LV. 1808. Dec. 28. CHAP. relaxed during the retreat, though only of three days' duration, from Sahagun; the spirit of the men had been surprisingly depressed by the thoughts of retiring before the enemy: the officers had, in a great degree, lost their authority, and disorders equally fatal to the army and inhabitants had already commenced. But these evils were accumulating only in the front part of the column, which was suffering merely under the fatigues of the march and the severity of the weather; no decline of spirit or enterprise was perceptible in the rearguard, which was in presence of the enemy. Pickets of cavalry had been left to guard the fords of the Esla; and, on the 28th, a body of six hundred horsemen of the Imperial Guard crossed over, and began to drive in the rearguard, stationed in that quarter to repel their incursions. Instantly, these gallant horsemen made ready to oppose them, and though only two hundred in number, repeatedly faced about, and by successive charges, under Colonel Otway, retarded the advance of the enemy till assistance was at hand. At length the enemy having been drawn sufficiently far into the plain, the 10th, who were formed, concealed by some houses, suddenly appeared, and advanced to the assistance of their brave comrades. At the joyful sight of the well-known plumes, the retiring horsemen wheeled about, a loud cheer was given, and the whole bore down at full speed upon the enemy. The Imperial Guard, the flower of the French army, wreathed with 468. Tor. i. the trophies of Austerlitz, were in an instant broken and driven over the Esla, with the loss of a hundred and thirty killed, and seventy prisoners, among whom was their coinmander, General Lefebvre Desnouettes.1 1 Lond. i. 253, 256. Nap. i. 467, 189, 190. Larry, iii. 127. The destruction of the bridge of Castro-Gonzalo was so in the long galleries of an immense convent built round a square; the horses of the cavalry and artillery, scarcely less numerous, were in the corridor below, so closely jammed together that no one could pass between them, and there was but one entrance. Two officers, returning at night from the Bridge of Castro, being desirous of finding shelter for their men, entered the gate of this convent, and perceived with horror that a large window-shutter was on fire, and the flames were spreading to the rafters above, from whence a single spark falling on the straw under the horses would ignite the whole, and six thousand men and horses would inevitably perish. Without saying a word, one of them (Captain Lloyd of the 43d) made a sign to his companions to keep silence, and springing on the nearest horse, ran along the backs of the others till he reached the flaming shutter, which by great efforts he tore from its hinges and flung into the court-yard without giving any alarm; which, in such circumstances, would have been hardly less destructive than the flames.-See Life of a Sergeant, p. 143; and NAPIER, i. 467. CHAP. 1808. 46. Astorga. thoroughly effected, that it delayed for two days the advance of the French, who could not cross the stream at other points from its swollen state; but at length, the arches having been restored, Bessières crossed on the 30th The Emperor with nine thousand horsemen, and reached Benevente, continues the which had been evacuated by the English on the same pursuit to day. At the same time, the bridge of Mansilla, guarded by Romana's troops, was forced by a charge of cavalry, and Soult, passing over, overspread the plains of Leon with his light horse, and captured the town of the same name, with great stores belonging to the Spanish government. The whole army, consisting of the guards, reserve, Soult's and Ney's corps, in all seventy thousand strong, including ten thousand horse, and a hundred pieces of cannon, were, on the 1st January, united by the Emperor at Astorga. Jan. 1, 1809. The union of so great a force in that remote part of the Peninsula, was both the highest compliment that could be paid by that great general to the prowess of the English army, the clearest demonstration of the importance of the stroke delivered by its commander, and the strongest proof of the vigour and celerity with which, by long experience and admirable arrangements, the movements of the French troops could be effected. In ten days Napoleon had not only transported fifty thousand men from Madrid to Astorga, a distance of two hundred miles, but crossed the Guadarrama range when enveloped in a frightful snow-storm, and the torrent of the Esla when swollen by wintry rains. In each of those operations more than 1 Tor. ii. 189, a day's march had been lost, so that the advanced posts of 190. Lond. 256, 259. his army at least had marched the astonishing number of Pellet, twenty-five miles a-day when actually in motion, in the Guerre de depth of winter; an instance of exertion almost unparal- 48. leled in modern times.* But they were there left by Napoleon.1 On the road between Benevente and Astorga, when *It has been greatly exceeded, however, in the same country in later times, though by a much smaller force. In December 1836, the Spanish General Gomez marched from the lines of St Roque in front of Gibraltar to Tudela on the Ebro he left St Roque on the 24th November, and reached the Ebro on the 17th December, having repeatedly fought, and been driven to circuitous roads to avoid the enemy on the way. The distance was above five hundred miles, performed in twenty-five days. There is no such instance of sustained effort in modern times. Septimius Severus marched from Vienna to Rome, a distance of eight hundred miles, in forty days, or twenty miles a-day; but he had the glittering prospect of the empire to animate his exertions.-See Ann. Reg. 1836, 379, 380; and GIBBON, ch. iv. 1809, i. 47, LV. 1809. 47. But thence returns to Paris. CHAP. riding in pursuit at the gallop with the advanced posts, he was overtaken by a courier with despatches; he instantly dismounted, ordered a bivouac-fire to be lighted by the roadside, and seating himself beside it on the ground, was soon so lost in thought as to be insensible to the snow which fell in thick flakes around him. He had ample subject for meditation; they contained authentic intelligence of the accession of Austria to the European Confederacy, and the rapid preparations which her armies were making for taking the field. On the spot, he wrote an order for calling into immediate activity the second levy of eighty thousand conscripts authorised by the Senatus Consultum of 10th October preceding; and proceeding slowly and pensively on to Astorga, remained there for two days, writing innumerable despatches and regulating at once the pursuit of the English army, the internal affairs of Spain, the organisation of the forces of the Rhenish Confederacy, and the development of the gigantic strength of France for the German war. On the 3d he returned to Valladolid, where he remained three days, still indefatigably engaged 473. Tor. ii.' in writing despatches, and then returned, with extraordinary celerity, by Burgos* and Bayonne, to Paris, where he arrived on the 23d. He took back his guards, but sent on Soult and Ney with two divisions of the reserve, in all about sixty thousand men, to continue the pursuit of the English, who were falling back by rapid marches, and in great disorder, towards the Galician mountains.1 Jan. 3. 