to distinguish himself. Of course, owing to the Emperor's judicial blindness as to the real feelings of Spain, he was expected to pick up large numbers of Spanish troops, besides about 8,000 Swiss who had been in the service of the Spanish king. Instead of all these, he got at most some 2,000 Swiss who, joining for their own convenience, were ready to desert at a moment's notice. Still he determined to push on to Cordova, on the way to which city he met and routed one of the Spanish armies. Cordova, refusing to surrender, was taken by storm; and the scene which followed was as disgraceful as any of those which disgraced the successes of the French. The cathedral was pillaged, and out of the treasury alone ten millions of reals were confiscated. This was the term of Dupont's victories. Frenchmen had by that time got a tolerable contempt for their enemy, who, in some instances, it must be confessed, did not deserve much else. Most of the battles already fought had been mere butcheriesat Logrono the Spanish lost 100 to the French one; at Mallen, while 1,000 of the patriots fell, the invaders lost only 20. At Medina de Rio Seco, Bessières had beaten Cuesta and Blake so thoroughly that their loss exceeded 5,000 while he had only 70 killed. But French generals could not shut their eyes to the fact that nobody declared for them; that their individual positions were safe only so long as they could support one another; that they were at best like Cæsar's military tribunes in winter quarters among hostile Gauls. Dupont ought to have been supported by Moncey, who was to have secured Valentia, just as he himself was to have marched on to Seville and Cadiz. Here again Napoleon failed by departing from his old tactics; instead of massing his troops together, according to his famous dictum about big battalions, he frittered them away in small bodies. He thought the sight of a French regiment would be enough to disperse a whole patriot army; and thus, instead of doing what he had planned, all his generals, ex

cept Bessières, were stopped on their road-Moncey at Cuenca, Chabran (who was to have supported him by marching along the coast) at Tarragona, Lefebvre-Desnoettes at Saragossa, Duhesme in Barcelona, and Dupont, who was to have knocked to pieces the Seville-Cadiz 'junta of Spain and the Indies,' at Cordova. Savary, at Madrid, saw more clearly than Napoleon could at Bayonne how critical Dupont's position was. The army of Andalusia was far the strongest of the Spanish forces, and Castaños was a much better general than Cuesta, and as full of energy as Palafox himself. But Napoleon would not hear of anybody advising him in the management of a campaign.

Help Bessières,' he kept crying, 'Dupont can take care of himself." He had no idea of what the Spanish rising really was: with incredible blindness, he wrote to Savary on the 19th June, a fortnight after the Asturias deputation had landed at Falmouth, to order that as the rebels are disarmed in each town let companies of national guards be enrolled to support the authority of the alcaldes, and to be responsible for the tranquillity of the place.' He understood Germany and Italy, but Spain was something new, and Napoleon had got past the age at which it was possible to force a fresh idea into his brain.

Dupont, then, with less than 9,000 men, finds himself in Cordova, with the road to Seville blocked by Castaños, and with the army of Grenada advancing upon his left in the direction of Jaen. No wonder

he 'executes a strategic movement' and falls back on Andujar. Here he is covered (such covering as it is) by the almost dry bed of the Guadalquivir, and has his back against the defiles of the Sierra Morena. He calls urgently for help, and Vedel's division is at last ordered up from Toledo to join him.

Napoleon had no other troops to send he could not force another conscription just then; all bis men were beyond the Rhine except three or four regiments dispersed through France: it was not till he had made things safe on the side of Austria by

winning over the Russian emperor at Erfurt that he was able to pour his legions into Spain. Just then he divided his few disposable troops, part to help Verdier in besieging Saragossa, part to support Duhesme in holding Barcelona, part to join Bessières at Burgos. Savary wants again and again to send Gobert's division down to Dupont; he is not allowed to do so till the 18th July. Dupont had surrendered on the 21st, Gobert coming too late to be of any use to him. Napoleon won't help his intended marshal; neither will he let him fall back behind the Sierra Morena: he shall win his baton by himself. Indeed the very day that the poor general is signing his capitulation Napoleon thinks things are so promising everywhere that he may leave Bayonne and take a tour through the south of France. He sees, indeed, that Dupont, in spite of reinforcements which bring his numbers up almost to 25,000 men, is the one general who is not safe, but after balf a page of argument (in the Notes on the actual position of the army in Spain on July 21, 1808') he concludes, 'anyhow he has more men than are necessary for him to achieve something grand; if he had only 21,000 men he would have eighty chances out of a hundred in his favour.'

