Then began the English retreat to the Douro; disgraceful as well as disastrous. The confusion, bad conduct, and insubordination of the army were extraordinary; it seemed completely demoralized by the reverse. The soldiers thought they were advancing to the French frontiers; instead of which, they were carried back again across Spain and Portugal. Thousands of the men deserted; and Wellington said his troops were “more ill-behaved and undisciplined than any army he ever read or heard of.” At the same time the Spanish general, Ballasteros, refused to listen to or obey him--a heretic foreigner--for which, on Wellington’s complaint, the Cortes cashiered and imprisoned him. The English general, leaving his army in Portuguese cantonments, went down to the junta at Cadiz, and there made such representations of the evils of a divided command, and told them so plainly his determination not to act without receiving the plenary powers he needed, that he was made generalissimo of the united armies of England and the Peninsula.
In 1813 the terrible effects of the Russian campaign began to be felt in Spain. French armies were withdrawn to fill the place of “those veteran hearts that were wasted” beside the Berezina. Wellington, the supreme chief, again advanced, and for the last time, from his base of operations in Portugal. But for this sea-washed position, he would have been driven out of the Peninsula long before. The giant Antreus, when overthrown, instantly recovered when he touched mother earth. Wellington, in his defeats, recovered whenever he touched the sea. He now turned his back upon it, and marched for the Pyrenees. From the frontiers of Portugal he followed the French, who retreated on Burgos. In June he beat King Joseph at Vittoria, and following the French to Pamplona, forced them to enter France by the Bidassoa and other points. But France was not to be invaded without a bloody struggle. Soult, who had received reinforcements from those terrific conscriptions with which Napoleon was decimating France, once more turned upon Wellington. He attacked and beat the English generals in several desperate engagements in the defile of Puerto Maya, and the pass of Roncesvalles.