The Spanish Bride

5

If the truth were told, Lord Wellington was by no means satisfied with the result of the action at Tarbes. Having driven Soult from every position during the three days of the Allied advance, with the intention of forcing him back against the barrier of the Pyrenees, it was exasperating to find that one road of retreat had been left open. Soult, keeping his army intact, escaped by the St Gaudens road, which, running along the line of the Pyrenees for some fifty miles, took a northward turn towards Toulouse at St Martory. His lordship, deciding that it was of more importance to strike at Toulouse than to pursue Soult in force, detached Hill to follow him, and himself led the main body of his army to Toulouse by the direct road running through Trie, Castelnau, and Lombex. Weather conditions were appalling. The whole of the surrounding countryside was waterlogged, and the road was worse than a Spanish mule-track. The artillery stuck fast in mud; the wagons foundered in deep pits and ruts; even his lordship’s barouche, with General Alava in it, had to be man-hauled out of clinging slime. The army’s progress was slow, partly owing to the state of the roads, partly owing to his lordship’s mistrust of the French population. This was soon discovered to be unfounded. Although Morillo’s Spaniards left a trail of rapine in their wake, the Allied army was welcomed with open arms. Every kind of foodstuff was offered for sale, from bales of corn to cackling geese. The army, in spite of having outdistanced its supplies, had never fared so well. It behaved well, too: there was really very little unpleasantness, although at Castelnau a vociferous female loudly and insistently demanded vengeance on a handsome young Rifleman, who, she said, had seduced her daughter. No evidence was forthcoming, and it was generally felt that fat Johnny Castles had summed the matter up very justly when he remarked, slicing a hunk of bacon on to his bread, that if the mother had never been in the oven, she would not have looked for her daughter there.

But this was an isolated incident, the behaviour of the French people as a whole being so enthusiastic that an indignant sous-prefet wrote to inform Marshal Soult that the whole population had ceased to have any national spirit.

Soult, leaving five thousand stragglers along the route of his march, reached Toulouse two days ahead of Lord Wellington: a remarkable feat, considering the deplorable condition of his troops, and the fifty extra miles he was forced to cover. The country people reported that the French soldiers had worn out their boots, but as Toulouse was the main depot of military stores for southern France, this, and every other deficiency of equipment, could very soon be made good.

Toulouse, a medieval fortress, lay, from Lord Wellington’s point of view, on the wrong side of the Garonne; and was protected, in addition to its bastioned walls, by a very wide ditch, like a moat. On the northern and eastern sides, the Royal Canal made any approach next door to impossible; on the west the Garonne presented an even more difficult problem; and the only feasible way into the city, to the south, was guarded by the well-fortified bridgehead of St Cyprien. Between the canal, and the Ers river, on the east, the commanding heights of Mont Rave dominated the city, and had already been extensively entrenched. The heads of Lord Wellington’s columns appeared before Toulouse on the 26th March, and for the next fortnight his lordship’s temper was worn thin by a series of unsuccessful attempts to get his army across the Garonne. The fact that a certain measure of this unsuccess was due to his own refusal, at St Jean de Luz, to listen to the advice of his senior Engineer, did nothing to improve his temper.

His first plan, rather a risky one, was to force a passage at Portet, south of the city. He succeeded, by some clever demonstrations, in convincing Soult that he meant to cross downstream, north of Toulouse, but when the Marshal had obligingly drawn off four of the seven cavalry regiments patrolling the Garonne to watch the banks to the north, leaving the southern reaches almost wholly unguarded, the plan failed owing to there not being sufficient pontoons to span the swollen river. After they had been laboriously laid down on the bank, and launched, it was found that the bridge fell short by as much as eighty yards: a contingency long foreseen by Elphinstone, the Engineer. In a black rage, his lordship, clinging to his plan of crossing south of the city, had the pontoons moved three miles upstream, just above the junction of the Ariege with the Garonne. The bridge was thrown over during the night of the 30th March, at Pinsaguel; and in the morning Hill’s corps crossed without encountering any opposition.

Soult, busy strengthening his fortifications, did not discover the move for a whole day; but Hill, finding the ground sodden with rain, and the Ariege impassable, was forced to abandon his position, and to countermarch on Pinsaguel.

Up came the pontoons again, back on to their travelling-carriages. ‘Lummy, who’d be an Engineer?’ said the rest of the army.

By the and April, his lordship had made up his mind that he must cross, after all, below Toulouse. By the 4th April, the cursing Engineers had succeeded in transporting the pontoons to a point eleven miles to the north of the city, and there, at last, they threw a bridge over the river by which the army could pass. There was still no opposition from Soult; and by the afternoon, Beresford was across with three divisions of infantry, three brigades of cavalry, and some artillery.

Then the rain came. The Garonne, filling fast, swayed the pontoons this way and that, until the last of the cavalry were obliged to dismount and lead their horses over the perilous bridge. By dark, some of the moorings had broken, and one pontoon, in spite of every effort made by the drenched Engineers to save it, went bobbing away down the river. Freire’s Spanish divisions, the dragoons of the King’s German Legion, the Light division, and all the reserve artillery were left on the western bank and Marshal Beresford, separated from this force by a swollen and angry river, felt himself to be in such a hazardous position that even a visit from Lord Wellington, who had himself rowed across in a small boat, failed to convince him that he was not in the utmost danger. ‘You are safe enough, Beresford!’ said his lordship bracingly. ‘Two such armies as Soult’s could make no impression on you with that ravine in your front!’

To everyone’s surprise, Marshal Soult made no effort to drive Beresford’s force into the river. The Marshal, reinforced by conscripts, was either suffering from nervous dread, thought the English, or he did not know how few men Beresford had with him. The, rain stopped; and by the 7th April the floods began to fall. The lost pontoon was miraculously recovered, the bridge once more thrown across the river, and all but the Light division passed over to join Beresford. The Light division, moving upstream to Seilh, maintaining communications with Hill’s force, did not cross until dawn on the 10th April, and by that time his lordship had moved his troops forward to the outer defences of Toulouse, and Vivian’s cavalry had started hostilities by engaging in a brief but glorious skirmish with the French dragoons.