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THE

CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

JULY 1898.

FIGHTS FOR THE FLAG.

BY THE REV. W. H. FITCHETT,

AUTHOR OF DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE.'

What is the flag of England? Winds of the world declare!-KIPLING.

VII.'

WELLINGTON AT SALAMANCA.

JULY 22, 1812.

Salamanca was the first decided victory gained by the allies in the Peninsula. In former actions the French had been repulsed; here they were driven headlong, as it were, before a mighty wind without help or stay. . . . And the shock, reaching even to Moscow, heaved and shook the colossal structure of Napoleon's power to its very base.-NAPIER.

I saw him [Wellington] late in the evening of that great day, when the advancing flashes of cannon and musketry, stretching as far as the eye could command in the darkness, showed how well the field was won; he was alone, the flush of victory was on his brow, his eyes were eager and watchful, but his voice was calm and even gentle. More than the rival of Marlborough, for he had defeated greater generals than Marlborough ever encountered, with a prescient pride he seemed only to accept this glory as an earnest of greater things. IDEM.

It was a French officer who condensed the story of Salamanca into the epigram that it was 'the battle in which 40,000 men had been beaten in forty minutes.' In an epigram, truth is usually sacrificed to picturesqueness, and this oft-quoted saying is in open quarrel with fact. The battle of Salamanca lasted, not forty minutes, but six hours. Yet, in dramatic quality, it is one of the

1 Copyright by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett. All rights reserved. VOL. V.-NO. 25, N.8.

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most remarkable fights in modern history; and the tactics of the three or four weeks which preceded it—the marches and countermarches, the tangled maneuvring, the swift thrust and swifter parry of two great masters in the art of war—are almost as dramatic in their features as the battle itself.

Salamanca was fought on July 22, 1812. A little more than a month earlier-on June 13—Wellington crossed the Portuguese border, and began the movement designed to drive the French out of Spain. It was a step of singular daring. Wellington had under his nominal command some 90,000 men, but they were widely scattered, composed of four different nationalities, were ill supplied and worse paid, and the number under his immediate command did not reach 50,000. The French, on the other hand, had 300,000 soldiers in Spain, of one blood and discipline, veterans in war, and led by generals trained in Napoleon's school and familiar with victory. Marmont, who directly confronted Wellington on the east, had 70,000 men under his standard ; but the French system of 'making war sustain war'-of feeding an army, that is, by supplies taken from the enemy—caused Marmont's troops to be widely scattered. Yet he had 52,000 present with the eagles. Marmont, too, had Madrid, strongly held by Napoleon's brother Joseph, behind him. Soult, to the south, held Andalusia with 56,000 men ; Souham held the Asturias to the north with 38,000; Suchet had 76,000 men in Catalonia and Valencia.

Wellington's plan was to leap on Salamanca, capture it, and, if possible, crush or defeat Marmont before reinforcements could reach him.

He thrust hard and fiercely, that is, at the French centre, and calculated that the thrust would draw the widely scattered French armies from the extremities, and so, with one stroke, clear northern and southern Spain. In any case, the march to Salamanca and Madrid must bring Soult tumbling uj from the south, as otherwise his communications with Franc would be cut off. To advance with 50,000 troops against force numbering in all 300,000 was an act of signal hardihood. Wel lington was thrusting his head, in brief, into the lion's mouth and if, while engaged in deadly wrestle with Marmont at ti centre, the French armies on either flank closed in upon him, 1 must be destroyed.

Wellington, however, measured with ice-clear intellect, a faced with ice-cool courage, the risks of this daring strategy, a

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made his historic dash at Salamanca. There were two circumstances in his favour. First, the French quite misread his strategy. Soult, on March 26, wrote he was certain Wellington would march upon Andalusia to raise the siege of Cadiz. But Wellington, with more subtle strategy, proposed to raise the siege of Cadiz by striking at Salamanca ! The other circumstance in Wellington's favour was the total want of concert betwixt the French generals, Napoleon, whose genius alone could control their fierce jealousies of each other, was far off in Russia. His brother Joseph lacked the skill and daring of a great soldier. His more famous brother had put the crown of Spain upon his head, but he could not put within that head the brains necessary to sustain it; and his generals were loyal neither to him nor to each other. Napoleon himself attributed the loss of Salamanca to the 'vanity' of Marmont, eager rather to win personal fame than to serve France. But that same flame of restless and selfish vanity burnt in the breasts of all the French marshals. They cared more to outshine each other than even to beat the common enemy.

Wellington reached Salamanca on June 17, and Marmont, who could assemble only 25,000 troops, fell back before him. But he left Salamanca strongly fortified. No less than thirteen convents and twenty-two colleges, it was said, had been pulled down to yield material for the French forts; and these were heavily armed with artillery, while Wellington had only four heavy guns and three 24-pounders, and a very scanty supply of ammunition for even these. Marmont reckoned that the forts would hold out for at least fifteen days; and in less than that time he would be heavily reinforced from Madrid and from the north, and could then advance and crush Wellington. Wellington's attack, however, was fierce. The men who had stormed Badajos and Ciudad Rodrigo were not to be denied at Salamanca, and the forts would have fallen in five days, but that ammunition failed and gave the garrison a brief respite.

Marmont found he must do something to divert the fierceness with which the British pressed on his forts. He was a gallant soldier, a fine tactician, full of French élan, and of a half-scornful eagerness to overthrow the mere 'sepoy general' opposed to him, and drive the British into the sea; and with a force of 30,000 he advanced in very tempestuous fashion against the force covering the attacked forts. Wellington knew that a barren victory would

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