CHAPTER I
SOULT’S PRELIMINARY OPERATIONS IN GALICIA
(JANUARY 19-MARCH 6, 1809)
After the departure of Bonaparte for Paris there were, as we have already shown, only two points in the Peninsula where the strength of the French armies was such as to allow them to continue the great movement of advance which their master had begun. We have already seen how Victor, after advancing from the Tagus to the Guadiana, found his initiative exhausted, even after his victory at Medellin. He had halted, and refused to take the offensive against Lisbon or Andalusia till he should be heavily reinforced.
It remains to be seen how the other French army available for immediate field operations had fared. Moore’s daring march and the ensuing retreat had drawn up into the extreme north-west of the Peninsula the 2nd, 6th, and 8th corps d’armée. Of these the last-named had been dissolved at the new year, and the bulk of its battalions had been transferred to Soult’s corps, which on January 20 had a nominal effective of more than 40,000 men. Ney’s Corps, the 6th, was much smaller, and does not seem to have amounted to more than 16,000 or 18,000 sabres and bayonets. But between Astorga, the rearmost point occupied by Ney, and Corunna, which Soult’s vanguard had entered on January 19, there were on paper 60,000 men available for active operations. Nor had they to guard their own communications with Madrid or with France. Lapisse’s numerous division had been left at Salamanca; there was a provisional brigade at Leon[197]; Bonnet held Santander with another division; there were detachments in Zamora, Valladolid, and the other chief towns of the Douro valley. Somewhat later, in April, the Emperor moved another whole army corps, that of Mortier, into Old Castile, when it became available after the fall of Saragossa. Even without this reinforcement he thought that the rear of the army in Galicia was adequately covered. The parting instructions of Bonaparte to Soult have already been cited: when the English should have embarked, the Duke of Dalmatia was to march on Oporto, and ten days later was to occupy Lisbon. We have already seen that the scheme of dates which Napoleon laid down for these operations was impossible, even to the borders of absurdity: Oporto was to be seized by February 1, and Lisbon by February 10! But putting aside this error, which was due to his persistent habit of ignoring the physical conditions of Spanish roads and Spanish weather, the Emperor had drawn up a plan which seemed feasible enough. Ney’s corps was to move up and occupy all the chief strategical points in Galicia, taking over both the garrison duty and the task of stamping out any small lingering insurrections in the interior. This would leave Soult free to employ the whole of his four divisions of infantry and his three divisions of cavalry for the invasion of Portugal. Even allowing for the usual wastage of men in a winter campaign, the Emperor must have supposed that, with a nominal effective of 43,000 men, Soult would be able to provide more than 30,000 efficients for the expedition against Lisbon[198]. Considering that the Portuguese army was still in the making, and that no more than 8,000 British troops remained in and about Lisbon, the task assigned to the Duke of Dalmatia did not on the face of it appear unreasonable.
But in Spain the old saying that ‘nothing is so deceptive as figures—except facts,’ was pre-eminently true. No map—those of 1809 were intolerably bad—could give the Emperor any idea of the hopeless condition of Galician or Portuguese mountain-roads in January. No tables of statistics could enable him to foresee the way in which the population would receive the invading army. We may add that even an unrivalled knowledge of the realities of war would hardly have prepared him to expect that the campaign of Galicia would, in one month, have worn down Soult’s available effectives to a bare 23,000 men. Such was the modest figure at which the 2nd Corps stood on January 30, for it had no less than 8,000 men detached, and the incredible number of over 10,000—one man in four—in hospital. For this figure it was not the muskets of Moore’s host which were responsible: it was the cold and misery of the forced marches from Astorga to Corunna, which seem to have tried the pursuer even more than the pursued. The 8,000 ‘detached’ were strung out in small parties all the way from Leon to Lugo—wherever the Marshal had been obliged to abandon stores or baggage that could not travel fast, he had been forced to leave a guard: he had also dropped small garrisons at Villafranca, Lugo, and Betanzos, to await Ney’s arrival; but the most important drain had been that of his dismounted dragoons[199]. In his cavalry regiments half the horses had foundered or perished: the roads so deadly to Moore’s chargers had taken a corresponding toll from the French divisions, and at every halting-place hundreds of horsemen, unable to keep up with the main body, had been left behind. In any other country than Spain these involuntary laggards would have found their way to the front again in a comparatively short time. But Soult was commencing to discover that one of the main features of war in the Peninsula was that isolated men, or even small parties, could not move about in safety. The peasantry were already beginning to rise, even before Moore’s army took its departure; they actually cut the road between Betanzos and Lugo, and between Lugo and Villafranca, within a few days after the battle of Corunna. This forced the stragglers to mass, under pain of being assassinated. Hundreds of them were actually cut off: the rest gathered in small wayside garrisons, and could not get on till they had been formed into parties of considerable strength. The rearmost, who had been collected at Astorga by General Pierre Soult, the Marshal’s brother, did not join the corps for months—and this body was no less than 2,000 or 2,500 strong. The other detachments could not make their way to Corunna even when Marshal Ney had come up: it was only by degrees, and after delays covering whole weeks, that they began to rejoin. The only solid reinforcement received by Soult, soon after the departure of the English army, consisted of his rear division, that of Heudelet, which came up from Lugo, not many days after the battle of January 16.
