国外文学英文系列 Vol. IV.docx

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1、1国外文学英文系列国外文学英文系列 Vol.IVTitle:A History of the Peninsular War.Vol.IV.Dec.1810-Dec.1811.Massenas Retreat,Fuentes de O?oro,Albuera,TarragonaAuthor:Charles OmanPREFACEIn this volume are contained the annals of all the many campaigns of 1811,with the exception ofthose of Suchets Valencian expedition in

2、the later months of the year,which for reasons ofspace have to be relegated to Volume V.It was impossible to exceed the bulk of 660 pages,andthe operations on the Mediterranean coast of Spain can be dealt with separately without anygrave breach of continuity in the narrative,though this particular V

3、alencian campaign affectedthe general course of the war far more closely than any other series of operations on the Easternside of the Peninsula,as I have been careful to point out in the concluding chapters of SectionXXIX.The main interest of 1811,however,centres in the operations of Wellington and

4、 his opponents,Massna,Soult,and Marmont.In the previous year the tide of French conquest reached itshigh-water mark,when Soult appeared before the walls of Cadiz,and Massna forced his way tothe foot of the long chain of redoubts that formed the Lines of Torres Vedras.Already,before1810 was over,Mass

5、nas baffled army had fallen back a few miles,and this first short retreat toSantarem marked the commencement of a never-ceasing ebb of the wave of conquest on theWestern side of the Peninsula.Matters went otherwise on the Eastern coast in 1811,but allSuchets campaigns were,after all,a side issue.The

6、 decisive point lay not in Catalonia orValencia,but in Portugal.p.ivWhen Massna finally evacuated Portugal in March 1811,forced out of his cantonments byWellingtons skilful use of the sword of famine,a new stage in the war began.The French hadlost the advantage of the offensive,and were never to reg

7、ain it on the Western theatre of war.Allthrough the remainder of 1811 it was the British general who dealt the strokes,and the enemywho 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

8、of Badajoz in June,2and the blockade of Ciudad Rodrigo in August and September,were both brought to an end bythe concentration of French armies which Wellington was too weak to attack.But the masses ofmen which Soult and Marmont gathered on the Guadiana in June,and Dorsenne and Marmontgathered on th

9、e Agueda in September,had only been collected by a dangerous disgarnishing ofthe whole of those provinces of Spain which lay beneath the French yoke.They could not remainlong assembled,firstly because they could not feed themselves,and secondly because of theperil to which their concentration expose

10、d the abandoned regions in their rear.Hence,in eachcase,the French commanders,satisfied with having parried Wellingtons stroke for the moment,refused to attack him,and dispersed their armies.That the spirit of the offensive was lost on theFrench side is sufficiently shown by the fact that when their

11、 adversary stood on the defensiveupon the Caya in June,and at Alfayates in September,they refused to assail his positions.We leave the allied and the French armies at thep.v end of the autumn campaign of 1811 stillin this state of equipoise.Wellington had made two successive attempts to strike,and h

12、ad 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 ournext volume.The main bulk of the seven sections herewith presented consists of a narrative of th

13、e successivephases 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 ofthe year,in Andalusia,Murcia,Estremadura,Galicia,the Asturias,and Catalonia,and to showtheir beari

14、ngs on the general history of the great Peninsular struggle.I must apologize for the long space of time three years that has elapsed between theappearance of the third and the fourth volumes of this work.But it was impossible to producethese sections till I had taken two more voyages over the more i

15、mportant fighting-grounds of1811one round Catalonia,the other along the line of Massnas retreat from Portugal.It wasonly in the last days of September 1910 that I was able to accomplish the latter journey.It wasmade under the happiest conditions,for the government of King Manuel kindly lent me amoto

16、r-car,and put at my disposition the services of Captain Teixeira Botelho,an admirablespecialist on the artillery side of the Peninsular War.Guided by him,and accompanied by myfriend Mr.Rafael Reynolds of Barreiro,I was able to study the topography of Pombal,Redinha,Condeixa,Casal Novo,and Foz do Aro

17、uce,not to speak of many otherp.vi picturesque spots ofmilitary interest.Hence my survey of the main fighting-grounds of 1811 has been fairly completeI spent long days at Fuentes de O?oro and Albuera,walked all round Badajoz and the field ofthe Gebora,and studied Tarragona and other Catalan sites.Ba

