A History Of the Peninsular War, Volume III September 1809 to December 1810: Ocana, Cadiz, Bussaco, Torres Vedras [Illustrated Edition] by Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman KBE

Author:Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman KBE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

SECTION XX: CHAPTER II — OPERATIONS IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN DURING THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1810

THE situation which had been created by King Joseph’s rapid conquest of the open country of Andalusia in January and February 1810, and by his failure to capture Cadiz, was destined to remain unchanged in any of its more important details for a full year. Soult, with the three corps of Victor, Sébastiani, and Mortier, was strong enough to hold the towns and plains, strong enough also to blockade Cadiz and to spare expeditionary forces at intervals for operations outside the limits of his own sphere of command. From time to time he sent the greater part of Mortier’s corps against Estremadura, and the greater part of Sébastiani’s corps against Murcia. But his 70,000 men were not sufficient to provide an army for the permanent conquest of either of these provinces. And every time that 10,000 or 15,000 sabres and bayonets were distracted to one of these raids, the total of troops left behind to watch Cadiz, to guard Seville, and to repress the interminable activity of the guerrilleros of the mountains was found to be dangerously small. Ere long the force that had marched out for external operations had to be called back in haste, to ward off some peril to one or other of the vital points of Andalusia.

Soult himself remained for the greater part of his time at Seville, occupied not only in keeping the movements of his three corps in unison—no easy task, for both Victor and Sébastiani had wills of their own, and even the placid Mortier occasionally murmured—but in superintending the details of civil administration. It was very seldom that he marched out in person at the head of his last reserves, to strengthen some weak point in his line of offence or defence. During the next two years he was quite as much the Viceroy as the Commander-in-Chief in Andalusia. Though the Emperor had refrained from naming that kingdom one of the ‘Military Governments,’ which he had created by his decree of Feb. 15, 1810, yet Soult made himself in fact, if not in name, as independent as the governors of Aragon or Navarre or Catalonia. The bond of common interests and desires which had united him to King Joseph during the winter of 1809-10 was soon broken. The monarch at Madrid soon discovered that his presence was not desired in Andalusia—some good military reason could always be discovered which made it impracticable that he should revisit Seville. Little or no money was remitted to him from the South: rich as was Soult’s sphere of governance, it was always made to appear that the expenses of the sustenance of the army and of the siege of Cadiz were so great that no surplus remained for the central government. When the King murmured, and appealed to Paris, his brother usually supported the Marshal{364}; it was Napoleon’s first maxim that war should maintain war, and he thought it

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