Soult was still far from suspecting the full difficulty of the task that was before him. He had been much encouraged by the tame way in which the Governor of Corunna had surrendered on January 19. If Alcedo had made the least semblance of fight he could have detained the Marshal before his walls for an indefinite time. The city was only approachable by a narrow and well-fortified isthmus, and the French could not have battered this formidable front to any effect with the six-pounders which formed their only artillery. The surrender of the place gave Soult some food, the considerable resources of a rich harbour town, and (most important of all) a large number of guns of position, suitable for use against the other fortress which he must take ere he moved on against Portugal.
This place was Ferrol, the second naval arsenal of Spain, which faces Corunna across the broad inlet of Ares Bay—only thirteen miles distant by water, though the land road thither by Betanzos, round the head of the fiord, is forty miles long. To make sure of this place was obviously Soult’s first duty: if left unmolested it would prove a dangerous nucleus round which the Galician insurgents could concentrate. For it contained a regular garrison, consisting of the dépôts and half-trained recruits of La Romana’s army, and of 4,000 or 5,000 sailors. There were lying in the harbour, mostly half-dismantled and unready for sea[200], no less than eight line-of-battle ships and three frigates. Their crews, much depleted, but still numerous, had been landed to assist the soldiers in garrisoning the forts[201]. In addition several thousand citizens and peasants had taken arms, for muskets abounded in Ferrol, from the stores lately received from England. With these resources it is clear that a governor of courage and resolution might have made a long defence; they were far greater than those with which Palafox had preserved Saragossa; and Ferrol was no open town, but a fortress which had been kept in good repair for fear of the English. But, for the misfortune of Galicia, the commander of Ferrol, Admiral Melgarejo, was a traitor at heart. He was one of the old bureaucrats who had only followed the patriotic cause because it seemed for the moment to be in the ascendant; if patriotism did not pay, he was perfectly prepared to come to terms and to do homage to Joseph Bonaparte.
On January 23 Soult marched against Ferrol with the infantry division of Mermet, the dragoons of Lorges, and the heavy guns which he had found in Corunna. He left Delaborde in garrison at the latter place, posted Merle at Betanzos, a half-way house between the two fortresses, and directed Franceschi’s cavalry division on Santiago and Lahoussaye’s on Mellid, in order to see whether there was any Spanish field-force visible in western Galicia. On the twenty-fifth the Marshal presented himself in front of Ferrol, and summoned the place to surrender. Melgarejo was determined not to fight, and several of his chief subordinates supported him. The armed citizens persisted in their idea of defending the place, but when the French broke ground in front of the walls and captured two small outlying redoubts, they allowed themselves to be overpersuaded by their treacherous chief. On January 26 the place surrendered, and on the following day Soult was received within the walls. The capitulation had two shameful clauses: by the first the civil and military authorities undertook to take the oath of allegiance to King Joseph. By the second the splendid men-of-war in the harbour were handed over intact, a most valuable acquisition for the Emperor if Galicia was to remain under his control. Any one but a traitor would have burnt or scuttled them before surrendering. But Melgarejo, after receiving high testimonials from Soult, hastened up to Madrid and took office under the Rey Intruso[202]. Along with the squadron 1,500 naval cannon, an immense quantity of timber, cordage, and other stores, and 20,000 muskets newly imported from England, fell into the hands of the French.
On the day after Ferrol was occupied, Soult received the last communication from the Emperor which was to reach him for many a day[203]. It was dated from Valladolid on January 17. We have already had occasion to refer to it more than once, while dealing with the controversies of King Joseph and Marshal Victor. This dispatch repeated the Emperor’s former orders, with some slight concession in the matter of dates. Instead of reaching Oporto on February 1 the Marshal was to be granted four extra days, and after taking Oporto on February 5, he was to reach Lisbon on the sixteenth instead of the tenth. Soult was also told that he would not have to depend on his own resources alone: Victor with the 1st Corps would be at Merida by the time that the 2nd Corps was approaching the Portuguese capital: he would be instructed to send a column in the direction of Lisbon, to make a diversion in favour of the attack from the north, and at the same time Lapisse from Salamanca should move on Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. Bessières was, so the Emperor said, under strict orders to send Lapisse forward into Portugal the moment that the news should reach him that the 2nd Corps had captured Oporto. This combination sinned against the rules of strategy, as they had to be practised in Spain. The Emperor had yet to realize that in order to make operations simultaneous, when troops starting from bases several hundred miles apart are to co-operate, it is necessary that their generals should be in free communication with each other. But Soult, when he had advanced into Portugal, was as much out of touch with the other French corps as if he had been operating in Poland or Naples. It was literally months before accurate information as to his situation and his achievements reached Salamanca, Merida, or Madrid. The movements of Victor and Lapisse being strictly conditioned by the receipt of news concerning Soult’s progress, and that news being never received, or received too late, the combination never did and never could take place. Napoleon had forgotten to reckon with the ubiquitous Spanish insurgent: here, as in so many cases, he was unconsciously assuming that the bearer of dispatches could ride freely through the country, as if he were in Saxony or Lombardy; and that Soult could make known his movements and his desires as often as he pleased. French critics of the Emperor generally confine themselves to censuring him for sending the 2nd Corps to attempt unaided a task too great for it[204]; this is not quite fair, for he had intended to support Soult by two strong diversions. The real fault lay in ignoring the fact that in Spain combined operations, which presuppose constant communication between the participants, were practically impossible. The same error was made in 1810, when Drouet was told to co-operate in Masséna’s invasion of Portugal, and in 1811 when Soult was directed to lend a helping hand to that same invasion. It is impossible to give effective aid to a colleague whose condition and whose whereabouts are unknown.
