The Age of Elegance Read Free Page A

destination became known, the British, fresh from their triumph at Ciudad Rodrigo, broke into cheers. Twice in the previous summer they had laid siege to Badajoz and, for lack of proper battering and sapping equipment, had thrown themselves at its half-breached defences; twice they had had to draw off as Soult's and Marmont's armies marched to its relief. Now Marmont, with his hands tied by his master's orders and his troops scattered in the interior, was left to watch the bolted door into northern Portugal, while Soult, unaware of the sudden threat to his Estremaduran bastion, was far away in Andalusia, holding down his wide province and laying interminable siege to sea-guarded Cadiz. "Proud" Badajoz, with its fever-laden mists, its rich, collaborating alfrancesados, its record of disaster to the Allied cause, was at Wellington's mercy. 1
    While the long, winding columns of men and mules followed the two-hundred-mile mountain-track along the frontier, the guns of the siege-train moved eastwards from Lisbon, sliding up the Tagus to Abrantes and jolting over rough unmetalled roads behind bullock teams, while hundreds of peasants followed bearing shot and shell. In every wooded valley climbing into Spain, droves of mules, laden with food and ammunition, converged on Badajoz, their bells mingling with the shouts of muleteers and the screeching ox-wagons. For Britain's power to strike in that barren land of sierras and far horizons depended on her ability to feed and supply; to purchase stores from neutral Morocco, America and Turkey, to carry them across the seas to Lisbon and Oporto and distribute them over mountain, gorge and forest to the fighting columns on the frontier. The commissaries in their travel-soiled cocked-hats, the hardy active muleteers with their bright trappings and guitars, the ragged, muddy escorts marching beside them with musket and pack, the bucking mules and patient bullocks, the wicker-sided, wooden-wheeled country carts, piled with provender, were England's life-line and
    1 Grattan, 175; Gomm, 249-50; Bessborough, 221; Tomkinson, 145.
    the conduit along which her power ran. So were the transports and merchantmen courting the winds as they followed their ocean courses to Tagus, Mondego and Douro. And guarding them, far away, the battleships that had fought under Nelson and St. Vincent still kept their vigil outside the ports of Napoleon's closed empire. On Pel lew, Collingwood's successor in the Mediterranean, watching Toulon and Venice; on Lord Keith, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet guarding Rochefort, Brest and Cherbourg; on William Young—"stiffo Rumpo" to the Navy which had bred him since his tenth birthday—blockading Antwerp and the Texel; on Saumarez in the Baltic; and on the rough, hard-used men who served under them, the fortunes of England and the world continued to revolve. Without them Wellington's eight fighting divisions would have counted for as little on the battlefields of Europe as they did in Napoleon's computation. It was maritime power that magnified their strength.
    That, and the patient genius of their commander. When at the darkest hour of their country's struggle Nelson, Pitt and Fox had followed one another to the shades, it had seemed as if Britain had been left leaderless. Sir John Moore's death at Corunna had completed the desolation of the landscape. Then a young Lieutenant-General, appointed before his fortieth birthday to command her expeditionary force in Portugal, had not only enabled England to retain her foothold in the Peninsula, but in three years of unspectacular success had steadily expanded it.
    Though contemptuously called a Sepoy general by Napoleon, who had never crossed swords with him, Lord Wellington had already outmatched his finest lieutenants. Notwithstanding their superior numbers, Massena, Soult, Victor, Jourdan, Marmont, Junot and Kellermann had all in turn tasted the iron he administered. Repeatedly on the point of being driven into the sea,