The Political History of England – Vol XI

He was opportunely reinforced, and gave battle on the rugged heights in front of Pamplona to a force numerically superior, but for the most part charging uphill. Never, even at Bussaco, did the French show greater ardour and élan in attack, and it was only after a series of bloody hand-to-hand combats on the summits and sides of the mountains that they were compelled to recoil and rolled backward down the ridge. Baffled in his attempt to relieve Pamplona, Soult turned westwards towards St. Sebastian, but was anticipated by Wellington, and faced by three divisions of Hill on his right. A second engagement followed, in which the Portuguese earned the chief honours, and 3,000 prisoners were taken. At last Soult gave orders for a retreat, and in the course of it was all but entrapped in a narrow valley where he could not have escaped the necessity of surrender. It is said that he was warned just in time by the sudden intrusion of three British marauders in uniform; at all events, he instantly changed his line of march, and ultimately led his broken army back to France, but in the utmost confusion, and not without fresh disasters. One of these befell Reille's division in the gorge of Yanzi, and another the French rear-guard under Clausel, which defended itself valiantly, but was driven headlong down the northern side of the Pyrenees from which this series of battles derives its name.

The siege of St. Sebastian was immediately renewed with a far more powerful battering train, but its defences had also been strengthened by the indefatigable governor. The final assault took place on August 31, and rivalled the storming of Badajoz in the murderous ferocity of the melée at the breaches, as well as in the horrors practised on the inhabitants by the victorious assailants, which Wellington and Graham vainly endeavoured to check. So desperate was the defence, and so insuperable appeared the obstacles to an entrance by the breaches, that Graham adopted the heroic expedient of causing his artillery to fire a few feet only over the heads of the forlorn hope, until a clear opening had been made, and deadly piles of combustibles had been exploded behind the main breach, blowing into the air 300 of the garrison. A hideous conflagration destroyed the greater part of the town. A few days later the castle, to which the governor had retired, yielded to an irresistible cannonade, and he surrendered at discretion with about 1,200 men. Several hundred wounded, including a large number of British prisoners, were found there in the hospitals.

On the 30th, the day before St. Sebastian was stormed, Soult attempted a diversion for its relief by crossing the Bidassoa, and on the following day he engaged a large body of Spaniards at St. Marcial. On this occasion Wellington held the British troops in reserve, and the Spaniards without their aid defeated the French with great slaughter. So ended a well-planned and well-executed effort to reconquer the Spanish frontier. Pamplona was still untaken, and Suchet was still in Catalonia, but no further offensive movement was undertaken by the French against Spain. Both Soult and Wellington had shown remarkable powers of generalship, and there was a moment when Soult might have snatched the prize of victory by raising the siege of Pamplona. But his ultimate success was hopeless, and his failure was complete. Before the fall of St. Sebastian and the battle of St. Marcial, Wellington estimated the French losses at 15,000 men, who could ill be spared in the interval between Napoleon's last gleam of victory at Dresden and on his signal defeat at Leipzig.

WELLINGTON ENTERS FRANCE.

But the Peninsular war, in the historical sense, was not yet over. During the summer of 1813 a mixed force of British, Germans, Spaniards, and Sicilians had been carrying on an intermittent war against the French under Suchet in the eastern provinces. Their commander, Sir John Murray, who had allowed the beaten enemy to escape at Castalla, proved equally irresolute in an attempt to capture Tarragona, countermanded the assault, and re-embarked his troops on the approach of Suchet. Soon afterwards he was superseded by Lord William Bentinck, and Suchet after the battle of Vitoria was compelled to retire behind the Ebro. Bentinck renewed the investment of Tarragona, but permitted Suchet without a battle to relieve it, demolish its fortifications, and withdraw its garrison at the end of August. An ill-judged advance of the British general into Catalonia brought about another misfortune, and, upon the whole, the series of operations conducted against Suchet were by no means glorious to British arms or generalship, however important their effect in preventing a large body of French veterans from reinforcing Soult's army at a critical time in the Western Pyrenees. Wellington himself inclined to complete the deliverance of Spain by clearing the province of Catalonia of the invaders, but the British government, having in view the prospect of crushing Napoleon in Germany, urged him to undertake an immediate invasion of France. Accordingly he moved forward on October 7, leaving Pamplona closely blockaded, threw his army across the Bidassoa on the 8th by a stroke of masterly tactics, forced the strong French lines on the north side of it, and established himself on the enemy's soil. Before entering France he issued the most stringent proclamations against plundering, which he enforced by the sternest measures, and announced that he would not suffer the peaceful inhabitants of France to be punished for the ambition of their ruler. On the 31st the French garrison of Pamplona, despairing of relief, surrendered as prisoners of war.