On January 29 the Duke of Dalmatia set to work to reorganize his army for the great expedition that had been assigned to him. It was impossible to march at once, as the Emperor had commanded, because Ney had not yet arrived at the front, and it was necessary to turn over the charge of Corunna and Ferrol to him before departing further south. Moreover, there were many other arrangements to be made: a base hospital had to be organized at Corunna for the thousands of sick and wounded belonging to the 2nd Corps. Its transport had to be reconstructed, for most of the animals had died during the forced marches in pursuit of Moore[205]. A new stock of munitions had to be served out from the stores so fortunately captured at Ferrol. The military chest of the corps had been left behind at Astorga, and showed no signs of appearing: to provide for the more urgent day-by-day needs of the army, the Marshal had to squeeze forced contributions out of the already exhausted towns of Corunna, Ferrol, and Santiago, which had long ago contributed all their surplus resources to the fitting out of Blake’s army of Galicia. These same unhappy places had to submit to a heavy requisition of cloth and leather, for the replacing of the garments and boots worn out in the late marches. But even with the aid of 2,500 English greatcoats discovered in store at Corunna, and other finds at Ferrol, the wants of the army could not be properly supplied; it started on the campaign in a very imperfectly equipped condition[206]. The most dangerous point in its outfit was the want of mules: most of the valleys of inner Galicia and northern Portugal are destitute of carriage roads. To bring up the food and the reserve ammunition pack-animals were absolutely necessary, and Soult could only collect a few hundreds. Even if his men should succeed in living on the country, and so solve the problem of carrying provisions, they could not hope to pick up powder and lead in the same way. When, therefore, the heavy baggage on wheels had to be left behind, the 2nd Corps was only able to carry a very insufficient stock of cartridges: twice, as we shall see, it almost exhausted its ammunition and was nearly brought to a standstill on the way to Oporto.
It was not till February had already begun that Soult was able to move forward the whole of his army, for he refused to withdraw Delaborde’s division from Corunna and Mermet’s from Ferrol, till Ney should have brought up troops of the 6th Corps to relieve them. The Duke of Elchingen, though apprised of the Emperor’s orders, lingered long at Lugo, and it was not till he came down in person to the coast that Soult could call up his rear divisions. Meanwhile a small exchange of troops between the two corps was carried out: Ney, being short of cavalry, received a brigade of Lorges’ dragoons to add to his own inadequate force of two regiments of light horse. In return he made over to the 2nd Corps three battalions of the 17th Léger, which had accompanied him hitherto. They were added to Delaborde’s division, which had been only eight battalions strong.
Even before the troops from Ferrol and Corunna were able to move, Soult had put the rest of his army on the march for Portugal. On January 30 Franceschi’s light horsemen started along the coast-road from Santiago to Vigo and Tuy, while further inland Lahoussaye’s division of dragoons, quitting Mellid, took the rough mountain path across the Monte Testeyro, by Barca de Ledesma and Cardelle, which leads to Rivadavia and Salvatierra on the lower Minho. Merle’s and Heudelet’s infantry started several days later, and were many miles behind the advanced cavalry.
Lahoussaye’s division met with no opposition in the rugged region which it had to cross, and occupied Salvatierra without difficulty. Franceschi scattered a few peasants at the defile of Redondela outside Vigo, and then found himself at the gates of that harbour-fortress. The governor, no less weak and unpatriotic than those of Ferrol and Corunna, surrendered without firing a shot. His excuse was that he had only recruits, and armed townsfolk, to man his walls and handle his numerous artillery. But his misconduct was even surpassed by that of the Governor of Tuy, who capitulated to Franceschi’s 1,200 horsemen three days later in the same style, though he was in command of 500 regular troops, and was implored to hold out by the local junta. Throughout Galicia, in this unhappy month, the officials and military chiefs showed a most deplorable spirit, which contrasted unfavourably with that of the lower classes, both in the towns and the country-side.
The way to the frontier of Portugal had thus been opened, with an ease which seemed to justify Napoleon’s idea that the Spaniards would not hold out, when once their field armies had been crushed. Franceschi and Lahoussaye reported to the Duke of Dalmatia that they had swept the whole northern bank of the Minho, and that there was nothing in front of them save the swollen river and a few bands of Portuguese peasantry, who were observing them from Valenza, the dilapidated frontier fortress of the neighbouring kingdom.