18、rrosa alone,I regret to say,I havenot been able to visit.I have to offer grateful thanks to many possessors of documents,who have been good enough toplace them at my disposition.The most important of all were the DUrban papers,lent to me byMr.W.S.M.DUrban,of Newport House,near Exeter;the diary and o

19、fficial correspondence ofhis grandfather,Sir Benjamin DUrban,Beresfords Chief-of-the-staff during the Estremadurancampaigns of 1811,were simply invaluable for the comprehension of those operations.I had3already acknowledged my indebtedness to the DUrban papers in my narrative of 1810;but inthe follo

20、wing year,when Beresford was acting as the leader of an independent army,they wereeven more importantas my constant references to them in notes will show.A new source of high value came to my knowledge last year,through the kindness of Mr.G.Scovell,of Hove,who placed in my hands the papers of his gr

21、andfather,Major Scovell,who actedin 1811-12-13 as Wellingtons cipher-secretary.Not only was this officers personal diary ofgreat use to me,but the file of the intercepted French dispatches in cipher,with theinterpretation of them worked out with infinite pains,proved as valuable as it was interestin

22、g.Many of the originals,written on small scraps of the thinnest paper,and folded into such minuteshapes that they could be sewed on to a button,or hidden in a coatp.viiseam,had evidentlybeen taken on the persons of emissaries of the French generals,who had been captured by theguerrilleros,and had pr

23、obably in most cases cost the bearers their lives.The ciphers were of twosorts:in the more complicated every word was in cipher;in the less complicated only names ofpersons and places and the numbers of troops or dates were disguised,the bulk of the dispatchbeing in plain French.In the key to these

24、last there were several hundred arbitrary numbers used,and it was Major Scovells task to make out from the context,or the repetition of the samefigures in many documents,what the individual numbers meant.By the end of his researches hehad identified four-fifths of the names,and those which he had no

25、t all belonged to unimportantpersons or places,infrequently mentioned.A much shorter but quite interesting file of diary and letters placed at my disposal were those ofCornet Francis Hall of the 14th Light Dragoons.They practically covered only the year 1811,butwere very full,and written in an anima

26、ted descriptive style,very different from that of many dryand short journals.They contained by far the best account of the cavalry part of the fighting atFuentes de O?oro that I have ever seen,and I am exceedingly obliged to the writer sgranddaughter Miss E.G.Hall for allowing me to utilize them.I a

27、m still occasionally using notes of 1811 made from two collections of unpublished letters,ofwhich I had occasion to speak in my last preface,those of General Le Marchant,now in the handsof Sir Henry Le Marchant of Chobham,and those of General John Wilson belonging toCommander Bertram Chambersp.viii

28、R.N.To both of the courteous possessors of these files ofcorrespondence I owe my best thanks.I must mention,as in previous volumes,much kind help given me by those connected with themilitary archives of Paris,Madrid,and Lisbon.Once more I must acknowledge the unfailingkindness of M.Martinien at the

29、French War Ministry,who did so much to make easy for meendless searches through the overflowing cartons of its Library.At Madrid Commandant JuanArzadun of the Artillery Museum placed much suggestive material at my disposal,and found meone or two scarce books,while Major Emilio Figueras at the War Mi

30、nistry searched out andcopied for me a number of unpublished morning states of the various Spanish Armies.I mustalso recur to the name of Captain Teixeira Botelho of the Portuguese Artillery,my companion onthe line of Massna s retreat,who furnished me with a rich mine of information in hisunpublishe

31、d subsidios para a historia da Artilheria Portugueza.4Among my English helpers I must give a special word of thanks to Major John Leslie,R.A.,towhose researches I owe all that I know about the British artillery in the Peninsular War.HisDickson Papers are always at my elbow,and I owe him particular g

32、ratitude for the ArtilleryAppendix XXIV,which he has been good enough to compile for me.To the Hon.John Fortescue,the historian of the British Army,whom we were proud to welcome at Oxford as Ford Lecturerthis year,I am deeply indebted for his answers to my queries on many dark points,and mostespecia

33、lly for his notes as to several suppressed parts of the Wellington Correspondence.Mr.Rafael Reynolds of Barreiro,who shared in myp.ix September tour of last year,has obtained forme in Lisbon a number of rare Portuguese volumes,most especially a complete set of MarshalBeresfords Ordens do Dia for the

34、 whole Peninsular Waran almost unprocurable collection,containing every general order,report of a court martial,list of promotions,and statistical paper,which was issued to the Portuguese Army.It is absolutely invaluable for identifying names anddates,and settling questions of organization.The Rev.A