The prolonged defence of Pamplona gave Soult time to strengthen his position on the Nivelle. The lines which he constructed rivalled those of Torres Vedras, and the several actions by which they were at last forced and turned were among the most desperate of the whole war. The first was fought in the early part of November, and resulted in the occupation by Wellington's army of the great mountain-barrier south of Bayonne, with six miles of entrenchments along the Nivelle, and of the port of St. Jean de Luz. A month later Wellington became anxious to establish his winter-cantonments between the Nive and the Adour, partly for strategical reasons, and partly in order to command a larger and more fertile area for his supplies. On December 9, therefore, Hill with the right wing forded the Nive and drove back the French left upon their camp in front of Bayonne. Then followed three most obstinate combats on the 10th, 11th and 13th, in which Soult took the offensive, with Bayonne as the centre of his operations, and with the advantage of always moving upon interior lines resting upon a strong fortress. In the first of these attacks, he surprised and nearly succeeded in overwhelming the British left, under Hope, now Sir John, before Wellington could bring other divisions to its support. In the second, he fell suddenly on the same troops, exhausted by fatigue, and still more or less isolated, but they were rallied by Hope and Wellington in person, and remained masters of the field. In the third he concentrated his whole strength upon the British right under Hill, aided by a thick mist, and by a flood upon the Nive, which swept away a bridge of boats, and separated Hill from the rest of the army. Nevertheless, that able general, emulating the noble example of Hope in the earlier encounters, succeeded in repelling assault after assault, until Wellington himself appeared with reinforcements of imposing strength, and converted a stubborn defence into a victory.

The loss of the allies since crossing the Nive had exceeded 5,000; that of the French was 6,000, besides 2,400 Germans who deserted to the British during the night of the 9th in obedience to orders from home. Ever since he assumed the command Soult had shown military ability of a rare order. Bayonne, the base of all his operations, was indefensible before he fortified it. A great proportion of his troops were raw conscripts, or demoralised by defeat, before he inspired them with his own courage and vigour. He was practically dependent for subsistence in his own country on the very system of pillage which had roused a patriotic frenzy of resentment in Spain and other lands ravaged by French armies. He now stood at bay in the south of France, as Wellington had so long stood at bay in Portugal, and continued there during the early part of 1814 a defensive campaign not unworthy of comparison with the prodigious exploits of Napoleon himself against the invaders of his eastern provinces.

THE INVESTMENT OF BAYONNE.

A respite of two months succeeded the battles on the Nive. During this interval Wellington's difficulty in paying his troops was great, owing to the enormous drain of specie from England into Central Europe. He was further embarrassed by the appearance of the Duke of Angoulême, elder son of Charles, Count of Artois, afterwards Charles X., at his headquarters. The British government was by no means committed to a restoration of the Bourbons, and Wellington deprecated the duke's appearance as at least premature. He therefore insisted upon his remaining incognito and as a non-combatant at St. Jean de Luz. Soult was in great straits, not only because he was compelled to "make war support war" by exorbitant requisitions upon the French peasantry, but also because the exigencies of Napoleon were such that large drafts of the best troops were drawn from the army of the south. When hostilities were resumed in the middle of February, 1814, the Anglo-Portuguese and Spanish force combined outnumbered the French by nearly five to three, but Soult retained the decisive advantage of having a strong point d'appui in Bayonne at the confluence of the Nive and Adour. Careful preparations were made by Wellington for throwing a large force across the Lower Adour below Bayonne, in concert with a British fleet. Contrary winds and a violent surf delayed the arrival of the British gunboats, but on February 23 Hope sent over a body of his men on a raft of pontoons in the face of the enemy's flotilla, with the aid of a brigade armed with Congreve rockets, which had been first used at Leipzig, and produced the utmost consternation in the French ranks. The gunboats soon followed, but with the loss of one wrecked and others stranded in crossing the bar. By the joint exertions of soldiers and sailors a bridge was then constructed, by which Hope's entire army with artillery passed over the river, and, two days afterwards, began the investment of Bayonne.