Both the French and the Galicians of the coast-line might well have forgotten the fact that there was still a Spanish army in existence within the borders of the province. It is long since we have had occasion to mention the fugitive host of the Marquis of La Romana. After being hunted out of Ponferrada by Soult on January 3, he had followed in the wake of Craufurd’s brigades on their eccentric retreat down the valley of the Sil. But while the British troops pushed on to Vigo and embarked, the Spaniards halted at Orense. There the Marquis endeavoured to rally his demoralized and starving host, with the aid of the very limited resources of the district. He had only 6,000 men left with the colours, out of the 22,000 who had been with him at Leon on December 25, 1808. But there were several thousands more straggling after him, or dispersed in the side valleys off the road which he had followed. Most of these men had lost their muskets, many were frost bitten, or suffering from dysentery. The surviving nucleus of the army was composed almost entirely of the old regulars: the Galician militia and new levies had not been able to resist the temptation to desert, when they found themselves among their native mountains. The Marquis hoped that, when the spring came round, they would find their way back to the army: in this expectation, as we shall see, he was not deceived. For nearly a fortnight the wrecks of the army were undisturbed, and La Romana was able to collect enough efficients to constitute two small corps of observation, one of which he posted in the valley of the Sil, to watch for any signs of a movement of the French from the direction of Ponferrada, while the other, in the valley of the Minho, kept a similar look out in the direction of Lugo. The latter force was unmolested, but on January 17 General Mendizabal, who was watching the southern road, reported the approach of a heavy hostile column. This was Marchand’s division of Ney’s corps: the Marshal had divided his force at Ponferrada; he himself with Maurice Mathieu’s division had kept the main road to Lugo, while Marchand had been told off to clear the lateral valleys and seize Orense. La Romana very wisely resolved that his unhappy army was unfit to resist 8,000 French troops. On January 19 he evacuated Orense, and fled across the Sierra Cabrera to Monterey on the Portuguese frontier. Here at last he found rest, for Marchand did not follow him into the mountains, but, after a short stay in Orense, marched to Santiago, where he was directed to relieve Soult’s garrison.
The Marquis was completely lost to sight in his frontier fastnesses, and was able to do his best to reorganize his battered host. By February 13 he had 9,000 men under arms, nearly all old soldiers, for the Galician levies were still scattered in their homes. His dispatches during this period are very gloomy reading: he complains bitterly of the apathy of the country-side and the indiscipline of his officers. What could be expected of subalterns, he asks, when a general (Martinengo of the 2nd division) had absconded without asking leave or even reporting his departure? ‘I know not where the patriotism, of which every one boasted, is now to be found, since on the smallest reverse or misfortune, they lose their heads, and think only of saving themselves—sacrificing their country and compromising their commander.’ Much harassed for want of food, La Romana kept moving his head quarters; he was sometimes at Verin and Monterey, sometimes at Chaves just inside the Portuguese frontier, more frequently at Oimbra. He had only nine guns left; there was no reserve of ammunition, and the soldiers had but few cartridges remaining in their boxes. The strongest battalion left in the army had only 250 bayonets—many had but seventy or eighty, and others (notably the Galician local corps) had completely disappeared. He besought the Central Junta to obtain from the British money, muskets, clothing, and above all ammunition, or the army would never be fit to take the field[207]. A similar request in the most pressing terms was sent to Sir John Cradock at Lisbon.
Soult could not but be aware that La Romana’s army, or some shadow of it, was still in existence: but since it sedulously avoided any contact with him, and had completely evacuated the coast-land of Galicia, he appears to have treated it as a ‘negligible quantity’ during his first operations. Its dispersion, if it required any further dispersing, would fall to the lot of Ney and the 6th Corps, not to that of the army sent against Portugal.
Franceschi and Lahoussaye, as we have already seen, reached the Minho and the Portuguese border on February 2. It was only on the eighth that the Duke of Dalmatia set out from Santiago to follow them, in company with the division of Merle. Those of Delaborde and Mermet, released by the arrival of Ney, took the same route on the ninth and tenth respectively. The rear was brought up by the reserve and heavy artillery, and by that brigade of Lorges’ dragoons which had not been handed over to the 6th Corps. The coast-road being very good, Soult was able to concentrate his whole army within the triangle Tuy, Salvatierra, Vigo by the thirteenth, in spite of the hindrances caused by a week of perpetual storm and rain.
It was the Marshal’s intention to enter Portugal by the great coast-road, which crosses the Minho at Tuy and proceeds to Oporto by way of Valenza and Braga. But as Valenza was a fortress, and its cannon commanded the broad ferry at which the usual passage was made, it was clearly necessary to choose some other point for crossing the frontier river. After a careful survey Soult fixed on a village named Campo Saucos, only two miles from the mouth of the Minho, as offering the best starting-point. He established a battery of heavy guns on his own side of the river, and collected a number of fishing-boats[208], sufficient to carry 300 men at a voyage. As he could not discover that the Portuguese had any regular force opposite him, he resolved to attempt the passage with these modest resources.
