Читать книгу Military Memoirs of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington - Joseph Moyle Sherer - Страница 10

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There was a moral dignity in the Spanish people, of which Napoleon appears to have been incredulous. The two most powerful principles of human feeling lived warm in their hearts,— they were patriotic and religious: their patriotism was not a vanity; neither was their religion a name. They loved their country, and all that nature and habit had connected with it their mountains; their rivers; their language; their music; and those fragments of their old cançionero, which in every Village some were yet found to sing, and many to listen to. Again,—they loved their faith. The Spanish Christians, for 600 years, had struggled for it against the Moors; and the memory of that struggle is not yet dead. The rigid orthodoxy of the Spanish people has been quite independent of the inquisition and its fires: their fear of God; their reverence for his altars; their deep and warm devotion, laid them prostrate at the feet of a crafty priesthood; and a haughty hierarchy, leagued with a heartless sovereign, weighed them down.

But the virtue of the Spaniards had been outraged and insulted by the conduct of a wicked court, their loyalty abused by enormous and criminal imposts, and their pride wounded by an alliance with the French, to whom the most disgraceful concessions had been made; by whom daily and increasing sacrifices were demanded, and who were at all times hateful to the Spaniards. They had been murmuring over their abject condition for many months. The surface of society was agitated, and heaving with hidden but fierce fires, which threatened some speedy and violent eruption. Their reverence for royalty in the person of Charles could not keep them in observance of a like respect for his incapable and guilty minister, Godoy. They lothed the man, his faction, and his measures, and were resolved to get rid of them. Popular commotion broke out at last in many parts of the kingdom. When it was found that Charles was determined upon going all lengths with his adviser, the people rose in fierce tumult, menaced the minister’s life, welcomed the abdication of the terrified and weak father, and hailed the elevation of the unknown and foolish son. The abdication of Charles and the fall of Godoy appeased them for the moment They saw in the elevation of Ferdinand to the throne a remedy for every grievance.

When the public mind was in a tumult of joy at the accession of Ferdinand, whom an indignant nation had summoned to the throne, Murat entered Madrid with a French army. He would not, of course he could not, recognize the king who had been chosen. The people, as they stood chilled in their hopes, and suspicious for the future, anxiously asked what did he there at all? This they asked each other in those squares and streets where their pride was wounded, and their jealousy awakened by the irritating presence of the brilliant and haughty soldiery of France. Of a sudden they heard of the departure of Ferdinand for Bayonne, a journey undertaken before they had time to prevent it: then they heard of the flight of Charles, and the escape of Godoy; next they saw Murat appointed member of the governing junta, and they found French troops on all sides advancing. Muleteers from the north had brought intelligence that their frontier fortresses had been treacherously seized. The peasants that came into market lingered to warm their hate of the foreigner before they returned to their expecting children; and the women, who kneel in long crowds by the banks of the Manzanares, invoked the Virgin and St. Isidro; and as they thought on those dear to them, they paused and sighed in their labors: not a sound was there of the customary laughing and loud merriment.

As early as the 23d of April, there was a serious riot at Toledo ; but by the timely advance of Dupont’s division, the city, which is not a large one, was restored to order; and the peasants who had flocked into it to assist in the commotion were dispersed.

On the morning of the 2d of May a crowd was gathered in front of the royal palace at Madrid round an old-fashioned Spanish carriage, which, it was rumored, was to convey don Antonio, the last Spanish prince remaining still in Madrid, to Bayonne. Some discontent might have been perceived, and some angry ebullition of popular feeling might have been looked for; but few could have foreseen that whirlwind of vengeance which was then nigh. Mighty and momentous consequences for the hopes and happiness of all Europe hung upon the movements of that swart and surly crowd.

The report of the destination of the carriage was unfounded in fact; but as it was uttered so it was received; and the mob manifested their indignation by cutting the traces and forcing it back into the yard, with furious curses upon the French. Colonel la Grange, an aide-de-camp of Murat’s, came to learn the cause of the disturbance. They immediately assailed him with abuse and menace; and he was saved only by the intervention of Spanish officers and authorities. The colonel went away, and returned with a party of soldiers: the mob fell upon them instantly; and the war of Spain may date its commencement from that hour.