Meanwhile, the centre and right wing, under the command of Wellington, had forced a passage across the Upper Adour and threatened Bayonne on the other side. Leaving a garrison of 6,000 men in Bayonne, Soult took his stand at Orthez, with an army of about 40,000 men, on the summit of a formidable ridge. Wellington attacked this ridge on the 27th, with a force of nearly equal strength in three columns so disposed as to converge from points several miles distant from each other. The veterans of the French army, admirably handled, fought with tenacity, and all but succeeded in foiling the attack before Wellington could bring up his reserves. The conscripts, however, were not equally steady, and when Hill, advancing from the extreme right, pressed upon the French left, Soult's orderly retreat became a precipitate flight. The French loss greatly exceeded the British, and was soon afterwards swelled by wholesale desertions; the road to Bordeaux was thrown open, and the royalist reaction against Napoleon, stimulated by the depredation of the French troops, ripened into a general revolt.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had lost Germany by the battle of Leipzig; early in 1814 the allied armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia had entered France, and a congress was being held at Châtillon-sur-Seine, to formulate, if possible, terms of peace. The city of Bordeaux was the first to declare itself openly in favour of the Bourbons. Wellington sent a large detachment to preserve order, with strict instructions to Beresford, who commanded it, to remain neutral, in the event of Louis XVIII. being proclaimed, pending the negotiations with Napoleon at Châtillon. But the excitement of the people could not be restrained, and the arrival of the Duke of Angoulême evoked a burst of royalist enthusiasm which anticipated by a few weeks only the abdication of Napoleon at Fontainebleau. The defection of Bordeaux forced Soult to fall back rapidly on a very formidable position in front of Toulouse. The British army followed in pursuit, encumbered with a great artillery and pontoon train. After a lively action at Tarbes, it arrived in front of Toulouse on March 27, to find the Garonne in flood, and the French army strongly entrenched around the town, with a prospect of being joined by 20,000 or 30,000 veterans, under Suchet, from Catalonia.

THE BATTLE OF TOULOUSE.

The dispositions of Wellington, ending in the battle of Toulouse, on April 10, have not escaped criticism. Hill, with two divisions and a Spanish contingent, threw a bridge across the Garonne below Toulouse, but discovered that he could make no progress in that direction, owing to the impassable state of the roads. Beresford crossed the river with 18,000 men at another point, but a sudden flood broke up the pontoon bridge in his rear, and he remained isolated for no less than four days, exposed to an attack from Soult's whole army. Having missed this rare opportunity, Soult calmly awaited the attack, with a force numerically inferior, but with every advantage of position. On the 10th Wellington's troops advanced in two columns, separated from each other by a perilous interval of two miles. One of these, including Freyre's Spaniards and Picton's division, was fairly driven back after furious attempts to storm the ramparts of the fortified ridge held by the French. Beresford, however, who in this battle combined generalship with brilliant courage, restored the fortunes of the day by a dashing advance against the redoubts on the French right. Having carried these he swept along the ridge, which became untenable, and Soult withdrew his army within his second line of defences. Two days later, seeing that Hill menaced Toulouse on the other side, and fearing that if defeated again he would lose his only line of retreat along the Carcassonne road, he evacuated Toulouse by that route, leaving his magazines and hospitals in the hands of the British army. By so doing he left to Wellington the honour and prize of victory, but few victories have been so dearly bought, and the loss in killed and wounded was actually greater on the side of the victors than on that of the vanquished.

