The attack failed and, learning that the French were now within a day or two’s march of him, Wellington felt obliged to withdraw across the Portuguese frontier into the Alentejo. He now turned his attention once more to the north and to the town just beyond Fuentes de Oñoro, Ciudad Rodrigo. He surrounded the garrison there in August, hoping it would soon be forced to surrender. But the French appeared in strength to drive the British off. They were commanded now by Massena’s successor, Marshal Marmont, the thirty-seven-year-old duc de Raguse. There was a short engagement at El Bodon on 25 September after which Wellington was forced to withdraw, finding himself in a predicament from which General Craufurd made no noticeable effort to extricate him.
‘I am glad to see you safe, General Craufurd,’ he said to him coldly the next morning.
‘I was never in danger.’
‘Oh! I was.’
As they parted after this brief exchange, Craufurd was heard to mutter, ‘He’s damned crusty this morning.’31 Wellington took no notice. ‘He knew Craufurd’s merits and trusted him’, though the Advocate-General thought it was ‘surprising what he bore from him at times’.32
Despite his irritability after the setback at El Bodon and his disappointment after Fuentes de Oñoro, Wellington felt justified in congratulating himself when he withdrew to the Coa in Beira: the French were no longer in Portugal.
‘We have certainly altered the nature of the war in Spain,’ he reported to the Cabinet. ‘It has become, to a certain degree, offensive on our part. The enemy are obliged to concentrate large corps to defend their own acquisitions; they are obliged to collect magazines to support their armies … and I think it probable, from all that I hear, that they are either already reduced, or they must soon come, to the resources of France for the payment of those expenses which must be defrayed in money. As soon as this shall be the case … you may be certain that Bonaparte will be disposed to put an end to it … I think it is not unlikely that peace is speculated upon in France.’33
Wellington’s feelings towards the Government had changed of late. He was still short of money but satisfactory numbers of reinforcements were being sent out to him – against the advice of the Duke of York who feared that England was being left undefended – and he looked with confidence to the future.
