Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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him to cross swords with the English. Thus the whole of the East eluded the

clutches of Napoleon and from Gibraltar to India, by sea and by land, the

English had succeeded in isolating the Empire.

WELLINGTON’S CAMPAIGNS

The Napoleonic Empire had the appearance of an island from which there

was no means of escape, while its enemies could enjoy free movement all

around and anywhere they liked in the world. But it was also a fortress

which could neither be reduced by famine nor taken by assault as long as

the French army was intact. All the British ﬂ eet could do was to land troops

at suitable spots to help the continental allies. But this threat, though useful

in itself, because it forced Napoleon to guard every coast and kept the inhab-

itants’ nerves on edge, was not enough to be decisive. England’s allies were

well aware of this, and though very ready to pocket English money, were not

satisﬁ ed with this alone. As long as English ships did not bring redcoats, they

were criticised with the suggestion that the command of the seas was exer-

cised solely for England’s beneﬁ t. Yet most English ministers and the vast

majority of their fellow citizens were nonetheless averse to ﬁ ghting on the

Continent. Their insular feelings – strongly reinforced by the experiences of

1793 and 1799 and then by the threatened landings in Great Britain – were

increased by the fact that manpower was not overabundant. Though the

English were willing to enlist in defence of their own country, the army was

only recruited by dint of offering bonuses among the poorer classes, and

even then there was a dearth of recruits. Her overseas possessions were

continually extending, and it was not practicable to denude England entirely

of troops, let alone Ireland, which was still under martial law. There were

thus very few troops available, and there was all the greater reluctance to risk

an expeditionary force, seeing that it would be extremely difﬁ cult to replace.

It was also necessary to take expenses and monetary difﬁ culties into

account. The English troops were accustomed to pay for what they took

from the country, even in Portugal and Spain, and in France in 1814, and

they consequently needed coin or means of exchange. And lastly, there

was the difﬁ culty in Parliament, where any continental undertaking provided

the opposition with a means of stirring up strong feeling. They had no hesi-

tation in declaring that Napoleon was invincible on land, which was an

indirect argument for peace. For all these reasons, Fox and his successors

refrained from any interventions on the Continent – apart from the re-

inforcements sent to the Swedes in Pomerania; and this was an attitude that

contributed not a little to the alienation of Russia. Canning and Castlereagh

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were in favour of an exactly opposite policy; but Tilsit had dissolved the

Coalition, and it was not till Copenhagen that Canning was able to show his

abilities.

Here too the Spanish insurrection was of capital importance. Canning did

not hesitate to promise the juntas his support and, not content merely to

promise them money and supplies, he arranged for the reconquest of

Portugal, which up till then had been denied any military aid, and despatched

Baird to Galicia. His path was smoothed by the initial support of the Whigs,

who ﬁ rst of all greeted the insurrection with enthusiasm. But after the

emperor’s campaign they changed their tune. The opposition came to life

again and proceeded to criticise the Convention of Cintra, and to maintain

that Portugal was not defensible. Sir John Moore had also been of this

opinion, and the government began to wonder whether they should recall

Cradock, who had remained in Lisbon with ten thousand men, or transfer

to Portugal the army that had returned from Galicia in a deplorable state.

This time, it was Castlereagh who made the decision. After consulting Arthur

Wellesley, he made up his mind on 2 April 1809 to despatch this army to

Portugal, acting on the assurance that thirty thousand men would be enough

to save the country. At this juncture, however, Austria was just entering the

war, and Castlereagh, like a good disciple of Pitt, keeping his eyes ﬁ rmly

ﬁ xed upon the Netherlands, could not resist the temptation to send an expe-

dition to Holland under the pretext that it would help Austria. And so

England, having neglected to take action between 1805 and 1807, now

intervened simultaneously in two places, but the reinforcements sent to

Portugal hardly raised the strength to more than twenty-six thousand men.

On the other hand, in the spring of 1809, if England had sent all available

forces to the German coast, she might have struck a decisive blow. But the

Walcheren expedition was a failure, and from this time onwards England’s

activities abroad were to be conﬁ ned to the Spanish peninsula.