Toulouse received Wellington on the 12th with open arms, and as news reached him on the same day announcing the proclamation of Louis XVIII. at Paris, he no longer hesitated to assume the white cockade. Soult loyally declined to accept the intelligence until it was officially confirmed, when a military convention was made on the 18th, whereby a boundary line was established between the two armies. Suchet had already withdrawn from Spain, and at last recalled the garrisons from those Spanish fortresses in which Napoleon had so obstinately locked up picked troops which he sorely needed in his dire extremity. But on the 14th, a week after Napoleon's abdication, the famous "sortie from Bayonne" took place, in which each side lost 800 or 900 men, and Hope, wounded in two places, was made prisoner. For this waste of life the governor of Bayonne must be held responsible, since he was informed of the events at Paris by Hope, and instead of awaiting official confirmation, like Soult, chose to risk the issue of a night combat, which must needs be deadly and could not be decisive.

Thus ended the Peninsular war. This war on the British side has seldom been surpassed in the steady adherence to a settled purpose, through years of discouragement and failure, maintained by the general whose name it has made immortal. Neither his strategy nor his tactical skill was always faultless; and afterwards in comparing himself with Soult, he is reported to have said, that he often got into scrapes, but was extricated by the valour of his army, whereas Soult, when he got into a scrape, had no such men to get him out of it. However this might be, Wellington's foresight in appreciating the place to be filled by the Peninsular war in the overthrow of Napoleon's domination, and his truly heroic constancy in striving to realise his own idea will ever constitute his best claim to greatness. No other man in England or in Europe discerned as he did, that with Portugal independent and guarded by the power of Great Britain on its western coast and its eastern frontier, the permanent conquest of Spain by the French would become impossible. No one else saw beforehand, what Napoleon discovered too late, that a war in Portugal and Spain would drain the life-blood of his invincible hosts, and at length help towards the invasion of France itself. No other general would have shown equal statesmanship in managing Spanish juntas and controlling even Spanish guerillas, or equal forbearance in sparing the French people the evils which a victorious army might have inflicted upon them.

CHAPTER VI.

THE DOWNFALL OF NAPOLEON

The war between France and Russia, publicly threatened in August, 1811,53 was long deferred. On Russia's part the adherence to a defensive policy delayed action until France was ready. But there was another reason why the preparations for war were only slowly pushed forward. Even at the court of St. Petersburg there was a French party which retarded such preparations as committing Russia too definitely to an open rupture. On the part of France, also, delay was necessary. Though deliberately provoked by himself, the war was not altogether welcome to Napoleon. It suited him best to have a strong but friendly neighbour in Russia, and victory promised him but the half-hearted friendship of a power to which he could no longer dare to leave much strength. Besides it was necessary to make far more extensive preparations than had been required for any of his previous campaigns. Russia was too poor and too thinly peopled for it to be possible for war to support itself, and immense supplies with correspondingly large transport arrangements were needed for a large army which would have to fight at so vast a distance from its base. It would have been impossible to be ready in time for a summer campaign in 1811; the country was not favourable to transport on a large scale during winter, and the war was therefore postponed till the summer of 1812. The end of May or beginning of June was the date originally selected for the beginning of operations, as it was expected that the difficulty of providing fodder would be greatly reduced when the grass had grown. But the preparations were not sufficiently advanced by that date, and hostilities were only opened on June 24.

The interval was spent by both powers in securing allies and pacifying enemies. Early in the year 1812 Prussia had made a last attempt to avert a French alliance by inviting Russia to join in a peaceful compromise. After the failure of this negotiation her position was helpless, and resembled that of Poland before its national extinction. Russia could not become her active ally without exposing her own army to destruction at a second Friedland, and Prussia could not fight France alone. Frederick William, therefore, accepted the terms dictated by Napoleon. By a treaty concluded on February 24 he agreed to supply the emperor with 20,000 men to serve as a part of the French army, and was to raise no levies and give no orders without his consent. The king was also to afford a free passage and provide food and forage for the French troops, payment for which was to be arranged afterwards. In return for this a reduction was made in the war indemnity due to France. This was probably as much as Napoleon could have obtained without authorising a dangerous increase in the Prussian army.

RUSSIAN ALLIANCES.