In every quarter of the city the people rushed upon the astonished soldiery, of whom many were walking about the streets in pleased and idle wonder at the novelties this capital presented; some indeed without their arms.

But when human passion has once the mastery, its actings, though brave, are, especially in revenge, ferocious and pitiless. They slew the soldiers with whatever weapons or means of destruction came first to hand. Gun, pistol, sword, dagger, clasp-knife, and stones, were all used in this sudden onset From the windows and roofs of houses shots were fired, and weighty missiles hurled down upon the aghast and bewildered Frenchmen. This was not a plotted assault on the part of the people. It was the sudden burst of indignation no longer to be repressed. Neither was there, on the part of the Spaniards, any ignorance of the immediate and certain consequences: these might not have been thought of at the moment; but, as soon as they were, they were contemplated fearlessly and contemptuously.

In the same spirit war was waged by Spaniards to the very last: all the details of their defeats and disasters, their panic and runnings, are known, and have been visited with a full perhaps a useful, exposure; but the feet of a valiant, constant resistance to the legions of France, on the part of the Spanish people, for five years, stands out from the page of history in bold and glorious relief; and here it began. This was the declaration of war by Spain against Napoleon; and it was written and sealed in blood.

Among the many incidents of this memorable day was an attack upon the French hospital, of which Southey, jealous for the honor of the Spaniard, and chivalric in his own generous conceptions of the scene, speaks with natural horror and indignation ; but a military man knows that the attendants, orderlies, and convalescents of a military hospital, are capable not only of defence but of active hostility. The military historian Napier accordingly relates it without any such feeling against the Spaniards. The Spanish troops in Madrid remained shut up in their barracks, and under the close control of their officers throughout the whole of this strange contest No Spanish soldiers took any part in the struggle, except two officers of artillery, on duty at the arsenal, named Daoiz and Velarde, and a detachment of invalids under their orders. These officers hearing the sounds of the combat, and being told that a French column was advancing in the direction of their post, brought out guns to defend the approaches to the arsenal, and loaded them with grape; being resolved to resist any assault of the arsenal by force. As soon as the enemy came in sight they opened upon them with these guns, and continued to fight them till they fell. Velarde was shot dead by a musket-ball. Daoiz was wounded in the thigh; but he sat up on the ground, and continued to give orders until, under three more wounds, he expired. Velarde was a fine young man of five-and-twenty. Daoiz was a man of thirty.

It has been said, that, as military men, they were not justified in acting as they did, without express orders. We think otherwise. They had charge of the arsenal: they already knew the fate of the Spanish fortresses in the north; and the moment was come when they had a right, as Spaniards, to choose their course of action. They well knew that an unarmed mob, even had they been assisted by the few Spanish regiments in garrison, could not long and effectually resist the bayonets and sabres of 25,000 choice troops; but they cast in their lot with the people; they saw the consequences; for Spain they were willing to fall, and with a devotion alike hopeless and heroic they did fell. It has been said by an eye-witness that they were under excitement from the wine they had just drunk at a déjeûné à fourchette. It is customary to drink wine at that meal on the continent; and it is not improbable that the quantity usually taken at that hour, felling upon hearts full of their country’s wrongs, may have given to their manner a passionate and (to the eye of a calm observer) an extravagant warmth; but we believe they acted from a principle of pure patriotism, and that they seized the offered opportunity to act bravely, what they thought nobly. The column spoken of above soon gained possession of the arsenal, passing over the bodies of Daoiz and Velarde. The French cavalry, pouring into the city, charged through the streets, slew numbers, and made many prisoners. After nightfall the peasantry of the neighborhood came armed, and in crowds, to the city gates: they were repulsed with great loss by the French guards; and in the morning again they were charged, trampled down, and dispersed by the enemy’s cavalry. Of the prisoners taken in Madrid, about 100 were tried by a French military commission, and shot in the Prado The stain of this cold and criminal execution attaches not, according to some authorities, to Murat, but to Grouchy, and to a colonel of the imperial guard. Murat, who had ordered their trial, and confirmed their sentence, forbade the execution of it, at the prayer of the municipality. His earnestness to save their lives was not exhibited by any extraordinary effort in person. The loss of lives in this rising of the people was not very great: the casualties of the French amounted to about 700; those of the Spaniards are estimated at 200; but accounts so contradictory, so exaggerated, and so interested, were published by both parties, that the best and calmest estimates may be far from correct: though it is certain that the rising was not premeditated, yet was it something more than accidental. The public mind was charged with matter fiercely combustible: it is of little moment to inquire when or from whence the igniting spark fell.

