LIV. 1808. 26. Accumula tanos invaders. Dupont remained several days at Cordova, but learning CHAP. that the insurrection had spread, and was gathering strength in all directions, and finding his communications with Madrid intercepted by the patriot bands in his rear, he deemed it imprudent to make any farther tion of forces advance in the direction of Seville. Meanwhile the under Casinsurgents closed around and hemmed him in on every round the side. The armed peasants of Jaen and its vicinity crossed the Guadalquivir, and overwhelmed the detachment left at Andujar in charge of the sick there, and with savage cruelty, in revenge for the sack of Cordova, put them all to death; the smugglers of the Sierra Morena, relinquishing their illicit traffic for a more heart-stirring conflict, issued from their gloomy retreats, and beset all the passes of their inaccessible mountains. Even the peasants of La Mancha had caught the flame; the magazines of Mudela had fallen into their power; the sick at Manzanares had been barbarously put to the sword; the roads were so beset that even considerable detachments in the rear were captured or defeated; General Roize, with a body of four hundred convalescents, was overthrown in the open plains of La Mancha; and after having joined five hundred light horse under General Belair, the united array was deemed inadequate to forcing the passes of the Sierra Morena, and fell back towards Toledo. These accumulating disasters, which were greatly magnified by popular rumour, and the impossibility of getting any correct detail of the facts from the general interruption of the communications, produced such an impression on Dupont, that he deemed it hopeless to attempt any 1 Foy, iii. farther advance into Andalusia; a resolution which Tor. ii. 325. proved the salvation of that province, and, in the end, of Nap. i. 114. Spain;1 for such was the state of anarchy and irresolution taken in 1236 by Ferdinand King of Castile. These terrible scenes had no excuse in the losses sustained by the conqueror; for the attack of the town had not cost them ten men, and the total success of the day had only weakened them by thirty killed and eighty wounded." Toreno, though a decided liberal Spanish historian, observes,-"Rushing into the town, the French proceeded, killing or wounding all those whom they met on their road: they sacked the houses, the temples, even the humblest dwellings of the poor. The ancient and celebrated cathedral became the prey of the insatiable and destructive rapacity of the stranger. The massacre was great, the quantity of precious spoil collected immense. From the single depots of the Treasury and the Consolidation, Dupont obtained ten million reals, besides the sums extracted from public and private places of deposit. It was thus that a population was delivered up to plunder which had neither made nor attempted the slightest resistance."-See Foy, iii. 230, 231; and TORENO, i. 322. 234, 236. LIV. 1808. CHAP. which prevailed among the troops intrusted with its defence, that, had he advanced boldly forward and followed up his successes at Alcolea and Cordova with the requisite vigour, Seville would at once have fallen into his power, and the insurrection in that quarter been entirely crushed. 27. Dismay of the Spaniards tion of Dupont. Castanos, indeed, was at the head of eight thousand regular troops, drawn from the camp at St Roque, and an enthusiastic but undisciplined body of thirty thousand and irresolu- armed peasants assembled at Utrera. But the latter part of his force was incapable of any efficient operations in the field; and such was the consternation occasioned, in the first instance, by the success of the French irruption, that the general-in-chief was desirous of retiring to Cadiz, and making its impregnable fortifications the citadel of an intrenched camp, where the new levies might acquire some degree of consistency, and the support of ten or twelve thousand British troops might, in case of necessity, be obtained. The authority of Castanos was merely nominal; Morla, governor of Cadiz, was his enemy; and the junta of Seville issued orders independent of either: so that the former general, despairing of success, had actually, under pretence of providing for the security of Cadiz, embarked his heavy artillery for that fortress. From this disgrace, however, the Spaniards were relieved by the apprehensions of the enemy. A pause in an invading army is dangerous at all times, but especially so when an insurrection is to be put down by the moral influence of its advance; and the hesitation of Dupont at Cordova proved his ruin. He remained ten days inactive there, during which the whole effect of his victory was lost. Confidence returned to the enemy from the hourly increase of their force, and the evident alarm of the French general and at length some 1 Nap. 1. 114, intercepted despatches to Savary were found to contain so doleful an account of his situation, that not only were all thoughts of retiring farther laid aside, but it was resolved immediately to advance, and surround the enemy in the city which he had conquered.1 115. Foy, iii. 234, 236. Nap. i. App. : The fears of Dupont, however, prevented Cordova from a second time becoming the theatre of military license. Detachments of peasants had occupied all the passes in LIV. 1808. 28. Retreat of the Sierra Morena: troops, including some regulars, were CHAP. accumulating in the direction of Grenada, with the design of seizing Carolina and intercepting his retreat to La Mancha. Fame had magnified the amount of the forces descending into the plains of Leon, under Cuesta Dupont to and Blake; and rumours had got abroad that Savary was Andujar and Baylen. fortifying himself in the Retiro. Unable to withstand the sinister presentiments consequent on such an accumulation of adverse incidents, the French general resolved to fall back; and accordingly broke up from Cordova on the 16th June, and three days afterwards reached Andujar, June 16. without having experienced any molestation. A strong June 19. detachment was immediately sent off to Jaen, which defeated the insurgents, and took a severe but not undeserved vengeance on the inhabitants for their barbarity to the sick at Andujar, by sacking and burning the town.