Austria was more fortunate, because an Austrian war would have been a serious diversion, not a step towards the invasion of Russia. She was in consequence able to impose her own terms on France. These terms, so far as the nature and extent of the Austrian assistance to France were concerned, had been sketched by Metternich to the British agent, Nugent, as far back as November, 1811, and they were accepted by France in a treaty of March 16, 1812.54 Austria was to provide an army of 30,000 men to guard Napoleon's flank in Volhynia. In return France guaranteed the integrity of Turkey, and secretly promised a restoration of the Illyrian provinces to Austria in exchange for Galicia, which was to form a part of a reconstituted Poland. Elsewhere Napoleon's negotiations were unsuccessful. In January he fulfilled his threat of occupying Swedish Pomerania, but it had no effect on Swedish policy, and when in March he offered Finland and a part of Norway as the price of an alliance, his terms were rejected and Sweden allied herself with Russia. On April 17 Napoleon made overtures for peace with Great Britain, offering to evacuate Spain and to recognise the house of Braganza in Portugal and the Bourbons in Sicily, if the British would recognise the "actual dynasty" in Spain and Murat in Naples. The offer was certainly illusory. "Actual dynasty" was an ambiguous phrase, but would naturally mean the Bonapartes. Castlereagh declined to recognise Joseph, but declared his readiness to discuss the proposed basis if "actual dynasty" meant a recognition of Ferdinand VII. in Spain. Napoleon was enabled to say that his offers of peace had been rejected, and made no answer to Castlereagh.

Russia in her turn had to conciliate the Porte, Sweden, Persia, and Great Britain. The Turkish negotiations were prolonged, and it was only in May that the treaty of Bucharest was signed, by which Russia gave up all her conquests except Bessarabia. Sweden had offered Russia her alliance in February. She was prepared to surrender Finland to Russia on condition that Russia should assist her in the conquest of Norway. A joint army was to effect this conquest and then make a descent on North Germany, threatening the rear of the French army of invasion. The adhesion of Great Britain was to be invited. On April 5 an alliance between Russia and Sweden was signed on the terms suggested. This was followed on August 28 by the treaty of Åbo, which was signed in the presence of the British representative, Lord Cathcart. By this treaty Russia was to assist Sweden with 30,000 men and a loan, Sweden undertook to support Russia's claim, when it should be made, for an extension of her frontier to the Vistula. Shortly afterwards it was agreed to postpone the attack on Norway till the following year, and thus at length the Russian army in Finland was set free. The treaties with the Porte and Sweden were too late to liberate troops to oppose Napoleon's advance, but the troops thus liberated greatly endangered his retreat. With Persia no peace could be made. Great Britain was still nominally at war both with Russia and with Sweden. Negotiations with Russia in April came to nothing because the British government refused to take over a loan of £4,000,000, but on July 18 a treaty of alliance between the three powers was signed, in which Great Britain promised pecuniary aid to Russia. A further sign of friendship was given when the tsar handed over the Cronstadt fleet for safekeeping to the British. The formal treaty was, however, only the public recognition of a friendship and mutual confidence which had begun with the breach between Russia and France. This good understanding was shared by the nominal allies of France, Prussia and Austria. Russia was fully informed of the military and political plans of Austria, and knew that her forces would not fight except under compulsion.

At last, on June 24, Napoleon's grand army began the passage of the Niemen, which formed the boundary between the duchy of Warsaw and the Russian empire. The main body, at least 300,000 strong, was commanded by Napoleon himself. A northern division, including the Prussian contingent, was commanded by Macdonald, and, after advancing to Riga, which it pretended to besiege, remained idle throughout the campaign. The Austrians, under Schwarzenberg, formed a southern division, but they merely manœuvred, and made no serious attempts to impede the movements of the southern Russian army on its return journey from the war on the Danube. Napoleon himself drove the main Russian armies before him in the direction of Moscow. At last Kutuzov, who had taken over the command of the Russians in the course of the retreat, made a stand at Borodino, where on September 7 one of the bloodiest battles on record was fought. The figures are variously given, but the French army probably lost over 30,000 in killed and wounded out of a force of 125,000; and the Russians lost not less than 40,000 out of an army of slightly smaller dimensions. This awful carnage ended, after all, in little more than a trial of strength. The French gained the ground, but the Russians made good their retreat, and six days later Kutuzov retired through the streets of Moscow, taking the better part of the population and all the military stores with him. The French vanguard entered on the 14th, and Napoleon himself next day. A fire, kindled either by accident or by Russian incendiaries, raged from the 14th to the 20th and destroyed three-fourths of the city.