Every morning at dawn, when we started out, the burning villages, hamlets and woods, which illuminated the sky, told of the progress of the French. Murdered peasants lay in all directions. At one place, which contained some fine buildings, I halted at a door to beg water of a man who was sitting on the threshold of the house staring fixedly before him. He proved to be dead, and had only been placed there, as if he were still alive, for a joke….The corpse of another Portuguese peasant had been placed in a ludicrous position in a hole in a garden wall, through which the infantry had broken. It had probably been put there in order to make fun of us when we came along….The villages through which we marched were nothing but heaps of debris.

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The most powerful evocations of the horrors of this war never even saw the light of day until 1863. During the fighting, Francisco de Goya, very much an enlightened Spaniard with little sympathy for the Church, had flirted with the new regime. He even painted Joseph Bonaparte’s portrait. But the unceasing cascade of atrocities revolted him. They drove him to produce a series of blisteringly powerful etchings titled The Disasters of War, which depicted atrocities committed by all sides. Their unflinching, deliberately obscene detail exposed the horrors of war in a manner rarely before seen in European art. In fact, they speak better to later sensibilities, which perhaps explains why Goya never published them in his lifetime.

The guerrillas, however, did not defeat Napoleon in Spain. Even when such forces as Espoz y Mina’s turned into something closely resembling regular armies (and managed to get the French to end summary executions of prisoners), they still could not hope to beat Napoleon’s men in battle. They did, however, manage to tie down hundreds of thousands of French soldiers desperately needed in other theaters of operations (particularly Russia), while bleeding them badly and destroying their morale. The Spanish war: death for soldiers, ruin for officers, fortunes for generals, ran a piece of cynical French graffiti found on a Spanish wall.

The distinction for beating the French in the field, however, belonged above all to the British and their meticulous, stern commander, Wellington. Commanding his relatively small, well-disciplined professional force but aided by troops from the old Spanish army and the Portuguese one reorganized by his associate Sir William Beresford, he carried out a brilliant series of victories: Talavera, Busaco, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vitoria.

In 1809-10, thrown back into Portugal, the British commander constructed massive fortifications and stopped the French advance. Finally, in 1813, with Napoleon withdrawing troops from the peninsula to replace Russian losses, Wellington forced the French army back toward the Pyrenees, and Joseph Bonaparte’s regime collapsed.

France had not yet been definitively defeated. It would take the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, and subsequent events in Germany, to bring Napoleon down. But France had been terribly weakened. And in the process, the Spanish War had given birth to a new, horrid form of warfare that we have seen repeated again and again during the last two centuries.

At the Battle of Vitoria on June 21, 1813, a convoy carrying the papers and treasures of King Jose was pillaged, leaving trunks, ledgers, books and silver scattered across the field — an apt symbol for the wreck of French ambitions. Joseph Bonaparte himself fled to France; after his brother’s final defeat he emigrated to southern New Jersey, where he lived the life of a dissolute country gentleman until the 1840s on land now used by Ocean Spray to raise cranberries.

This article was written by David A. Bell and originally published in the April 2007 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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