35、lexander Craufurd,grandson of thefamous commander of the Light Division,has continued,as in previous years,to place his store ofinformation concerning the campaigns of that hard fighting unit at my disposal.Lastly,the compiler of the index,a weary task executed under many difficulties,must receive m

36、yheartfelt thanks for much loving labour.I must apologize to readers for some occasional discrepancies in spelling which may bediscovered in the text and maps.They are mainly due to the fact that all along thePortuguese-Spanish frontier every town and village is spelt differently by its own inhabita

37、nts andby its close neighbours of the other nationality.I find it impossible to avoid the occasionalintrusion of a Portuguese spelling of a Spanish locality,and vice versa.Matters are made stillmore hard by the fact that the spelling of local names in Portugal(less so in Spain)seems to havebeen much

38、 changed since 1811.It is difficult to avoid occasionally an archaic,or on the otherhand a too-modern,form for a name.These slight errors,or discrepancies between names asspelled in the text and in the maps,were nearly all caused by alterations between the receivedspelling of 1811,followed in the ma

39、ps I used,and that of 1911.p.x I do not think that they willcause any difficulty to the reader,who will not e.g.find it hard to recognize that Foz do Arouce isthe same as Foz de Arouce or Casal Novo as Cazal Novo.In a few cases the critic may find a slight difference in the numbers of troops,or of k

40、illed andwounded,which are given in the text and in the appendices.In almost all cases this results fromthe fact that the official totals quoted in the text turned out not to work out in exact agreementwith the detailed list of items in the morning states or the complete casualty lists.Theseerrors,a

41、lways trifling,could not be discovered till the arithmetic of the appendices had beenverified,sometimes when the text had already been printed off.The most frequent discrepancieswere found in comparing Wellingtons totals of Portuguese strengths or casualties with thedetailed official figures.In all

42、instances the differences are small,but the Appendices must betaken to give the more exact numbers.C.OMAN.5Oxford:July 1,1911.SECTION XXIIITHE WINTER CAMPAIGN OF 1810-11CHAPTER IMASSNA AT SANTAREM.THE DEADLOCK ON THE LOWER TAGUS.DECEMBER 1810-JANUARY1811On the 18th of November,1810,Massna had comple

43、ted the movement to the rear which hehad commenced on the 14th.His army no longer threatened the Lines of Torres Vedras:he hadabandonedtheoffensiveforthedefensive.ConcentratedinthetriangleSantarem-Punhete-Thomar,with his three corps so disposed that a march of twenty miles wouldsuffice to concentrat

44、e everything save outlying detachments,he waited to see whether hisenemy would dare to attack him;for he still hoped for a battle in the open field,and wasprepared to accept its chances.At Bussaco,so he reasoned,his defeat had been the result of anover-bold attack on a strong position.The event migh

45、t go otherwise if he threw the responsibilityof the offensive on Wellington.He had secured for himself an advantageous fighting-ground:hisleft flank was protected by the formidable entrenchments around Santarem;his front wascovered by the rain-sodden valley of the Rio Mayor,which during the winter s

46、eason could becrossed only at a few well-known points.His right wing could not be turned,unless his adversarywere ready to push a great force over villainous roads towards Alcanhede and the upper courseof the Rio Mayor.And if Wellington should risk a large detachment in this direction,it might bepos

47、sible to burst out from Santarem,against the containing force which he would be compelled6to leave on the banks of the Tagus,about Cartaxo,and to beat it back towards the Linesamovement which would almost certainly bring back the turning column from the North.For theEnglish general could not dare to

48、 leave Lisbon exposed to the chances of a sudden blow,whenthere was little but Portuguese militia left to occupyp.2 the long chain of defensive works fromAlhandra to Torres Vedras.For some weeks after his retreat to his new position at Santarem,Massna lived in hopes that Wellington would either deli

49、ver an attack on his well-protected front,or undertake the dangerous turning movement towards his left.No such chance was granted him.His adversary had weighed all the arguments for and againstthe offensive,and had made up his mind to rely rather on his old weaponstarvationthan onforce.In several of

50、 his December dispatches he sums up the situation with perfect clearness;onthe 2nd he wrote to Lord Liverpool,It would still be impossible to make any movement ofimportance upon the right flank of the enemys position at Santarem without exposing somedivisions of troops to be insulated and cut off.Th