1 Nap. i. 469,; 189, 195. Lond. i. 256, 259. Thib. vii. 176, 185. Pellet, Guerre de 1809, i. 47, 48. 48. Sir John Moore retires to Lugo. The withdrawing of the Emperor, however, made no change in the vigour with which the pursuit of the English army was continued. Soult, who immediately pressed upon their retiring columns, had twenty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry under his command; and though the British army was still nearly twenty thousand strong, yet the inclemency of the weather and *He is said to have ridden from Valladolid to Burgos, a distance of thirtyfive French leagues, in five hours! This rapidity would appear incredible, were it not for the circumstance that the Emperor here had his saddle-horses arranged by divisions of nine each at every three or four leagues along the road, so that every eight or ten miles he found fresh relays of his own horses, which were in admirable condition. This was his usual practice wherever there appeared the least chance of his riding on horseback during his journeys. The remainder of the road to Paris he travelled in his carriage.-See THIBAUDEAU, vii. 194. CHAP: LV. 1809. rapidity of the retreat had in a great degree relaxed the bonds of discipline, and diminished the moral strength of the soldiers.* The rearguard, indeed, still with unabated resolution repelled the attacks of the enemy; but the other troops, who had not the excitement of combat, often sank under the rigour of the season, or yielded to the temptations of intemperance, which the extensive stores of wine along their line of march too readily afforded. The native and ineradicable vice of northern climates, drunkenness, here appeared in frightful colours. The great wine-vaults of Bembibre proved more fatal than the sword of the enemy; and when the gallant rearguard, which preserved its ranks unbroken, closed up the array, they had to force their way through a motley crowd of English and Spanish soldiers, stragglers and marauders, who reeled out of the houses in disgusting crowds, or lay stretched on the roadside an easy prey to the enemy's cavalry, which thundered in close pursuit. The condition of the army daily became more deplorable. The frost had been succeeded by a thaw; rain and sleet fell in torrents; the roads were almost broken up; the horses foundered at every step; the few artillery-waggons which had hith1 Nap. i. 473, erto kept up, fell one by one to the rear, and being imme- 478. Tor. ii. diately blown up to prevent their falling into the enemy's 193, 194. Lond. i. 260, hands, gave melancholy token, by the sound of their 267. explosions, of the work of destruction which was going on.1 The mountain-passes through which the retreat was conducted, presented, indeed, in many places positions in which a few regiments might have arrested, for a time at Increasing least, on that single road, an army; but it was thought the retreat. there was no use in contesting them, as the vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and the advancing columns of Ney's corps, were supposed to give the pursuers the power of speedily turning them on either flank. It is well known also to all really acquainted with war, that a mountainous region, in appearance the most defensible, is in reality often in the end the most indefensible of all districts, against a superior and enterprising enemy, led by a skilful general. Sir John Moore was constantly with the rearguard, doing his utmost to arrest the disorders and pro*Three thousand men, chiefly light troops, had been detached from the main body to Vigo, to facilitate the embarkation on which the English commander was already determined.-NAPIER, i. 473. VOL. XIL 1 M 49. disorder of СНАР, 1809. Jan. 5. tect the retiring columns; and at Villa Franca a sharp skirmish ensued with the foremost of the pursuers, in which, though the French cavalry were at first successful, they were ultimately repulsed by a heavy fire from the British light troops, with the loss of several hundred men, including General Colbert, who fell while gallantly leading on the vanguard. In other quarters, however, the same discipline was not preserved. Disorders went on accumulating with frightful rapidity along the whole line; and such was the general wreck of presence of mind or foresight, that at Nogales the military chest of the army, containing £25,000 in dollars, having stuck fast in the mud, the treasure was rolled in the cask in which it was contained over a precipitous descent, and became the prey of the peasantry, who picked it up at the bottom. All order or subordination was now at an end; the 1 Tor. ii. 194, soldiers, exhausted by fatigue, or depressed by suffering, 473, 481. sank down by hundreds on the wayside, and breathed Lond. i. 260, their last, some with prayers, others with curses on their lips; and the army, in frightful disorder, at length reached Lugo, late on the evening of the 6th January.1 198. Nap. i. 267. South. ii. 504, 514. 50. And offers battle, which is declined. Here, however, Sir John Moore halted, and in a proclamation issued next day, severely rebuked the insubordination of the troops, and announced his intention of offering battle to the enemy. The army, accordingly, was drawn up in a strong position, extending along a ridge of low hills, flanked on either side by precipitous rocks, from the mountains to the bed of the Minho; and it then speedily appeared that the preceding disorders of the march had at least not been owing to want of courage. Instantly, as if by enchantment, the disorder ceased; joyfully the men fell into their places, the stragglers came up from the rear; arms were cleaned, faces brightened, confidence was restored; and before the morning of the 8th nineteen thousand men stood in battle array, impatiently awaiting the attack of the enemy. Soult, however, declined the combat, though on that day he had seventeen thousand infantry, four thousand cavalry, and fifty 2 Nap. i. 485, 486. Tor. ii. pieces of artillery in line; and Moore, having gained his object of recruiting his troops, and having little food remaining in the stores of Lugo, broke up in the following night and retired towards Corunna.2 Jan. 8. 195, 196. Lond. i. 270, 276. |