STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 052
Two Safe Returns: London and Spain
7. Tales of Secret Service (13)
Two Safe Returns: London and Spain
La Romana had thus collected some 9,000 men out of the 14,000 who had been under his command. He shipped them over to Langeland, which was perfectly safe, as broad sea separated it from the larger isles. Here Admiral Saumarez arrived on August 10th with the fleet and a miscellaneous assortment of transports. The whole force embarked at leisure, was taken to Gottenborg in friendly Sweden, and thence to the Thames. La Romana asked that they might be landed on the north-west of Spain, and at Santander they came ashore on their own soil, in time to take part in Blake’s unlucky campaign of Espinosa.
The rest of their history is that of the much-tried Army of Galicia, which La Romana commanded in 1809 and Del Parque in 1810. The Marquis himself, as everyone knows, died within the lines of Torres Vedras, almost in the presence of Wellington, who had a great esteem for him, and considered him the safest of the Spanish generals.
Meanwhile Mr. Robertson was wandering up and down Germany for many a month, after his Spanish friends had got home. But he was back in London by the autumn of 1809. As an example of his occasional freaks of humour it may be mentioned that, being in Bavaria in August, he got from a colleague in the Secret Service Wellington’s bulletin of Talavera. Finding that the name and story of this battle were entirely unknown in Germany, he induced a friend who had a printing-press to strike off a number of copies of a translation of the document, and strewed them all round Munich. After which he very wisely removed to another city of refuge outside the borders of Bavaria.
After this came three uneventful years—satisfactory ones in that the Foreign Office had bestowed a good-service pension on its successful emissary—unsatisfactory as wanting in “the joy of eventful living”. But in 1813 Brother James went on his travels again. Wellington had written home to the Foreign Office that accurate information as to the mentality of Germany after the Moscow Retreat would be most valuable, and that he knew no one like Mr. Robertson for collecting news and escaping notice. The hint was taken, and the cheerful little monk pervaded South Germany all through the year of the War of Liberation, sending from time to time valuable précis of the trend of public opinion.
When the wars were over, he returned to his old monastery at Ratisbon, having apparently exhausted his craving for movement and adventure. And there he died in 1820, after having founded the first Bavarian Society for the help of the Deaf and Dumb, to which he subscribed himself the very handsome sum of 1,000 thalers, and of which he remained the patron till the day of his death. Presumably his own gift of cheerful volubility had given him a special pity for those who could neither talk nor listen to others talking.
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