[156] No one confesses the demoralization of the French troops more than Foy. ‘Dupont voulait combattre encore.... Mais pour exécuter des résolutions vigoureuses il fallait des soldats à conduire. Or, ces infortunés n’étaient plus des soldats; c’était un troupeau dominé par les besoins physiques, sur lequel les influences morales n’avaient plus de prise. La souffrance avait achevé d’énerver les courages.’
At dawn, nothing having been yet settled, La Peña wrote to Dupont threatening that if the 1,000 men who had been captured by Vedel on the previous day were not at once released, he should consider the armistice at an end, and order his division to advance. The request was reasonable, as they had been surprised and taken while relying on the suspension of arms. Dupont ordered his subordinate to send them back to Reding’s camp. Castaños meanwhile was pressing for a reply to his demand for surrender: he had brought up Felix Jones’s division to join La Peña’s in the early morning, so that he had over 14,000 men massed on the right bank of the Rumblar and ready to attack[157]. Dupont was well aware of this, and had made up his mind to surrender when he realized the hopeless demoralization of his troops. Early in the morning he called a council of war; the officers present, after a short discussion, drew up and signed a document in which they declared that ‘the honour of the French arms had been sufficiently vindicated by the battle of the previous day: that in accepting the enemy’s terms the commander-in-chief was yielding to evident military necessity: that, surrounded by 40,000 enemies, he was justified in averting by an honourable treaty the destruction of his corps.’ Only the cavalry brigadier Privé, refused to put his name to the paper, on which appear the signatures of three generals of division, of the officers commanding the artillery and engineers, of two brigadiers, and of three commanders of regiments.
[157] Namely, 6,600 of La Peña’s men, 5,400 of Jones’s, and 2,500 or 3,000 of Cruz-Murgeon’s flying column.
After this formality was ended Generals Chabert and Marescot rode out from the French camp and met Castaños. They had orders to make the best terms they could: in a general way it was recognized that the compromised division could not escape surrender, and that Vedel and Dufour would probably have to evacuate Andalusia and stipulate for a free passage to Madrid. The Spaniards were not, as it seems, intending to ask for much more. But while they were haggling on such petty points as the forms of surrender, and the exemption of officers’ baggage from search, a new factor was introduced into the discussion. Some irregulars from the Sierra Morena came to Castaños, bringing with them as a prisoner an aide-de-camp of Savary[158]. They had secured his dispatch, which was a peremptory order to Dupont to evacuate Andalusia with all his three divisions, and fall back towards Madrid. This put a new face on affairs, for Castaños saw that if he conceded a free retreat to Vedel and Dufour, he would be enabling them to carry out exactly the movement which Savary intended. To do so would clearly be undesirable: he therefore interposed in the negotiations, and declared that the troops of these two generals should not be allowed to quit Andalusia by the road which had been hitherto proposed. They must be sent round by sea to some port of France not immediately contiguous with the Spanish frontier.