Even then, English policy was not pursued without considerable hesita-

tion and debate. In 1809 the Portland Cabinet was disintegrating, for

Canning and Castlereagh were so different in background and character that

they found it hard to work together. The former aspired to becoming the

head of the government and to direct the war effort as well as diplomacy,

and in April he called upon his colleagues to choose between his rival and

himself. They put off making a decision until the end of the war, but the

Walcheren expedition was followed by a crisis. Canning resigned, and was

wounded in a duel by Castlereagh on 21 September. And then Portland died,

enabling Perceval, who had remained at the Exchequer, to reconstitute his

government and call Marquess Wellesley to the Foreign Ofﬁ ce. He had

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formerly been governor of India, and did his best to provide reinforcements

for his brother’s army. Nevertheless, this continued to be a weak govern-

ment. The defeat of Austria and Napoleon’s marriage had produced a

division in public opinion. Grenville, Grey [formerly Lord Howick] and

Ponsonby were strongly in favour of evacuating Spain, they criticised the

general and were unwilling to admit his successes. The government had

been obliged to hold an inquiry into the Zeeland expedition, and the throne

came in for a good deal of mud-slinging because of the scandal involving

the duke of York’s mistress, who was convicted of having sold ofﬁ cers’

commissions. To crown everything, the king once again went out of his

mind. The prince of Wales had a bad reputation because of his quarrels with

Caroline of Brunswick, whom he publicly accused of adultery; but he never-

theless found himself being made regent, under the same conditions as in

1788, up till 1 February 1812. As he had always enjoyed intimate relations

with the Whigs, it was to be expected that he would call them to ofﬁ ce now

that he was invested with full power. Finally, in 1811, the country was hit

by a severe economic crisis which upset the ﬁ nances and produced a number

of disturbances. It is thus not surprising that the Perceval government

showed some reserve in their attitude to Arthur Wellesley, who had mean-

while become Viscount Wellington. It was made clear to him that if he were

to meet with a serious reverse, evacuation would be bound to follow. When

Masséna’s offensive was announced in 1810, Wellington was warned that he

would be excused if he withdrew his forces earlier rather than later. There

was extreme parsimony in the supply of reinforcements, and the general

was left to grapple with the most harassing ﬁ nancial difﬁ culties.

But Masséna’s retreat brought a renewal of conﬁ dence. Reinforcements

were notably increased, and made the victorious campaign of 1812 possible.

For three years, however, Wellington had only himself to rely on: he had not

only to ﬁ ght a war but also to raise the morale of the government. This fact

explains the cautiousness of his strategy up to well on in 1812, and the care

with which he reorganised the Portuguese army. One of his outstanding

qualities was his ability to persist in spite of all difﬁ culties in carrying on

the war within the framework of the general British policy, which he

understood to perfection. He showed that the Spanish undertaking as such

possessed immense possibilities and lent a real effectiveness to the command

of the seas. It was thanks to him, as well as to Canning and Castlereagh, that

England was able to come to close grips with the Napoleonic giant.

In 1809 Arthur Wellesley, soon to-be Viscount Wellington, was forty years

old, the same age as Napoleon. He had served under his brother for a long

period in India – from 1798 to 1805 – and was only just beginning his

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European career. He was a sober character and blessed with an iron constitu-

tion. Like the emperor, he could work long hours and do with little sleep. He

had a clear and precise mind of a positive cast, with good organising ability.

He was a man of cool and tenacious will-power, though this did not exclude

an ability to take bold and calculated risks. As a young man, he had shown

himself very independent, but when he came to command he proved

extremely authoritarian, never allowing his ofﬁ cers – who were incidentally

of rather mediocre calibre – any initiative whatsoever. His expression was

marked by an aristocratic pride, hardened still further by his long years

among the Indians. He treated his ofﬁ cers with a haughty disdain, and had an

unlimited contempt for the common people, and for his own soldiers who

were of the people, calling them ‘the scum of the earth’, ‘a pack of rascals’, ‘a

crowd who only enlist for drink, and can only be managed with the whip’.

