CHAPTER XXII

A CAMPAIGN OF SIEGES

HE power of Napoleon may be said to have

reached its highest point at the beginning of 1812. He had shattered in turn every combination of the Great Powers of Europe; he had entered in succession almost every European capital as a conqueror. The mere recital of his victories has a sound like the roll of drums. Russia and Austria had joined with England in the effort to check his masterful rule in 1805; Russia and Prussia in 1806; Austria and Spain in 1809. But all was vain. Coalitions crumbled like houses of cards at the touch of Napoleon's sword. He made and unmade kings at pleasure. He rearranged empires to suit his ambition. "All Europe's bound-lines"—to quote Mrs. Browning-were "drawn afresh in blood" at his will.

A map of Central Europe in 1812 shows that Napoleonic France stretched from the North Sea to the Adriatic, from Brest to Rome, from Bayonne to Lübeck. The 85 departments of France had grown to 130. Rome, Cologne, and Hamburg were French cities, and a girdle of dependent States almost

doubled the actual area of the French Empire. Napoleon himself was king of Italy; Murat, his brother-in-law, the son of an innkeeper, was king of Naples; Joseph was king of Spain; Louis, of Holland. The Confederation of the Rhine, the Helvetic Republic, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, were but idle titles that served as labels for fragments of the empire of Napoleon. England, Russia, Turkey, and Scandinavia alone escaped his sway. But Russia was his ally and accomplice; Turkey and Scandinavia were mere dishes waiting to be devoured. There remained, in fact, only England -proud, solitary, unsubdued!

And yet 1812 is the year which marks the beginning of Napoleon's downfall-a downfall swifter and more wonderful than even his amazing rise. When Massena drew sullenly back from the lines of Torres Vedras, it was the ripple which marks the turn of an ocean-tide. French conquests had reached their farthest limits, and 1812 brought the two movements which, combined, overthrew Napoleon. It brought the war with Russia and the advance into Spain of Wellington. Three days after Wellington crossed the Agueda on his march to Salamanca-the victory which was to shake French power in Spain to its very base-Napoleon crossed the Niemen in that fatal march to Moscow which was within six months to wreck his reputation, destroy his whole military strength, and shake his throne to its fall.

Wellington's advance into Spain marked an essential change in the character of the Spanish struggle. It was no longer a defensive war, maintained by an unknown general against troops and marshals confident of victory. It was a war in which, at last, emerges a captain whose fame was to rival that of Napoleon, and whose strategy was to drive the soldiers and generals of France in hopeless ruin out of Spain.

The pride of Napoleon himself never soared higher than at the opening of the war with Russia. He was beginning, he dreamed, a campaign which would overwhelm all his enemies in one vast and final defeat. "Spain," said Napoleon to Fouché, "will fall when I have annihilated the English influence at St. Petersburg. I have 800,000 men, and to one who has such an army Europe is but an old prostitute who must obey his pleasure. I must make one nation out of all the European States, and Paris must be the capital of the world." The war, in a word, was but "the last act in the drama "-the great drama of his career. It is interesting to learn that, in his own judgment, Napoleon was thus aiming at London when he began his march to Moscow; and he so misread facts as to believe he was overthrowing Spain when routing Cossacks beyond the Niemen.

As a matter of fact, Napoleon was committing the blunder which was to cost him his crown.

When his many columns crossed the Niemen in June, they seemed a force which, in scale of discipline and equipment, with Napoleon for captain, might well conquer the world. Five months afterwards, a handful of ragged, frost-bitten, hungerwasted fugitives, flying before the Cossack spears, they recrossed the Niemen. The greatest army the world had seen had perished in that brief interval! In his Moscow campaign Napoleon was contending not so much with human foes as with the hostile forces of nature. His army perished in a mad duel with frost and ice and tempest, with hunger and cold and fatigue. Not the sharpness of Cossack spears or the stubborn courage of Russian squares overthrew Napoleon; but the cold breath of the frozen North, the far-stretching wastes of white snow, across which, faint with hunger, his broken columns stumbled in dying thousands.

But there were two fields of battle-Spain and Russia; and the war with Russia gave Wellington his opportunity in Spain. Napoleon starved his forces in that country to swell his Russian host. In 1811 there were 372,000 French troops with 52,000 horses in Spain. But in December 181I, 17,000 men of the Imperial Guard were withdrawn. By the beginning of 1812 some 60,000 veterans had marched back through the Pyrenees, and their places were taken by mere conscripts. Some of the best French generals, too, were summoned to the

side of Napoleon, and Wellington found himself confronted by leaders whose soldiership was inferior to his own. So 1812 marks the development of a new type of war on the part of the great English captain. He had, it is true, difficulties sufficient to wreck the courage of an ordinary general, and he had still to taste of great disasters. His troops were ill fed, ill clad, and wasted with sickness. Their pay was three months in arrear. The horses of

He had not

his cavalry were dying of hunger. quite 55,000 men, including Portuguese, fit for service. He was supported by a weak and timid Cabinet in England. His Spanish allies were worthless. Human speech has hardly resources sufficient to describe the follies and the treacheries of the assemblies which pretended to govern Spain and Portugal. Yet, under these conditions, and with such forces and allies, Wellington framed a subtle and daring plan for seizing the two great frontier fortresses, Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos, and for beginning an audaciously aggressive campaign against the French in Spain.

Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos stand north and south of the Tagus, which flows equidistant betwixt them. If we imagine an irregular triangle, of which Lisbon is the apex; one side running due west 120 miles long, reaches to Badajos; another side running north-west for 180 miles stretches to Ciudad Rodrigo; the base from Ciudad Rodrigo to Badajos

VOL. III.

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