Murat had been forewarned of the temper of the people. He took no precautions. He was a man of lofty, contemptuous courage; respecting no enemies who were not in uniform, and good soldiers to boot; and as he looked around upon the troops whom he had so often led to victory, he regarded the idea of any rising upon them by the mob of a third-rate capital as an event of impossible occurrence; when, therefore, the burst actually came, all was confusion. French soldiers, as they stood or walked unarmed, were mobbed and massacred, and ran about wild, helpless of defence, and hopeless of resistance. Many fell beneath the knives of their pursuers, before the troops in or near the city received any orders. Murat caused them to beat “the general,” and put himself at the head of as many men as he could collect in the square of the palace. With these, and with two pieces of artillery loaded with grape, he stood on the defensive, firing upon the people, until, at last, from the north and south gates, columns poured into the town. The cavalry of the imperial guard galloped up the streets Alcala and San Geronimo, which debouched upon the Puerta del Sol, and there established themselves upon the open space, while a strong column of 1500 men filled the street of San Bernardo, near the arsenal. The effusion of blood in many puts of the city continued till the Spanish authorities, and French generals, rode through the streets together waving white handkerchiefs, and inviting the people to submission and peace. The first fruit of tranquillity was the military tribunal, and the second an order of the day, directing that all groups of Spaniards seen in the streets, exceeding eight in number, should be fired upon; that every village in which a French soldier was slain should be burned; and that all authors, publishers, and distributers of papers, or proclamations, inciting to revolt, should be led out and shot forthwith. He also went instantly to the junta of government, then sitting, and took on him the office of president Murat is in his grave. He lived to wear a crown: he survived a hundred battles and combats, in which he bravely led the imperial cavalry of France; but he lived on only to fall at last by the muskets of a small guard of executioners in the mean hall of a petty town in Calabria.

At the news from Madrid all Spain arose and rushed to arms. The insults and injuries heaped on her by France had maddened her, and she was drunk with the spirit of revenge. The Spaniards are not a dark and designing people: they are frank and open, sudden and rash; in the moment of suspicion, jealous and credulous; in the act of vengeance, fiery and cruel.

It is not a matter of wonder, though certainly a subject of reproach, that, in many places of Spain, they disgraced the cause of patriotism, by the unreasonable tests they demanded of sincerity, by their ready credulity at the fatal cry “Traidor !” and by the summary punishments and instant massacres that followed. The thing is not new:—so much is it in the natural, though melancholy, course of events, in times of political trouble and confusion, that all nations would exhibit bursts of fury and of crime, not very dissimilar, under like circumstances. The Spaniards, being natives of a southern climate, are quick, impassioned, imaginative, easily excited, and as suddenly depressed by melancholy, and repentant of excess. Their national character is directly contrasted to the gay, cold, witty, prosaic Frenchmen. They are “good haters” and firm friends; they cannot smile even with complacency on those whom they dislike ; with them the mean of frigid indifference is unknown: if truly attached, they exhibit all the extravagance of fond admiration, and, alas! where they act their hate, they become barbarous and bloody.