At any rate his pride of country bound him closely to his own social caste and

to the land of which they were, in his view, the lawful owners, and his only

thought was to serve them. With a hard and dry character in which imagina-

tion and affection were equally wanting, he was at any rate preserved from

the romantic individualism that was the ruin of Napoleon, but his talent

lacked the unending fascination exercised by the genius of the emperor.

Wellington’s mind and character were perfectly suited to the life he was

leading as a warrior in command of a professional army of only moderate

effectiveness, slowly and monotonously campaigning with defensive battles

whose object was to wear out the enemy. Considered from the technical

point of view, he was essentially an infantry leader, hardly making use of the

cavalry, and very rarely pursuing the enemy. His artillery, whether mounted

or unmounted, was excellent but not very plentiful. There were no sappers,

engineers or siege equipment: his foot soldiers had to sufﬁ ce for all tasks,

and suffered enormous losses in taking fortiﬁ ed places by assault. Yet of all

the emperor’s enemies he was the one who enjoyed the pre-eminent advan-

tage of having given mature thought to the tactics to be adopted in his

encounters with the French. He preserved the line formation, while giving

greater elasticity to the method of combat. For defence against sharp-

shooters, he would shelter his lines behind hedges, ruins or houses with

loopholes, or conceal them on a counter-slope, and did not despise dispersed

ﬁ re or individual random ﬁ re. Each battalion had a company strung out

ahead of it, and from 1809 onwards he used a regiment of ‘riﬂ es’ and foreign

troops deployed in the same way. He did not fail to realise that the enemy,

whose triumphs had turned their heads, tended to cut short the sharp-

shooting preparation for battle and advance more and more promptly

with their battalions in deep column. At Maida, they had attacked without

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preliminary ﬁ ring. Wellington concealed his troops, reckoning that the

French were incapable of appreciating the results of ﬁ re, or would be impa-

tient at the slow progress made by their skirmishers, and that they would

then be all the more eager to charge with the bayonet. In that case, troops

who were arranged in shallow order, were cool-headed and almost intact,

would be at a great advantage. The professional English foot soldier was well

drilled in ﬁ ring volleys, and his weapon ﬁ red heavier bullets than the French.

Furthermore, Wellington adopted a line two-deep instead of three-deep, so

that a battalion of eight hundred men could ﬁ re eight hundred rounds in

one salvo. The French battalion, however, was arranged in column by compa-

nies, forty wide and eighteen deep, or in double companies, eighty wide

and nine deep, so that the ﬁ rst two ranks could only reply with eighty or 160

rounds. If they attempted to deploy, they would lose a good many men in the

process, and as a rule got out of formation, so bringing the attack to a halt.

When he had proved the effectiveness of these tactics, the English general

did not hesitate to use them now and again – as at Salamanca – to attack in

the same order, the line advancing at walking pace, and stopping deliberately

every so often to ﬁ re. But Wellington’s tactics were above all marvellously

effective in a defensive battle, and so ﬁ tted with the conditions generally

prevailing in his campaigns. They demanded, moreover, a professional army,

implacably disciplined to an automatic obedience by the use of corporal

punishment, like the army of Frederick II. Napoleon’s lieutenants failed to

learn their lesson through the reverses that Wellington inﬂ icted upon them;

and because he never came to observe these tactics in action, Napoleon was

only able to appreciate their value on the ﬁ eld of Waterloo.

Yet for all his talent, Wellington would probably not have succeeded in

maintaining his forces in the peninsula without having Portugal at his

disposal. He used it as a base that could be freely replenished by the British

ﬂ eet, and reorganised a national Portuguese army which provided him with

important contingents. The regency was never able to treat with England on

level terms, and in 1810 it co-opted the assistance of Charles Stuart, who

became the head of the administration. But Wellington never ceased to

complain of the nepotism and ineffectiveness of the aristocracy, and

their obstinacy in maintaining their own ﬁ scal privileges. He wanted the

subsidy – £1½ million and then £2 million – to be put at his disposal for

feeding the army, but London would never agree, in deference to the feel-

ings of the Portuguese. As the country subsisted solely on goods imported

from the United States, and was selling half as much wine as before the war,

the regency could only make both ends meet by feeding the soldiers on

requisitions paid for by a depreciated paper money, with the result that they

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were badly fed, and fell ill or deserted in large numbers. In February 1809

the regency asked the English to appoint a commander-in-chief. They chose

Beresford, who was not outstanding as a general, but was a good organiser.