There would have been no great difficulty in the enterprise during ordinary weather. But the incessant rains had so swelled the Minho that it was now a wild, ungovernable torrent, which it was hard to face and still harder to stem. When the heavy Atlantic surf met the furious current of the stream, during the rising of the tide, the conflict of the waters made the passage absolutely impossible. It had to be attempted at the moment between the flow and the ebb—though there was at that hour another danger—that the boats might be carried past the appointed landing-place and wrecked on the bar at the mouth of the river. But this chance Soult resolved to risk: on February 16, long before daybreak, his twenty or thirty fishing-boats, each with a dozen men on board, launched out from the northern shore, and struck diagonally across the stream, as the current bore them. They were at once saluted by a heavy but ill-directed fire from the Portuguese bank, where hundreds of peasants were at watch even during the hours of darkness. The soldiers rowed and steered badly—Soult had only been able to give them as guides a mere handful of men trained to the water[209]. The furious current swept them away: probably also their nerve was much tried by the fusillade, which, though more noisy than dangerous, yet occasionally picked off a rower or a helmsman. The general result was that only three boats with thirty-five or forty men got to the appointed landing-place, where they were made prisoners by the Portuguese. The rest were borne down-stream, and came ashore at various points on the same side from which they had started, barely avoiding shipwreck on the bar.
The attempt to pass the Minho, therefore, ended in a ridiculous fiasco: it showed the limitations of the French army, which among its numerous merits did not possess that of good seamanship. Soult was deeply chagrined, not because of the insignificant loss of men, but because of the check to his prestige. He resolved that he would not risk another such failure, and at once gave orders for the whole army to march up-stream to Orense, the first point where there was a bridge over the Minho. This entailed a radical change in his general plan of operations, for he was abandoning the good coast-road by Tuy and Valenza for a very poor mountain-way from Orense to Chaves along the valley of the Tamega. There was another important result from the alteration—the new route brought the French army down upon La Romana’s camp of refuge: his cantonments in and about Monterey lay right across its path. But neither he nor Soult had yet realized the fact that they were about once more to come into collision. The Marshal did not know where the Marquis was; the Marquis did not at first understand the meaning of the Marshal’s sudden swoop inland. Some of the Spanish officers, indeed, were sanguine enough to imagine that the French, after their failure on the lower Minho, would abandon Galicia altogether[210]!
The whole French army had now made a half-turn to the left, and was marching in a north-easterly direction. Lahoussaye’s dragoons, starting from Salvatierra, led the advance, Heudelet’s division marched at the head of the infantry; Delaborde, Mermet, and Merle, each at a convenient interval from the preceding division, stretched out the column to an interminable length. The heavy artillery and wagon train brought up the rear. Nine hundred sick, victims of the detestable weather of the first fortnight of February, were left behind at Tuy under the guard of a half-battalion of infantry.
It was on the march from Tuy to Orense that Soult began to realize the full difficulties of his task. He had already met with small insurgent bands, but they had been dispersed with ease, and he had paid little attention to them. Now however, along the steep and tiresome mountain road above the Minho, they appeared in great force, and showed a spirit and an enterprise which were wholly unexpected by the French. The fact was that in the month which had now elapsed since the battle of Corunna, the peasantry and the local notables had found time to take stock of the situation. The first numbing effect of the presence of a large hostile army in their midst had passed away. Ruthless requisitions were sweeping off their cattle, the only wealth of the country. Although Soult had issued pacific proclamations, and had tried to keep his men in hand, he could not restrain the usual plundering propensities of a French army on the march. Enough atrocities had already been committed to make the Galicians forget the misconduct of Moore’s men. La Romana, from his refuge at Monterey, had been dispersing appeals to the patriotism of the province, and sending out officers with local knowledge to rouse the country-side. These probably had less effect on the Galicians—the Marquis was a stranger and a defeated general—than the exhortations of their own clergy. In the first rising of the peasantry most of the leaders were ecclesiastics: in the region which Soult was now traversing the peasantry were raised by Mauricio Troncoso, Abbot of Couto, and a friar named Giraldez, who kept the insurgents together until, some weeks later, they handed over the command to military officers sent by La Romana or by the Central Junta. In the valley of the Sil, beyond Orense, it was Quiroga, Abbot of Casoyo, who first called out the country-side[211]. Every narrative of the Galician insurrection, whether French or Spanish, bears witness to the fact that in almost every case the clergy, regular and secular, were the earliest chiefs of the mountaineers. It was characteristic of the whole rising that many of the bands took the field with the church-banners of their parishes as substitutes for the national flag.
This much is certain, that as soon as the violent February rains showed signs of slackening, the whole of rural Galicia flew to arms. From Corcubion on the surf-beaten headland of Finisterre, to the remote headwaters of the Sil under the Sierra de Penamarella, there was not a valley which failed to answer the appeal which La Romana had made and which the clergy had circulated. From the weak and sporadic movements of January there sprang in February a general insurrection, which was all the more formidable because it had no single focus, was based on no place of arms, and was directed not by one chief but by fifty local leaders, each intimately acquainted with the district in which he was about to operate.
