No sooner did Wellington, with a flash of military insight, perceive the advantage thus offered than he flung half of his troops upon the French left wing, and made a vigorous attack with the rest upon the French centre. It was too late for Marmont, himself wounded, to repair the mistake, the centre was driven in, and, as was said, 40,000 men were beaten in forty minutes. General Clausel, who took Marmont's place, showed great ability in the retreat, but the French army could scarcely have escaped destruction had not the Spaniards, who were entrusted with a post on the river Tormes, left the passage open for the flying enemy. Nevertheless, the battle of Salamanca was the greatest and most decisive yet fought by the British in the Peninsula; it established the reputation of our army, and placed Wellington in the first rank of generals. Three weeks later he entered Madrid in triumph, and was received with the wildest popular acclamations. Joseph once more abandoned his capital, joined Suchet in Valencia, and ordered Soult against his will to withdraw from Andalusia and move in the same direction. This concentration relieved Wellington from immediate anxieties, but exposed him to a serious danger of being confronted before long by forces thrice as great as his own. He also needed reinforcements, and was in still greater want of money.
To students of military history it may seem a very doubtful question whether, under such circumstances, it was prudent to advance farther into Spain from his strongholds on the Portuguese frontier. But Wellington, who had been created a marquis on August 18, judged it necessary to crush if possible the remainder of Marmont's army which had retired northward under Clausel. He therefore left Hill with a detachment to cover Madrid, and marching through Valladolid occupied the town of Burgos. The castle of that place remained in the hands of a French garrison 2,000 strong and had been carefully fortified. Here again we may be permitted to doubt whether, after the experience gained at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, Wellington did wisely in resolving to invest and storm a fortress so formidable, without an adequate siege-train, and with the knowledge that Clausel might rally his forces in time to relieve it. Wellington himself afterwards admitted to Liverpool that he had erred in not taking with him the best of his own troops, and that he did not possess the means of transporting ordnance and military stores from Madrid and Santander, where there was abundance of them. The siege lasted a month, from September 19 to October 18; the garrison offered a most obstinate resistance, inflicting great loss on the besiegers by sorties, and in the end the attack failed. Souham, with Clausel, was closing in upon Wellington from the north, Soult from the south-east; Hill's position at Madrid was untenable, and another retreat became inevitable. It was the last and most trying in Wellington's military career. The army which had behaved nobly at Salamanca broke down under the strain of suffering and depression, like that of Sir John Moore before Coruña. The enemy was driven back in various rear-guard actions, but on the march the sense of discipline vanished and shameful disorders occurred. A scathing reprimand from Wellington, which might have been written by a French critic and which ought never to have been made public, threw all the blame of this disorganisation on the regimental officers, and denied that any scarcity of provisions could be pleaded in excuse of it.
MILITARY REFORMS.
By the middle of November the campaign ended, and Wellington's headquarters were at Ciudad Rodrigo. For the present, Spain was still dominated by the French, but its southern provinces were clear of the invaders, and elsewhere the tide was already on the turn. The Russian war cast its shadow beforehand on the Spanish peninsula; the French army was constantly weakened in numbers and still more in quality, as conscripts were substituted for veterans, and inferior generals succeeded to high commands; the Portuguese and Spanish contingents of the British army were stronger and better disciplined. Wellington himself, tenacious of his purpose as ever, received heartier support from home, where Liverpool had become prime minister in June, and had been succeeded by Bathurst as secretary for war and the colonies; and though the Marquis Wellesley, no longer in the government, complained that his brother's operations had been crippled by ministerial apathy, the Peninsular war, on the eve of its completion, was adopted with pride and sympathy by the nation.
The last chapter of the Peninsular war opens with the operations culminating in the battle of Vitoria, and closes with the battle of Toulouse. Having accepted the office of generalissimo of the Spanish armies, Wellington repaired to Cadiz during the winter of 1812-13, and formed the lowest estimate of the make-shift government there carried on under the dual control of the cortes and the regency. He failed to obtain a reform of this system, but succeeded in effecting a reorganisation of the Spanish army, to be in future under his own command. He next addressed himself, with the aid of Beresford and the British minister at Lisbon, to amend the monstrous abuses, civil and military, of Portuguese administration. By the beginning of May, 1813, a great improvement was visible in the equipment and moral of the Spanish and Portuguese troops; a vigorous insurrection against the French occupation had broken out in the province of Biscay, endangering the great road into Spain; and an Anglo-Sicilian army of 16,000 men, under Sir John Murray, had repulsed Suchet, hitherto undefeated, at Castalla on the Valencian coast, without, however, completing their victory, or capturing any of the French guns in the narrow defile by which the enemy fled. The want of unity in the command of the French army, and of harmony between its generals, was more felt than ever now that Napoleon's master-mind was engrossed in retrieving the awful ruin of the Russian expedition.
Yet Napoleon's instructions to Joseph show that he had fully grasped the critical nature of the situation. He enjoined Joseph to mass all his forces round Valladolid, and imperatively directed that at all hazards the communications with France should be maintained. The Spanish guerillas had long rendered communications so insecure that couriers with despatches had to be escorted by bodies of 250 cavalry or 500 infantry; they were now so effectually intercepted that Napoleon's own despatch reached Joseph more than two months late, by way of Barcelona and Valencia. Meanwhile, Joseph was openly accusing Soult, in a letter to his brother, of criminal ambition – a charge to which he laid himself open before in Portugal – and did not hesitate to add, "the Duke of Dalmatia or myself must quit Spain". In England, on the contrary, parties were at last united in the desire to bring the war to a triumphant end, and parliament grudged neither men nor money to aid Wellington's plan of campaign. It was, then, under happier auspices than in former years that he broke up from his cantonments then stationed on the Coa, a little to the north-west of Ciudad Rodrigo, and set forward with 70,000 British and Portuguese troops, besides 20,000 Spaniards, to drive the French out of Spain. So confident was he of success that, as Napier relates, he waved his hand in crossing the frontier on May 22, and exclaimed, "Farewell, Portugal".50
VITORIA.
He advanced by the valley of the Douro; then, turning to the north-east, he compelled the French to evacuate Burgos, and passed the Ebro on June 13. Graham in command of his left wing there joined him, after forcing his way by immense efforts across the mountains of the Portuguese frontier. Hill, commanding the right wing of his composite but united army, was already with him. A depot for his commissariat and a military hospital were established at Santander, where a British fleet was lying, and whence he could draw his supplies direct from home. The French army, under Joseph and Marshal Jourdan, fell back before him by a forced night march on the 19th and took up its position in front of Vitoria, in the province of Biscay. Here, on the plain of the river Zadorra, was fought on the 21st the greatest battle of the Peninsular war. Wellington had encountered serious physical difficulties in his passage from the valley of the Ebro to that of the Zadorra; but for once his plans had been executed with admirable precision, and all his troops arrived at the appointed time on the field of battle. The French, conscious of their impending expulsion from Spain, were encumbered by enormous baggage-trains containing the fruits of five years' merciless spoliation "not of a province but of a kingdom," including treasures of art from Madrid and all the provincial capitals, with no less than 5,500,000 dollars in hard cash, besides two years' arrears of pay which Napoleon had sent to fill the military chest of Joseph's army. A vast number of vehicles, loaded with the whole imperial and royal treasure, overspread the plain and choked the great road behind the French position, by which alone such a mass of waggons could find its way into France.
The French army consisted of about 60,000 men, with 150 pieces of cannon,
Napier,