* The supplies, however, which Dupont expected from this excursion were not obtained; for every article of provisions which the town contained was consumed in the conflagration. Both sides after this continued inactive for above three weeks, during which the sick in the French hospital, as usual with a retreating army, rapidly augmented; while the Spanish forces, under Castanos, which now approached, increased so much, by reinforcements from all quarters, that that general could now muster above twenty thousand regular infantry and two thousand horse, besides a motley crowd of thirty thousand armed peasants under his command. During the same period, however, powerful reinforcements reached the French general; for Gobert, with his division, whose absence from Leon Napoleon had so bitterly lamented, joined Vedel at BAYLEN on the 15th July, and a brigade 1 Nap. i. 117, was pushed on under Leger Belair to open up the com- 120. Foy, munication with the main body at Andujar. But the iv. 49, 52. Spanish generals, now deeming the escape of the French 360. impossible, were taking measures for enveloping the whole, and forcing them to surrender.1 That severity, however deplorable, was perhaps rendered necessary, and therefore justified, by the massacre of the sick at Andujar; but in the prosecution of their orders the French soldiers proceeded to excesses as wanton as they were savage; massacring old men, and infants at the breast, and exercising the last acts of cruelty on some sick friars of St Domingo and St Augustine who could not escape from the town.-TORENO, i. 326. Tor. i. 326, CHAP. LIV. 1808. 29. In truth the long delay afforded by the inactivity of Dupont had been turned to the best account by the Spanish general. In the interim he contrived to give a certain degree of consistence to his numerous but tumulof attack, and tuous array of peasants: while the disembarkation of preparatory General Spencer with five thousand English troops, on both sides. chiefly from Gibraltar, at Port St Mary's, near Cadiz, Spanish plan movements 1 Ante, c. 25, § 59. July 11. July 14. July 16. inspired general confidence by securing a rallying point in case of disaster. At length the regular troops from Grenada, St Roque, Cadiz, and other quarters having all assembled, to the number of eight-and-twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse, a combined plan of attack was agreed on. The army was arranged in three divisions; the first, under Reding, a Swiss general of distinction, brother to the intrepid patriot of the same name,1 received orders to cross the Guadalquivir at Mengibar, and move to Baylen, in the rear of Andujar, where Dupont still was, and between that town and the Sierra Morena; the second, under Coupigny, was to pass the same river at Villa-Neuva and support Reding; while Castanos, with the third and the reserve, was to press the enemy in front, and a body of irregular troops, under Don Juan de la Cruz, passing by the bridge of Marmolejo, to harass his right flank. A glance at any good map of the country will at once show that the effect of these dispositions, which were ably combined, was to throw a preponderating force in the rear of Dupont directly on his line of communications, and either separate the division under his immediate command from those of Gobert and Vedel, or interpose between them both and the road to Madrid. They were promptly and vigorously carried into execution. Castanos, with the troops under his immediate command, approached to within a league of Andujar, and so alarmed Dupont that he sent to Vedel for assistance, who came with his whole division, except thirteen hundred men left to guard the ford of Mengibar. This small body was there attacked, two days after, by Reding with eight thousand men, defeated, and the passage of the river forced; Gobert, advancing from Baylen to support the broken detachment, received a ball in the forehead, and fell dead on the spot. The French in dismay retreated to Baylen; and the Spaniards, CHAP. LIV. 1808. under Reding, seeing themselves interposed in this manner between Gobert and Vedel, with forces little superior to either, taken singly, also retired in the night by the ford to the other bank of the river. But this bold irruption into the middle of their line of march, and the disaster of Gobert, spread consternation through the army. A loud cannonade, heard the whole day from the side of Andujar, where Castanos was engaging the atten- 1 Tor. i. 360, tion of Dupont, induced the belief that they were beset iv. 59, 66. on all sides; and the accounts which reached both armies Jom. iii. 60, 61. Nap. i. in the evening of the disaster experienced before Valencia, 120, 121. increased the confidence of the Spaniards as much as it depressed the feelings of the French soldiers.1 * In the whole French army there was not a general of division who bore a higher character than Dupont ; and 363. Foy, 30. when he set out for Andalusia, in command of so con- Character of siderable a force, it was universally believed that he Dupont. would win his marshal's baton at Cadiz. In 1801, he had distinguished himself, under Brune, in the winter campaign with the Austrians on the Italian plains: in 1805, his gallant conduct had eminently contributed to the glorious triumph at Ulm: in 1807, he had been not less conspicuous in the Polish war at Eylau and Friedland. His courage was unquestionable: his talents of no ordinary kind. But it is one thing to possess the spirit and intrepidity which makes a good general of division or colonel of grenadiers; it is another and a very different thing to be endowed with the moral resolution which is requisite to withstand disaster, and act with the decision and energy indispensable in a general-in-chief. In the situation in which he was now placed there was but one course to adopt, and that was, to mass all his forces together, and bear down in a single column upon the 2 Foy, iv. 67, enemy, so as to reopen his communications, and secure, 363. Jom. at all hazards, his retreat: and twenty thousand French iii. 60. soldiers assembled together were adequate to bursting through at a single point all the troops of Spain.2 * A singular coincidence occurred in relation to the place and day of the action in which General Gobert lost his life. On the same day (16th July) nearly six hundred years before, (16th July 1212,) there had been gained at the same place the great battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, by Alphonso IX. over the Mussulman host of Spain and Africa, two hundred thousand strong. Gobert fell on the field still called the field of massacre, from the carnage made of the Moors on that memorable occasion-the greatest victory after that of Tours ever gained by the Christians over the soldiers of the Crescent.-TORENO, i. 363. VOL. XII. F 72. Tor. i. |