Book Description

In this volume are contained the annals of all the many campaigns of 1811, with the exception of those of Suchet’s Valencian expedition in the later months of the year, which for reasons of space have to be relegated to Volume V. It was impossible to exceed the bulk of 660 pages, and the operations on the Mediterranean coast of Spain can be dealt with separately without any grave breach of continuity in the narrative, though this particular Valencian campaign affected the general course of the war far more closely than any other series of operations on the Eastern side of the Peninsula, as I have been careful to point out in the concluding chapters of Section XXIX. The main interest of 1811, however, centres in the operations of Wellington and his opponents, Masséna, Soult, and Marmont. In the previous year the tide of French conquest reached its high-water mark, when Soult appeared before the walls of Cadiz, and Masséna forced his way to the foot of the long chain of redoubts that formed the Lines of Torres Vedras. Already, before 1810 was over, Masséna’s baffled army had fallen back a few miles, and this first short retreat to Santarem marked the commencement of a never-ceasing ebb of the wave of conquest on the Western side of the Peninsula. Matters went otherwise on the Eastern coast in 1811, but all Suchet’s campaigns were, after all, a side issue. The decisive point lay not in Catalonia or Valencia, but in Portugal. When Masséna finally evacuated Portugal in March 1811, forced out of his cantonments by Wellington’s skilful use of the sword of famine, a new stage in the war began. The French had lost the advantage of the offensive, and were never to regain it on the Western theatre of war. All through the remainder of 1811 it was the British general who dealt the strokes, and the enemy who had to parry them. The strokes were feeble, because of Wellington’s very limited resources, and for the most part were warded off. Though Almeida fell in May, the siege of Badajoz in June, and the blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo in August and September, were both brought to an end by the concentration of French armies which Wellington was too weak to attack. But the masses of men which Soult and Marmont gathered on the Guadiana in June, and Dorsenne and Marmont gathered on the Agueda in September, had only been collected by a dangerous disgarnishing of the whole of those provinces of Spain which lay beneath the French yoke. They could not remain long assembled, firstly because they could not feed themselves, and secondly because of the peril to which their concentration exposed the abandoned regions in their rear. Hence, in each case, the French commanders, satisfied with having parried Wellington’s stroke for the moment, refused to attack him, and dispersed their armies. That the spirit of the offensive was lost on the French side is sufficiently shown by the fact that when their adversary stood on the defensive upon the Caya in June, and at Alfayates in September, they refused to assail his positions. We leave the allied and the French armies at the end of the autumn campaign of 1811 still in this state of equipoise. Wellington had made two successive attempts to strike, and had failed, though without any grave loss or disaster, because the forces opposed to him were still too great. His third stroke in January 1812 was to be successful and decisive, but its history belongs to our next volume. The main bulk of the seven sections herewith presented consists of a narrative of the successive phases of the long deadlock between Wellington and his enemies along the Portuguese frontier: but I have endeavoured to give as clear a narrative as I can compile of all the side-campaigns of the year, in Andalusia, Murcia, Estremadura, Galicia, the Asturias, and Catalonia, and to show their bearings on the general history of the great Peninsular struggle. To be continue in this ebook...