He introduced a certain number of British ofﬁ cers and instructors into the

Portuguese regiments, and, with two exceptions, the generals were also

British. In September 1809 there were forty-two thousand men available,

and by 1810 they had more or less reached an effective strength of ﬁ fty-six

thousand, which was the target. All the same, there were great difﬁ culties

in providing them with weapons, and the cavalry was always short of

mounts. The militia was also used for garrison duties, reconnaissance and

guerrilla warfare, and in 1810 they had to fall back upon the ordenanza or levée

en masse .

The Spaniards did not procure the same degree of help. They had no

intention of letting themselves be governed, and up to 1812 refused to put

their forces under the command of the English. The central junta, however,

had only a limited authority. It had to ﬂ ee to Seville in December 1808, and

then in January 1810 took refuge in Cadiz, where it abdicated in favour of

a council of regency. In September the Cortes met and set up an executive

council which was replaced in 1812 by a new regency. All these govern-

ments showed indecision, and were suspected of nepotism and corruption.

The old council of Castile and the former junta of Seville disputed one

another’s powers, and certain persons such as the count of Montijo, the

duke of Infantado, the brother of Palafox, conspired to overthrow them. The

provincial juntas too were unstable, generally moving from one town to

another, and only obeying orders when they felt inclined. Co-operation

between the juntas and the military leaders was always precarious, and the

guerrillas were a law unto themselves. Moreover, though the population

hated the invaders, it by no means followed that most of the men were

disposed to ﬁ ght; and in any case they disliked the conscription that was

imposed by the central junta in 1811. Although the aim had been an army

of eight hundred thousand men, the regulars never in fact rose to one

hundred thousand men. There were difﬁ culties too in organising them and

supplying them, in spite of the funds sent from America, which rose to

nearly three million in the ﬁ rst year. Conscription was followed by a mass

insurrection, which was a customary institution in several of the northern

provinces, and was made general by the central junta on 17 April 1809; but

here again the results were disappointing. In Asturias, for example, the peas-

ants were successfully mobilised in 1809, but in 1810 they stayed at home.

Moreover, as they could be provided with neither ofﬁ cers nor arms, they

could hardly be used for anything but auxiliary services.

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Guerrilla warfare was what suited the Spaniards best of all, because in it

the soldier could remain his own master. The central junta legalised partisan

warfare on 28 December 1808, and there was an abundance of guerrilla

bands, some of which became famous, such as those of the Castile farm-

hand El Empecinado, and the two Minas in Navarre. They embarrassed the

French by attacking forage parties, convoys and isolated posts, and wore

down their strength by small daily losses, or by forcing them to detach a

signiﬁ cant number of ﬁ ghting men to guard their communications, while

in the north the emperor had to increase the number of gendarmerie squad-

rons. But the effectiveness of these bands has been exaggerated: whenever

the French could occupy a province in sufﬁ cient strength, the guerrillas, far

from being able to prevent them, were not even able to be a serious threat

to their security. This was so in Asturias under Bonnet’s command, though

the country was ideal for guerrilla warfare. Besides, these bands were a

motley collection, and not always clearly to be distinguished from high-

waymen. Even when they consisted of peasants loyally serving the cause of

religion, they were nonetheless a terror to the rich by reason of their extor-

tionate demands and their plundering, so that sympathies sometimes lay

with the French. Bonnet was able to organise a counter-guerrilla force, and

in Andalusia Soult succeeded in creating companies of escoperelas , a genuine

national guard consisting of afrancesados . With their resistance decisively

broken in this open country, the guerrilleros would soon have disappeared.

Now without the English help, the regulars would never have been able to

hold on. Nevertheless the central junta was highly mistrustful, and refused

to allow them into Cadiz; and in spite of the efforts of Henry Wellesley – the

future Lord Cowley – they would not consent to recognise Wellington as

commander-in-chief, even after the Battle of Talavera, and the Spanish

commanders only co-operated with him in a grudging manner. The distur-

bances in South America and the opening up of the Spanish colonies to

British trade merely made the misunderstandings worse.