The first result of this widespread movement was to complete the severance of the communications between the various French divisions in Galicia. From the earliest appearance of the invaders, as we have already seen, there had been intermittent attempts to cut the lines of road by which the 2nd and 6th Corps kept touch with each other and with Madrid. But hitherto a convoy, or escort of a couple of hundred men, could generally brush aside its assailants, and get through from post to post. In February this power of movement ceased: the insurgents became not only more numerous and more daring, but infinitely more skilful in their tactics. Instead of endeavouring to deliver combats in the open, they broke the bridges, burnt the ferry-boats, cut away the road in rocky places, and then hung persistently about any corps that was on the move, as soon as it began to get among the obstacles. They fired on it from inaccessible side-hills, attacked and detained its rearguard so as to delay its march, thus causing a gap to grow between it and the main body, and only closed when the column was beginning to get strung out into a series of isolated groups. The convoys which were being sent up from Astorga to the 2nd and 6th Corps were especially vulnerable to such tactics: the shooting of a few horses in a defile would hopelessly block the progress of everything that was coming on from behind. The massing of men to repair or rehorse disabled wagons only gave the lurking insurgent a larger and an easier target. Hence the bringing up to the front of the heavy transport of the French army became such a slow and costly business, that the attempt to move it was after a time almost abandoned. Another point which the insurgents soon perceived was the helplessness of the French cavalry among rocks and defiles. A horseman cannot get at an enemy who lurks above his head in precipitous crags, refuses to come down to the high-road, and takes careful shots from his eyrie into the squadron below. If, worried beyond endurance, the French officers dismounted some of their men to charge the hillside, the lightly-equipped peasants fled away, and were out of sight before the dragoons in their heavy boots could climb the first fifty yards of the ascent. The copious annals of the Galician guerrilla bands almost invariably begin with tales of the annihilation of insufficiently guarded convoys, or of the defeat and extermination of small bodies of cavalry caught in some defile. A very little experience of such petty successes soon taught them the right way to deal with the French. The invaders could not be beaten en masse, but might be cut off in detail, harassed into exhaustion, and so isolated one from the other that it would require the sending out of a considerable expedition to carry a message between two neighbouring garrisons, or to forward a dispatch down the high-road to Madrid.
In a very short time intercommunication between the various sections of the French army in Galicia became so rare and uncertain, that each commander of a garrison or chief of a column found himself in the condition of a man lost in a fog. His friends might be near or far, might be faring ill or prosperously, but it was almost impossible to get news of them. Every garrison was surrounded with a loose screen of insurgents, which could only be pierced by a great effort. Each column on the march moved on surrounded by a swarm of active enemies, who closed around again in spite of all attempts to brush them off. In March and April Ney, on whom the worst stress of the insurrection fell, could only communicate with his outlying troops by taking circular tours at the head of a force of several thousand men. Sometimes he found, instead of the post which he had intended to visit, only a ruined village full of corpses. Ere the Galician rising was three months old, the bands had become bold and skilful enough to cut off a strong detachment or to capture a place held by a garrison several hundreds strong. In June they actually stopped the Marshal himself, with a whole division at his back, in his attempt to march from Santiago to recapture Vigo.
But these times were still far in the future: and when, on February 17, Soult started on his march along the Minho from Tuy to Orense, the peasantry were far from being the formidable opponents that they afterwards became. Nevertheless, the progress of the 2nd Corps was toilsome and slow in the extreme. The troops had been divided between two paths, of which the so-called high-road, a mile or two from the river, was only a trifle less impracticable than the rougher path along the water’s edge. Lahoussaye’s dragoons had been put upon the latter track; Heudelet’s infantry division led the advance on the upper road. All day long the march was harassed by the insurgents, who descended from the hills and hung on the left flank of Heudelet’s column, delivering partial attacks whenever they thought that they saw an opportunity. The French advanced with difficulty, much incommoded by the need of dragging on their cannon, which could hardly be got forward even with the aid of the infantry. Lahoussaye, on the other path, was assailed in a similar way, besides being molested by the Portuguese, who moved parallel to him on the south side of the Minho, taking long shots at his dragoons wherever the path was close enough to the water’s edge to be within range of their own bank. If the peasantry had confined themselves to these tactics, they might have harassed Soult at small cost to themselves. But they had not yet fully learnt the guerrilla’s trade. At Mourentan on the path by the river, and at Francelos on the high-road, they had resolved to offer direct resistance to the enemy, and so put themselves within reach of the invader’s claws. At each place they had barricaded the village, had run a rough entrenchment across the road, and stood to receive the frontal shock of the French attack. They were, of course, routed with great slaughter when they thus exposed themselves in close combat: several hundred perished, among whom were many of their clerical leaders. Thus Soult was able to push on and occupy Rivadavia, which he found evacuated by its inhabitants. His soldiery had sacked and burnt all the villages on the way, and (according to the Spanish narratives) shot all adult males whom they could catch, whether found with arms or not[212].
On the eighteenth, having cut his way as far as Rivadavia, the Duke of Dalmatia came to the conclusion that it was hopeless to endeavour to carry on with him his heavy artillery and his baggage. On such roads as he had been traversing, and amid the continual attacks of the insurgents, they would be of more harm than use. In all probability they would ere long fall so far behind that, along with their escort, they would become separated from the army, and perhaps fall into the hands of the Spaniards. Accordingly he sent orders to the rear of the column that Merle’s division should conduct back to Tuy all the heavy baggage and thirty-six guns of large calibre. Only twenty pieces, mostly four-pounders, were to follow the expedition. When the wagons had been turned back, there were only pack-horses and mules sufficient to carry 3,000 rounds for the guns, and 500,000 cartridges for the infantry. This was a dangerously small equipment for an army which had a whole kingdom to conquer, and which was forced to waste many shots every day on keeping off the irrepressible insurgents. But Soult was determined that he should not be accused of shrinking from the task imposed on him, or allowing himself to be thwarted by bands of half-armed peasants.
