British expeditionary force, part guerrilla warfare; in fact Wellington got
better cooperation from the guerrilla chiefs, terrorists and brigands as
they were, than from the regular Spanish commanders who showed a
cynical lack of interest in anything from the British except cash and free
weaponry and ammunition. It was only in the final phase of the war, in
r8IZ-I3 that Wellington was able to dovetail all three elements and use
the guerrillas in a coordinated strategy.
The problem for the French was that they could have defeated
Wellington on his own or the guerrillas on their own, but they could not
defeat both. One hundred and fifty years later the Americans were to
learn the same bloody lesson in Vietnam: that the combination of a
regular army plus widespread guerrilla warfare and a hostile population
made military occupation of a large country impossible. What did for the
French was the deadly combination of Wellington and the guerrillas, and
the key element was the guerrillas. This is a fact notoriously overlooked
by British historians who treat the war solely as a series of set-pieces
between Wellington and Napoleon's marshals.
The French were strong enough to occupy the main towns and
strategic centres and thus contain the guerrillas provided they did not
also have to fight Wellington. But the British were merely the necessary
conditions for Spanish defeat; the guerrillas provided the sufficient
conditions. The more intelligent French commanders saw that the
requirements of military occupation in a hostile country contradicted the
requirements for active campaigning. An exhausted Bessieres wrote in
I 8 I I: 'If I concentrate zo,ooo men, all my communications are lost and
the insurgents make great progress. We occupy too much territory.'
Jourdan agreed that the military occupation of Spain was not feasible and
that any number of French set-piece victories would make no difference:
the only solution was to hold a line north of Madrid.
Guerrilla warfare meant constant threats to an already tenuous supply
line and the threat of starvation. Massena was fond of quoting an old
saying attributed to Henri Q!.Iatre: 'Spain is a country where small armies
are defeated and large armies starve.' Another marshal, Marmont, wrote
despondently in I8Iz: 'The English Army had its pay on time, the
French Army received not a penny. The English Army had magazines in
abundance, and the English soldier never needed to forage for himself;
the French Army lived only by the efforts of those who comprised it ...
The English Army had 6,ooo mules for its food supplies alone; the
French Army had no other means of transport but the backs of our
soldiers.'
This was the hidden subtext of Wellington's eventual triumph, which
marcin
(Marcin)
#1