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regained the hold on eastern and southern Andalusia which he had had before the relief of Badajoz.

Those who write Wellington down as a mere defensive general, inclined to over-caution, fortunate beyond the average and of not more than mediocre capacity, will have their eyes opened if they read either Prof. Oman or Mr Fortescue on 1809. There was nothing of Fabian methods about the offensive against Soult with which Wellesley opened his operations. As Mr Fortescue justly remarks (p. 163) the passage of the Douro demanded 'no ordinary audacity,' and if the element of luck entered into the campaign, it was Soult who was fortunate. Had the Ponte Nova been properly destroyed, or had General Tilson or the Portuguese commander Silveira done all that might have been reasonably expected, Soult would never have extricated the wrecks of his army from the Tras os Montes. Wellington missed capturing Soult, but he achieved more than he had calculated upon, and freed himself to tackle the more urgent danger-Victor's corps on the eastern frontier.

About Talavera both authors are in substantial agreement. Both, we are glad to see, assign to Mackenzie's brigade (24th, 31st, 45th) its fair share for the credit in saving the day, a service Napier had overlooked. If Wellington's advance up the Tagus proved a fiasco, and if in the week after the battle he found himself in a position of grave peril, the blame belongs mainly to Venegas, the commander of the Army of La Mancha, whom Mr Fortescue gibbets as 'irresolute for any good purpose, but unswerving in the pursuit of folly' (p. 264). Prof. Oman (pp. 480 ff.) criticises the 'double exterior lines' on which operations were planned and the trust placed in the Spaniards; on this Mr Fortescue also is severe, arguing that Wellington was impetuous and over-confident and should have been warned by Moore's experience of Spanish co-operation (p. 285 ff.). But what other course was open to Wellington? To have refused to co-operate with Cuesta and Venegas would have been most impolitic and unjustifiable before he had had positive proof of what co-operation entailed and of what reliance could be placed on Spanish commissaries. He received a severe lesson which was not lost on him, but to blame him for having made the venture is most unreasonable. More

over, success was nearly achieved. But for Cuesta, Victor could hardly have escaped destruction on the Alberche on July 23: had Venegas shown ordinary vigour he had Madrid at his mercy for six days. French writers have represented Wellington as escaping destruction only by a miracle; but the miraculous is rather to be found in Ney's unexpected evacuation of Galicia, which alone made Soult's move on Plasencia and Almaraz possible (Fortescue, p. 237). All Wellington's information led him to suppose Soult's corps still hors de combat, and Ney's committed to subjugating Galicia. And it is clear that by August 6, when he was in the MirabeteMeza d'Ibor position, Wellington was perfectly safe. The French concentration had foiled his move on Madrid; but Ney's corps had to return at once to protect Salamanca against del Parque and la Romana, Sebastiani had to hasten eastward against Venegas, and Soult could attempt nothing against Wellington, much less advance into Portugal. It was only because starvation drove Wellington back from Mirabete to Badajoz that the Talavera campaign proved comparatively barren. 'If I could only have fed,' wrote Wellington, 'I could, after some time, have struck a brilliant blow either at Soult at Plasencia or at Mortier in the centre.'

But was Talavera fruitless? To check Wellington the French had had to effect a concentration resembling on a smaller scale that which in 1812 forced him to retreat from Burgos. But concentration involved evacuation; in 1809 of Galicia and the Asturias, in 1812 of Andalusia. Moreover, while Wellington lay at Badajoz, he at once covered Portugal and flanked any advance into Andalusia; and for the rest of the year the French could not resume their main offensive, having to tell off a strong force to watch him. Meanwhile Beresford's vigorous reorganisation was rapidly making the Portuguese army an effective fighting machine, and already, under Colonel Fletcher's direction, the great lines in front of Lisbon were taking shape.

Between the close of the Talavera campaign and Soult's invasion of Andalusia the Junta launched the armies at its disposal in a new and utterly futile advance upon Madrid, from which Wellington wisely held aloof. Del Parque with la Romana's old Army of Galicia defeated Marchand at Tamames, but the utter rout of Ocana, in

which Areizaga's 'combination of rashness and vacillation' involved the unfortunate Army of La Mancha, destroyed Andalusia's poor chance of repulsing invasion. Its only good result was the overthrow of the utterly incompetent Central Junta. And in December the French gained another important success by finally overcoming the magnificent resistance which the Catalan fortress of Gerona had been making ever since May. Alvarez's heroic defence of that place had delayed the progress of the French on the east coast for eight months. Hardly anywhere does Prof. Oman appear to so much advantage as when describing the operations in Catalonia and Aragon. He might well despair of so complicated a subject, but he contrives, nevertheless, to give us a wonderfully clear picture. Despite a wealth of detail the main theme is never lost sight of, and the military lessons are admirably brought out. Except that it absorbed a large number of French troops, the struggle in the east was really quite a separate affair. Together Suchet's Third Corps in Aragon and the Seventh in Catalonia, successively, but none too successfully, commanded by St Cyr, Augereau and Macdonald, usually amounted to over 60,000 men, and, while the constant minor reverses which the Catalans and the guerillas of Aragon inflicted on isolated detachments involved in the aggregate enormous losses, the reduction of Gerona alone cost 14,000 casualties. Nowhere was the resistance more stubborn and bitter than in Catalonia, and though Suchet made steady progress, reducing Lerida in May 1810, Tortosa in January 1811, and Tarragona in June, the indomitable Catalans persisted in resisting, though their fortresses fell and their field armies were routed repeatedly.