The heavy guns and the train, therefore, were deposited at Tuy, along with the large body of sick and wounded who had already been left there. General Lamartinière, an officer in whom Soult placed much confidence, was left in command. He was warned that he would have to take care of himself, as his communication with the army would be cut the moment that Merle’s troops resumed their march to join the rear of the advancing column. Nor did Soult err in this: when the 2nd Corps had gone on its way, Tuy and the neighbouring post of Vigo were immediately beset by a thick swarm of peasants, who kept them completely blockaded.
Having thus freed himself from every possible incumbrance, the Duke of Dalmatia pushed briskly on for Orense and its all-important bridge. The insurgents had not fallen back very far, and on the nineteenth Heudelet’s division had two smart engagements with them, and drove them back to Masside, in the hills to the left of the road. The valley was here wider and the route better than on the previous day, and much more satisfactory progress was made. On the twentieth, still pushing on, Soult found that the ferry of Barbantes, ten miles below Orense, was passable. The Galicians had scuttled the ferry-boat in an imperfect fashion: some voltigeurs crossed on a raft, repaired the boat, and set it working again. Soult then pushed across the river some of Mermet’s battalions, intending to send them to Orense by the south bank, if it should be found that the bridge was broken. Meanwhile Heudelet continued to advance by the road on the north side: his column arrived at its goal, and found Orense undefended and its bridge intact. The townsfolk made no attempt to resist: they had not left their dwellings like the peasants, and their magistrates came out to surrender the place in due form. They appealed to Soult’s clemency, by showing him that they had kept safe and properly cared for 136 sick French soldiers, left behind by Marchand when he had marched through the town in the preceding month.
Where, meanwhile, it will be asked, was the army of La Romana? The Marquis had now 9,000 men collected at Oimbra and Monterey, and it might have been expected that he would have moved forward to defend the line of the Minho and the bridge of Orense, as soon as he heard of the eastward march of the 2nd Corps. He made no such advance: his dispatches show that the sole precautions which he took were to send some officers with fifty men to aid the peasants of the lower Minho, and afterwards to order another party, only 100 strong, to make sure that the ferry-boats between Tuy and Orense were all destroyed or removed—a task which (as we have already seen) they did not fully perform. If he had brought up his whole force, instead of sending out these paltry detachments, he would have made the task of Soult infinitely more bloody and dangerous, though probably he could not have prevented the Marshal from carrying out his plan. His quiescence is not to be explained as resulting from a reluctance to fight, though he was fully conscious of the low morale of his army, and was at his wits’ end to complete its dilapidated equipment. It came from another cause, and one much less creditable to his military capacity. Underrating Soult’s force, which he placed at 12,000 instead of 22,000 men, he was labouring under the idea that the 2nd Corps was about to retire from Galicia altogether, in face of the general insurrection and the want of food. The march of the French to Orense appeared in his eyes as the first stage of a retreat up the valley of the Sil to Ponferrada and Astorga, and he imagined that the province would soon be quit of them. Hence he contented himself with stirring up the peasantry, and left to them the task of harassing Soult’s columns, being resolved to make the proverbial ‘bridge of gold’ for a flying enemy. From this vain dream he was soon to be awakened.
From the 21st to the 24th of February the Duke of Dalmatia was busily employed in bringing up the rear divisions of his army to Orense. None of them reached that place without fighting, for the bands which had been driven off by Heudelet and Lahoussaye returned to worry the troops of Delaborde, Merle, and Mermet, when they traversed the route from Salvatierra to Orense. Jardon’s brigade of the last-named division had a sharp fight near Rivadavia, and Merle had to clear his way at Crecente by cutting to pieces a body of insurgents which had fortified itself in that village. When the whole army was concentrated between Rivadavia and Orense, the Marshal sent out large detachments to sweep the valleys in the immediate neighbourhood of those places. They found armed peasantry in every direction, but in each case succeeded in thrusting them back into their hills, and returned to Orense driving before them large herds of cattle, and dragging behind them country wagons with a considerable amount of grain. The longest and most important of these expeditions was one made by Franceschi, who marched, with his own horsemen and one of Heudelet’s brigades, along the road which the whole army was destined to take in its invasion of Portugal. They routed one band of peasants at Allariz, and another at Ginzo, half way to Monterey [February 23]. Still there was no sign of La Romana’s army, which remained behind the mountains of the Sierra Cabrera in complete quiescence, though Franceschi’s advanced posts were only twenty miles away[213].
Soult kept his head quarters at Orense for nine days, during which he was busied in collecting stores of food, repairing his artillery, whose carriages had been badly shaken by the villainous roads, and in endeavouring to pacify the country-side by proclamations and circular letters to the notables and clergy. In this last scheme he met with little success; from the bishop of Orense downwards almost every leading man had taken refuge in the hills, and refused to return. Silence or defiant replies answered the Marshal’s epistolary efforts. His promises of protection and good government were sincere enough; but the commentary on them was given by the excesses and atrocities which his troops were committing in every outlying village. It was not likely that the Galicians would come down from their fastnesses to surrender[214].