If Napoleon had come back to Spain after the Battle of Wagram, there

would have been no doubt about the triumph of the French forces. This

might even have been ensured if he had left someone like Davout in

command, armed with full powers. But Joseph, even with Jourdan by his

side, was incapable of managing a war like this. He did not even wield civil

authority, though he had behind him Urquijo, Azanza, Cabarrus, Canon

Llorente and others – enough to form a court, a ministry and a council of

state. But there was a lack of money, and the king only subsisted with difﬁ -

culty on municipal tolls, forced loans and paper money backed merely by

the doubtful security of a possible sale of clerical property. Napoleon

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reserved for himself the conﬁ scated property of the rebels. In the provinces

the generals were left to their own resources, and did not even receive their

pay. They laid their hands on anything that was available, and acquired the

habit of thinking only of their own sector. When Napoleon gave supreme

authority to a particular marshal, the others ruined all the plans by ill will

or negligence. Ney went so far as positively to refuse obedience to Masséna.

This anarchy was made worse by Napoleon’s habit of sending direct orders

to the army chiefs, quite apart from the fact that he was often imperfectly

informed or unable to judge properly at such a distance, so that he some-

times sent out instructions which were impossible to carry out or out of

date. Though Wellington had reason to complain of the Spanish generals,

the enemy operations were equally disjointed, and he was usually able to

beat them or hold them up one at a time.

As regards the physical and economic conditions in which the war was

fought – the mountainous nature of the country, the climate, the absence of

roads, the scantiness of foodstuffs – it has usually been said, and rightly

enough, that they were greatly to the disadvantage of the French. But it

should be added that their enemies also suffered a good deal from the same

conditions. The English were decimated by disease, and they had great difﬁ -

culties over transport. One is particularly struck by the central importance

of food supplies, which was equally vital and difﬁ cult for all the combatants.

The Spanish and Portuguese were no doubt used to living on very little; but

the English found themselves badly in need of supplies. The cavalry had

more than once to be partly dismounted through shortage of fodder. The

regulars were thus reduced, one way or another, to the habit of living like

the guerrillas, so that the peninsula might well seem to have reverted to the

days of the grandes compagnies.

The inhabitants were despoiled by friend and

foe alike, and marauding encouraged desertion. As there were many

foreigners in the English ranks, and as Napoleon sent a number of regiments

to Spain from vassal or allied countries, deserters commonly passed from

one camp to the other, or fraternised among themselves, and bands were

formed operating solely on their own behalf. The French, who were used to

making shift with living on the country, ended up by becoming demoral-

ised in this country where one was perpetually hungry and where nothing

was to be had but by stealth and force of arms. Too often their commanders

set them a bad example of extortion – for example, Sébastiani, Kellermann,

Soult, Duhesme in Barcelona, and Godinot, who, when his conduct was

subject to an ofﬁ cial inquiry, committed suicide in 1811. The English

* [Mercenary bands of looters in the Hundred Years War.]

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compensated for their sufferings by appalling orgies of drunkenness, and by

the systematic plunder of all towns taken by assault. From the strategic point

of view, Wellington’s unwillingness to stray too far from his base and to

return to it after each campaign is clearly to be explained by the scarcity of

provisions and the difﬁ culties of transport. Hence also his justiﬁ able conﬁ -

dence in face of the French offensives. He reckoned he would be able to

hold them up by laying waste the intervening countryside, calculating that

if they had achieved the impossible in the way of supplies, mules and

wagons would certainly be lacking. Things would have been very different if

Napoleon had come over in person to prepare the campaign with the same

care that he displayed in Russia. Since he decided not to do so, the advantage

– taken all round – lay with Wellington. As he paid cash, the peasants – who

were on the whole friendly – brought him what they could. Thanks to the

British ﬂ eet, he received outside help and built up stores, while the French

were sent no supplies by their own country. When Wellington opened his

winter campaign of 1812, he took the enemy by surprise, for they were

barely in a position to begin operations before harvest-time.