Dupont, as we have said, had fallen back from Cordova to Andujar, a position which was supposed to close the entry of the long defile from Baylen to Val de Peñas. It is all marked on the most ordinary map; at Andujar an affluent of the Guadalquivir comes down through the whole gorge, past Guarraman, Carolina, St. Helena, and Despeña-Perros. So far so good: but, unfortunately for Dupont, there were other roads to Baylen, and even to Carolina, and to Despeña-Perros at the other end of the gorge, roads from Urengibar, Linares, and half a dozen other places. So here was the brilliant would-be marshal lying, with his cowed recruits and his half-doubtful Swiss, with a dry river-bed on his rear and his flank liable to be turned by any one who knew the least about

the country. Vedel brought him 6,000 men towards the end of June; and if he had made a dash forward with them he might have frightened off Castaños and held out in Cordova till help came. But, besides the supineness which so often seizes a Frenchman when he has been unsuccessful, he had strict orders not to move from Andujar. Savary wanted him to fall back on Madrid: this Napoleon would not hear of; so a compromise was made, destructive, as military compromises usually are, and poor Dupont, with all his dash and his energy, had to stand still with 17,000 young soldiers on half rations in an unhealthy country and in face of a savage and numerous enemy. Gobert, it is true, had brought him nearly 5,000 men some ten days before Napoleon allowed him to start: Savary in this matter ventured to break rule; but even with these Dupont did not feel himself strong enough to attack, whilst the most positive orders forbade further retreat.

By the middle of July Castaños had arranged his plans: he had two able lieutenants, Reding, a Swiss, of a well-known family, commander of the troops which Napoleon fancied would have joined him en musse, and a French émigré, the Marquis de Coupigny. It soon became plain that the Spanish could fight to some purpose when they had clever generals. On the 15th a threefold attack was made on the French, and repulsed with loss. Dupont, fancying Castaños would attack Andujar in force next day, ordered Vedel, who had driven Reding over the river at Mengibar, to send him a battalion, or, if he had not a large force of the enemy opposite to him, a whole brigade, the next day. Vedel, hearing a noise of many guns, and seeing no one in front of him-for Reding had slipped out of sight-was actually fool enough to march all his strength, except a detachment under Liger-Belair, to support Dupont. The moment he was gone Reding appeared in force, forced the Guadalquivir, and drove Liger-Belair before him towards Baylen. Gobert, who held Baylen, came up to support Belair: he was

shot, and Dufour, who took the command, retreated on Baylen, leaving the important position of Urengibar in the hands of the Spanish. Dupont at once saw the mistake that had been made, and sent Vedel back to hold Baylen, bidding him look well to Carolina and the communications with the north side of the Sierra. At Baylen Vedel cannot see a trace of an enemy; and, as the French could never get a spy all the time they were in Spain, he does not know what can have become of the enemy. He finds Dufour has marched on Carolina, hearing that Reding has moved thither, and fearing lest, if that place is seized, the pass will be closed against the French. Vedel fancies that if he does not go to Dufour he may be overwhelmed before he gets to Carolina. He therefore pushes on, without even sending scouts, to Urengibar; and, of course, the moment he is well in the gorge, Reding, who had never left Urengibar, but had just sent a few guerillas to make a diversion' on the Carolina road, joins Coupigny, and they both occupy Baylen in force.

Dupont is thus fairly cut in two: he finds out on the 18th that Baylen is held by the enemy, and immediately falls back from Andujar, with the view of clearing them out of it. His march is ably conducted; he gets off in the night without disturbing Castaños, and would no doubt, with the 11,000 men still under him, have given a good account of his opponents but that his column is so encumbered with sick and baggage. These he had placed in the centre, with the weaker half of his troops in front of them, for he judged Reding, whom he was to meet, to be less formidable than Castaños, from whom he was running away. There was fully a league between the two divisions; hence anything like mutual support was impossible. At three in the morning of the 19th the advanced guard comes upon Reding's outposts. Dupont sends up regiment after regiment to support it, but they come up so straggling that their onset wants that élan which

is the salvation of French troops; they break the first line but can make no impression on the second; and Reding's artillery, being much superior,dismounts the French batteries in a few seconds. By ten o'clock in the morning the French are pretty well surrounded. Trésia's dragoons and Dupré's chasseurs charge again and again, and keep the enemy at bay, but they can do no more: the men are worn outit is not a sauve qui peut, for there is no chance of running away; but the French have already fallen into horrible disorder. Worn out by a march of seven leagues in burning heat, they fall to fighting among themselves for a water-tank, or for a few mouthfuls hidden under a stone in the dry river-bed. At noon Dupont makes one grand effort, but he is wounded, so are most of the officers (the peasants who have begun to crown the heights all round pick them off), and 1,500 men besides; the Swiss, seeing their countrymen fighting a winning game on the Spanish side, desert. Soon the cannon of Castaños is heard on the French rear: Dupont is caught between two fires; he holds out till two p.m., and then asks for an armistice. Reding grants it; but when he demands a free passage to Madrid, Castaños refuses and says he must surrender at discretion. Meanwhile Vedel, having of course found nobody at Carolina, had hastened back to Baylen and was now attacking Reding's rear. had taken 1,000 prisoners and several cannon, when Dupont sent him word to respect the armistice. Here was another of Dupont's mistakes: the moment Castaños refused his terms he ought to have recommenced hostilities, and then Reding would have been in the same dangerous position, between two fires, in which he had just been. Here his old dash would have stood him in good stead; but his dash was gone: he was one of those men who get on admirably so long as they have it all their own way: a poet, too, like our own Burgoyne, he had even sent in for a prize poem after he had been made general. Instead of making a dash, he called a

He

council of war, and councils don't often make heroic resolutions. The council decided that all resistance was impossible, and reopened negotiations with Custaños. The Spaniard was on the point of allowing the French to retreat to Madrid when he received an intercepted despatch from Savary urging Dupont to fall back on that capital without delay. All that Castaños would now give was leave to go to France by sea, and this only if Vedel's and Dufour's divisions were included in the capitulation. Dupont had the strange weakness to accept these terms for his subordinates: arms were to be laid down, the baggage of the higher officers alone was to pass unexamined, and this only on condition that the generals would undertake that it did not contain any church plate.