Soult's invasion of Andalusia achieved immediate success. Areizaga's feeble resistance collapsed at once; his troops dispersed ; Seville tamely opened her gates; and only the judgment and promptitude of Albuquerque in marching at full speed to Cadiz saved that all-important but ungarrisoned city. Albuquerque's action is applauded both by Prof. Oman and Mr Fortescue as the saving of the south. Soult found himself committed to the siege of Cadiz, an enterprise particularly difficult without command of the sea. Ten days after the French arrived outside the city, the entry of a British garrison, soon

raised to 8000 men and entrusted to that distinguished veteran, Sir Thomas Graham, made it practically safe. Throughout Soult's stay in Andalusia, his strongest corps, Victor's, was tied down to the blockade of Cadiz, and, mainly owing to this, the 70,000 who had sufficed to overrun Andalusia proved wholly insufficient to hold it down. and at the same time subdue Murcia or Estremadura. In January 1811 and again in May Soult moved every available sabre and bayonet into Estremadura, but each time his stay there was cut short by the dangers in which his absence involved French rule in Andalusia. If the perverse folly of his Spanish colleague, La Pena, had not wasted Graham's brilliant victory at Barrosa, Soult would have returned from taking Badajoz (March 1811) to find that he had practically all Andalusia to reconquer.

Indeed Soult's success was really a blessing in disguise to the Allied cause. Had his 70,000 been added to the 80,000 whom Masséna led into Portugal, Wellington's task would have been incomparably harder. As it was, not even the enormous reinforcements, amounting to 140,000 men, which Napoleon poured into Spain between Wagram and Bussaco ever quite sufficed for the simultaneous reduction of Andalusia and Portugal and the maintenance of the French hold on the rest of Spain. His subsequent censure of the Andalusian expedition (cf. Fortescue, p. 365) hardly comes well from him, seeing that Soult and Joseph had informed him of their project and that he had not replied to their formal request for permission to put it into effect. Once committed to the subjugation of Andalusia, the French could not have abandoned the task without great loss of prestige. And yet the success of their attack depended ultimately on the British army. Portugal flanks the advance to Andalusia, and though Wellington did nothing in 1810 to hinder the invasion and could not do more in 1811 than shake Soult's grip on the province, yet in 1812 the battle of Salamanca showed that Andalusia could not be held in the face of a successful counter-offensive by the defenders of Portugal. Wellington, as Mr Fortescue shows (p. 463), was delighted to see the French handicapped by the incubus of Andalusia ; nothing suited him better than that they should undertake more than they could accomplish instead of concentrating upon Lisbon.

Both Prof. Oman and Mr Fortescue give excellent accounts of Wellington's preparations for the defence of Portugal, the former in greater detail than the latter. The military forces of the kingdom were all assigned to appropriate spheres; most of the regulars to the field army, the militia either to fixed defences or to hanging on the flanks and rear of the French, cutting off stragglers and foragers and interrupting communications. Great defensive works were constructed before Lisbon-lines of formidable entrenchments, not liable to be turned since one flank rested on the sea and the other on the Tagus estuary, well armed and garrisoned solely by troops not belonging to the field army, the whole of which was held ready for a counter-stroke. Lastly, the country through which the French were likely to advance was systematically devastated. This expedient was not, as some French writers assume, dictated by the hard heart of a general trained in the atrocious wars of the East." It was an ancient Portuguese device, practised from time immemorial against the Castilian invader, which had never failed of success' (Oman, iii, 184). Executed thoroughly by the patriotic and frugal peasantry of Beira, it proved particularly efficacious against an army accustomed, as the French were, to live on the country. Masséna contrived to hold on longer than Wellington had anticipated, partly because the townsfolk of Santarem, Thomar and other places had not carried out their share of the work as thoroughly as had the peasantry, partly because the pressure of hunger developed among the French foragers an extraordinary skill in detecting hidden stores of food; but in the end starvation worsted him. His long endurance was no less remarkable than Wellington's success in starving him out, and was worthy of the man who had defended Genoa to the last rat.'

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A superficial study of Wellington's campaign of 1810 is probably responsible for the prevalence of the idea that he was essentially cautious and adopted the defensive from preference. Colonel Henderson in his 'Notes on Wellington,'* that marvellous little twenty-page essay which is worth all the biographies of the Duke ever published, has exposed this serious fallacy. The plain truth is

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*Science of War,' chapter v.

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