Free The Age of Elegance by Arthur Bryant Page B

well-chosen positions. As they were a third again as strong as his own force, he had every reason to expect one.
    But the French, remembering Salamanca, were taking no risks either. Pursuing the same strategy as Marmont, Soult crossed the Tormes on the 14th and began to wo rk his way southwards and west wards round Wellington's southern flank, while the Army of Portugal faced him from the east. But, unlike Marmont, who had tried to envelop Wellington by cutting straight across his front, Soult took so broad and cautious a sweep that his adversary was never in any danger of being encircled at all. And as it was clear that the French were not going to attack him on his own ground but were merely hoping, without an encounter, to cut his communications with Portugal, the British commander resolved to fall back to his base at Ciudad Rodrigo. It meant abandoning Salamanca, but there was nothing now to be gained by remaining there for the winter.
    On the afternoon of November 15 th, therefore, he gave the order to retreat, so bringing the campaign of 1812 to an end. Though he had been forced to relinquish his gains in Castile and Leon, it had proved more profitable than any he had yet undertaken. Twenty thousand French prisoners had been sent to England and 3000 guns had been taken or destroyed, the fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Almaraz and Alcantara were in his hands, and Santander and the Asturian coast ports had been won by Popham and the guerrillas as a sea base for future operations. A British force from Sicily was established at Alicante in the east, and Estremadura and the whole of the south had been liberated. Indeed, the very concentration of French armies that had driven Wellington from Madrid and Valladolid had given to the Spanish guerrillas and patriot armies the control of vast new areas. With the Cortes installed at Seville instead of being penned in Cadiz, Joseph's pretence of being King of Spain was almost at an end. His very capital, though he did not know it, had been reoccupied as soon as his troops left by the guerrilla chief, El Empecinado.
    Still, it was humiliating for the British to have to retrace their steps and withdraw from the scene of their triumphs to the bleak hills of the Portuguese frontier. On the day their retreat began, the equinoctial gales set in with an intensity of cold and rain unprecedented at that season. Within a few hours every stream and watercourse was a torrent and the roads rivers of icy mud which, rising to men's ankles and sometimes to their knees, sucked the boots off their feet. For four days, until the Agueda could be reached, there was no prospect of any bivouac but the drenched ground. That night it became known that there was small hope of food either.
    For through an administrative blunder the rations had gone astray. Like every- British commander in the field, Wellington suffered much from the War Office or, as it was then called in its administrative part, the Horse Guards. In pursuit of some time-honoured formula of transfer and promotion that institution, with an Olympian disregard of his wishes, had posted his 'Quartermaster-General, Geo rge Murray, to Ireland and replaced him by an inexperience d nominee of its own. This fun ctionary, on receiv ing orders to retire to Ciudad R odrigo, sent off the supply-train by a r oute far to the north of the army's line of retreat on the assump tion that the road farthest from the enemy was the safest. By forgetting that his first business was not to preserve his store s but to feed the troops, he infli cted greater suffering and loss on them than the concen t ration of four French armies. Had it not been for the excessive caution of Soult's pursuit—a legacy of Corunna and Albriera—they 'might 'have had to fight without the strength to do so.
    For four dreadful days, as they fell angrily back, the men were Without rations. Not knowing why, they assumed some disaster had occurred and that the French in s ome