Before this was brought to Dupont to be signed (on the morning of the 21st) Vedel had disappeared for some hours, leaving just a screen of men to mask his retreat, and he and Dufour were well out of harm's way. Dupont's duty, then, was clear; he ought at all risks to have refused to sign away the liberty of his two colleagues. The Spaniards, furious to think that half the French army had escaped them, threatened to slaughter his division in cold blood. He ought to have submitted even to that, if we can imagine that a modern army would have been guilty of such an outrage. He got frightened, however, and sent orders to Vedel, who had already pushed on to St. Helena, to come back again. The least he could have done would have been to send a verbal message telling him to disobey his written instructions. The strangest thing is that Vedel obeys. These Imperialist generals were not a bit like the men who had won Napoleon's empire for him: they fought desperately enough when the Emperor had his eye on them, but when he was away they seldom cared to try any of those glorious impossibilities by which their name had been won. They were mostly wealthy, pleasure-loving, intent on spoil, on pictures and plate and so forth, and not careful to risk the

material fruits of a campaign by a life-and-death struggle. So Vedel comes back, and more than 20,000 of the grand army surrender at discretion to a pack of Spanish guerillas. Poor fellows! the Seville junta refused to ratify the capitulation; and, instead of being sent home by sea, they were all except the higher officers kept prisoners (how treated we can only too well imagine) till 1814; when Dupont complained of this to the governor of Andalusia, the Spaniard read him a lecture on the gross way in which Spain had been treated by the French Emperor, and asked how he could expect any consideration for men who had, unprovoked, entered a free country to enslave it? The mistakes of the French generals throughout the whole business were one worse than another; but the grand culprit was Napoleon, who (stubborn as his nephew showed himself in this late war) insisted on directing from Bayonne a war of the conditions of which he knew nothing, and who would not let Dupont retreat on Carolina at a time when the poor fellow felt he could do nothing where he was.

But the results of Baylen are what make it so important that we may well understand the pride with which the Spaniards look on it. It was the first time any of the grand army had ever surrendered: the moral effect of it was immense, greater far than that of Cintra. At Cintra Junot got terms (too good by a great deal, say all the history books); at Baylen Dupont got no terms at all. Well might Napoleon write to Davoust (23rd August): 'Dupont has dishonoured our arms; he has shown as much folly as pusillanimity. If you heard all the facts your hair would stand on end at them.' He felt he was in fault, and so he tried to throw all the blame on his by no means faultless general. Dupont's surrender exposed Madrid on the south, and therefore obliged Joseph to evacuate his capital. It was time. He had been there a week, and the day before he ran away 2,000 servants went off from the palace as if it had been a pest-house. Napoleon recommended

his generals to hold the line of the Douro; but they thought this not safe enough, and fell back on the Ebro, leaving Portugal to the English. Verdier raised the siege of Saragossa; and Junot, making a mess of his well-conceived plan of concentrating the 25,000 men that he had scattered about in Portuguese fortresses, was compelled to fight at Vimiera just a month after Baylen and ten days after his troops were on their way to France.

But it was not in the Peninsula that the results of Baylen were chiefly seen. Napoleon's enemies everywhere felt that the world would now be able to breathe a little more freely. Von Stein (who with Hardenberg was the organiser of the Prussian land system), writing in August, 1808, to Prince Wittgenstein, says: We must be ready; we must undermine his Rhenish Confederation. Events in Spain have set everybody thinking: they prove what till now only a few of us had an inkling of.' Napoleon intercepted this letter, and at once insisted that his vassal of Prussia should dismiss his minister, whose

property in Westphalia he (with his usual meanness) proceeded to sequestrate. The German movement went on none the less; about this time we first hear of the German nation,' which now is making itself unexpectedly prominent. Maurice Arndt founded his Tugendbund (association of virtue); and, at first as stealthily as Carbonari, then more and more openly, the Germans began that movement which united all the Fatherland as one man, and gave Napoleon his crushing blow at the Völkerschlacht (fight of all the peoples) at Leipsig. And all this because Spain had set the example, and had shown, as Prussia has now shown, what a very different thing is a really national rising from a coalition of sovereigns. The one might be crushed, the other was invincible; and Baylen was a proof of its being so.

No wonder, then, to return to our text, that the Spanish are more than vexed at our habitual ignoring of what was certainly a more effectual check to France than the Cintra affair of which we talk so much.