These general conditions gave the ﬁ ghting in Spain a character that was

entirely different from the other Napoleonic campaigns. A considerable part

of the Spanish and Portuguese forces remained in scattered units, who

engaged in a whole series of random engagements, without having the

means to impose a decisive result, so that they alternately advanced and

retreated with monotonous regularity. When he left the peninsula, Napoleon

little imagined that things would turn out like this. In January 1809 there

only remained Cradock with ten thousand English at Lisbon, and it looked

as though they would have to withdraw, after which the Spaniards could not

hold out for long. Wellington’s arrival completely upset the emperor’s plans.

Of the 193,000 men he left in Spain, slightly over one-third were in the

west. Ney was keeping watch over Galicia, while Soult, leaving this province

with twenty-three thousand men, was marching on Lisbon, where he would

link up with Victor, who was coming down the Tagus with a force of twenty-

two thousand. Lapine, who had set out from Salamanca, was to be respon-

sible for liaison. With considerable difﬁ culty Soult reached Oporto, and took

it on 29 March 1809. Once there, he refused to move. He had dreams of

becoming king of Portugal, and spent his time organising petitions in his

favour. The army, moreover, did not take at all kindly to the prospect of

a King Nicholas – for that was Soult’s Christian name – and the discontent

grew to such proportions that it culminated in a plot and Argenton got in

touch with the English. Meanwhile Victor was driving Cuesta back beyond

the Guadiuna. Having beaten him on 28 March at Medellin, though without

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destroying his forces, he called for reinforcements from Lapine; but they

allowed the Alcantara bridge to be cut – the only one available for crossing

the Tagus and entering Portugal. Wellington was therefore able to land

unmolested on 22 April, concentrate twenty-ﬁ ve thousand men at Coïmbra,

and attack the two French armies one at a time.

In the ﬁ rst place he turned his attention to Soult, who was off his guard

and lost Oporto on 12 May. As Beresford had crossed the Douro upstream,

Soult could only escape via the mountains, which meant abandoning his

artillery. Instead of planning joint operations to save, at least, Galicia, Ney

and Soult proceeded to go their separate ways, and ﬁ nally evacuated the

province and retired on León and Zamorra respectively. Wellington had

turned back on Victor, but having experienced a great deal of difﬁ culty in

getting ready and coming to an agreement with Cuesta, he did not resume

action till 27 June. Victor fell back towards Madrid so as to link up with

Sébastiani. They were also counting on help from Mortier; but Napoleon

had placed him, together with Ney, under Soult’s orders, with instructions

to cut off Wellington’s line of retreat by crossing the Sierra de Gredos.

Nevertheless Victor and Sébastiani – nominally under Joseph’s command –

took the offensive and on 28 July attacked the allies, who had slightly supe-

rior numbers and held a strong position at Talavera. But they were thrown

back. Wellington, under threat from Soult, recrossed the Tagus and withdrew

towards Badajoz; nevertheless, his success made a great stir and he was

raised to the peerage as Viscount Wellington. Although there were ﬁ ve

French corps grouped together and the road to Lisbon lay open, no one

dared take the initiative and boldly seize this chance: the armies simply went

their several ways, and Sébastiani hastened to repulse Venegas’s army at

Almonacid, which had come from the direction of La Mancha.

Wellington, however, was not at all satisﬁ ed with this Spanish commander

or with Cuesta, or with the junta’s refusal to make him commander-in-

chief; from now on he therefore went his own way. He had a feeling, more-

over, that after his defeat of Austria Napoleon would launch a great effort

against him in Spain, and thought it wise to reserve his strength and organise

a fortiﬁ ed base in Portugal. The junta disregarded this plan and ordered a

general offensive. Areizaga advanced towards the Tagus at the head of the

Andalusian army and was routed by Soult at Ocaña on 29 November. Del

Parque made a momentary entry into Salamanca; but Kellermann came on

the scene and on 28 November overwhelmed the Estremadura army, led by

Albuquerque, at Alba de Tormes. Joseph and Soult then suggested the

conquest of Andalusia and Napoleon gave way, lured on by the prospect of

the resources to be found there. The French occupied Seville on 1 February