At Cadiz, Seville, Carthagena, and in many other cities, the French and all Spaniards supposed partisans of Godoy and of Napoleon were put to death by the excited populace: many liberal-minded, innocent men thus perished. It was a moment when reason was asleep, and diseased suspicions were awake; when a beaten and vindictive groom, or a ridiculed and scorned monk, was master of the noblest life, and could hunt an enemy to death by the simple word “traidor” Thus fell Solano at Cadiz, and Conde d’Aguilar at Seville. In Valencia, one Balthazar Calvo, an ecclesiastic and a canon, at the head of a fanatic mob, began and continued the bloody work of deliberate massacre for twelve days. A hundred victims bled beneath the knives of the assassins in his train: many families were made fatherless; but the cup of fury was presented to his own lips in torn: the wretch himself, with two hundred of his followers, were imprisoned, and strangled, by the miserable and disabused people. Filanghieri, the governor of Corunna, an Italian by birth, was put to death, under circumstances of cruelty horrible in the extreme, by the very troops he commanded. When Napoleon received the news from Madrid he was alarmed, and vexed.—“Murat va mal et trop vite” was his exclamation. But when he considered that he had 80,000 men in Spain, exclusive of the corps of Junot in Portugal; that all the frontier fortresses were in his possession; his main force occupying a position in the very heart of the country; the communication with France secure; that Spain was not only without a government, but without one single great or known character; that, of an army of one hundred and twenty thousand, fifteen thousand of the best were in Holstein with Romana, twenty thousand in Portugal, thirty thousand merely nominal, being a local militia never called out; and that the remainder, with the exception of eleven thousand Swiss and Walloons, mercenaries, were without officers, system, interior economy, or discipline; that Spain, in fact, had not only no army, but not even the frame-work of one to begin upon; he cast away all doubts as to his success, and pursued his combinations as calmly as if they had never been, even for a moment, disturbed. It has been said, that the French army had some points of weakness in its composition. Its conscripts were of different nations,—Germans, Swiss, Italians, and Poles. A great portion of the born French were from the last conscription, a raw levy of young men; but the first elements of drill are soon completed, and in no troops so soon as in the French. Their infantry regiments were formed upon excellent skeletons; good non-commissioned officers were present to instruct them; good officers to command them, and always a sprinkling of old soldiers to lead them into fire under the same eagles beneath which they had themselves earned their cheverons of service, and won their decorations. So that, with respect to the last point of weakness, viz. the youth and inexperience of many of the French soldiers, the difference between them and the Spanish levies was enormous. With regard to the first imputed defect, viz. that men of different nations served in the French ranks, little importance can be attached to it Napoleon’s was a good service for a mercenary; and the foreign conscripts soon became reconciled to it As to the cause for which they fought, they neither knew nor cared any thing about it “Very few,” observes Sir Walter Raleigh, in his discourse of war in general, “of the infinite number thus untimely slain, were ever masters of the grounds of the dispute for which they suffered, or the true reason of their being led to battle.”—“What deluded wretches,” then he adds, “have a great part of mankind been, who have either yielded themselves to be slain in causes which, if truly known, their heart would abhor, or been the bloody executioners of other men’s ambition!” It is a reflection of this sort that enables one to love and esteem the soldiers of an army as individuals, whom as ft body we designate by the harshest epithets, and act against with severity and vigor.

In most of the cities and towns in Spain, as soon as the first effervescence of public feeling had a little subsided, provincial and local juntas were formed for the conduct of public affairs: these juntas levied money and troops. At the sea-ports they opened an immediate intercourse with the English fleets upon their coasts, and sent deputies to England to ask aid in arms, clothing, and treasure, and to request the support of a British army. The joyous cries throughout all the land were, Viva Fernando Septimo! Guerra con la Françia! Paz con Inghilterra ! Guerra con el Mondo! Paz con Inghilterra! While the people of Spain were thus manifesting their true sentiments, the council of Castile, the municipality of Madrid, and the governing junta, at the intimated desire of Napoleon, elected Joseph Buonaparte king of Spain. Cardinal Bourbon, primate of Spain, first cousin of Charles IV., and archbishop of Toledo, not only acceded to this arrangement, but actually wrote a letter to Napoleon, testifying his contentment with the new order of things.

Joseph Buonaparte, late king of Naples, reached Bayonne on the 7th of June: on the 15th the assembly of notables, composed of ninety-one Spaniards of condition, met in that town,— received Joseph as their king,—discussed the constitution prepared for them by Napoleon as a matter of form, and accepted it as a matter of course. Joseph now journeyed to Madrid, under escort of his brother’s troops, and was proclaimed “KING OF SPAIN AND THE INDIES,” with the usual solemnities, amid a silent and sullen population, in a capital that bristled with French bayonets, and trembled to the salutes of French artillery. It proved an uneasy crown.