The general advance of the army towards Portugal had been fixed for March 4. It was not made under the most cheerful conditions. Not only were the neighbouring peasantry still defiant as ever, but bad news had come from the north. An aide-de-camp of Marshal Ney, who had struggled through to Orense in despite of the insurgents, brought a letter from his chief, which reported that the rising had become general throughout the province, and apparently expressed strong doubts as to the wisdom of invading Portugal before Galicia was subdued. The Duke of Elchingen, as it would seem, wished his colleague to draw back, and to aid him in suppressing the bands of the coast and the upper Minho[215]. He might well doubt whether the 6th Corps would suffice for this task, if the 2nd Corps marched far away towards Oporto, and got completely out of touch. Soult, however, had the Emperor’s orders to advance into Portugal in his pocket. He knew that if he disobeyed them no excuse would propitiate his master. Probably he was not sorry to leave to Ney the unenviable task of dealing with the ubiquitous and irrepressible Galician insurgents. He sent back the message that he should march southward on March 4, and continued his preparations. This resolve was not to the liking of some of his subordinates: many of the officers who had served with Junot in Portugal by no means relished the idea of returning to that country. They did not conceal their feelings, and made the most gloomy prophecies about the fate of the expedition. It was apparently Loison who formed the centre of this clique of malcontents: he found many sympathizers among his subordinates. Their discontent was the basis upon which, two months later, the strange and obscure ‘Oporto Conspiracy’ of Captain D’Argenton was to be based. At the present moment, however, they contented themselves with denunciations of the madness of the Emperor in planning the expedition, and of the blind obedience of the Marshal in undertaking it. They told their comrades that the numbers, courage, and ferocity of the Galicians were as nothing compared with those of their southern neighbours, and that during the oncoming operations those who found a sudden death upon the battle-field would be lucky, for the Portuguese not only murdered but tortured the prisoners, the wounded, and the stragglers. It was fortunate for Soult that the majority of his officers paid comparatively little attention to these forebodings, which they rightly ascribed to the feelings of resentment and humiliation with which the members of Junot’s army remembered the story of their former disasters[216]. But it did not make matters easier for the Marshal that even a small section of his lieutenants disbelieved in the feasibility of his undertaking, and expected disaster to ensue. Yet the opening scenes of the invasion of Portugal were to be so brilliant and fortunate, that for a time the murmurs of the prophets of evil were hushed.
On March 4 the Marshal’s head quarters were moved forward from Orense to Alariz, on the road to Monterey and the frontier. The main body of the army accompanied him, but Franceschi and Heudelet were already far in front at Ginzo, only separated from La Romana’s outposts by the Sierra Cabrera. From that point there are two difficult but practicable roads[217] into Portugal: the one descends the valley of the Lima and leads to Oporto by Viana and the coast. It is easier than the second or inland route, which after crossing the Sierra Cabrera descends to Monterey and Chaves, the frontier town of the Portuguese province of Tras-os-Montes. But every military reason impelled Soult to choose the second alternative. By marching on Viana he would leave La Romana, whose presence he had now discovered, far in his rear. The Marquis would be a bad general indeed if he did not seize the opportunity of slipping back into Galicia, reoccupying Orense, and setting the whole country-side aflame. It was infinitely preferable to fall upon him from the front, rout him, and fling him back among the Portuguese. Accordingly Franceschi, leading the whole army, crossed the mountains on the fifth, and came hurtling into La Romana’s cantonments long ere he was expected. Heudelet was just behind him, Mermet and Delaborde a march further back: Merle brought up the rear, guarding a convoy of 800 sick and wounded whom the Marshal had resolved to bring on with him, rather than to leave them at Orense to fall a prey to the insurgents. The dragoons of Lorges and Lahoussaye were kept out on the right and left respectively, watching the one the valley of the Lima, the other the head waters of the Tamega.
Down to the last moment the Marquis had been giving out his intention of retiring into Portugal and co-operating with General Silveira, the commandant of the Tras-os-Montes, in the defence of Chaves and the line of the Tamega. But he was on very strained terms with his ally, who showed no great alacrity to receive the Spaniards across the frontier: his troops had been quarrelling with the Portuguese, and he was very reluctant to expose his half-rallied battalions to the ordeal of a battle, which Silveira openly courted.
On the very day on which Soult started from Orense, La Romana made up his mind that, instead of joining the Portuguese, he would escape eastwards by the single road, over and above that of Chaves, which was open to him. Accordingly his army suddenly started off, abandoning the meagre magazines which it had collected at Oimbra and Verin, and made for Puebla de Senabria, on the borders of the province of Leon, by the road which coasts along the north side of the Portuguese frontier, through Osoño and La Gudina. This sudden move bore the appearance of a mean desertion of the Portuguese in their day of peril: but it was in other respects wise and prudent. It discomfited all Soult’s plans, since he failed to catch the army of Galicia, which escaped him and placed itself on his flank and rear instead of on his front. It was small consolation to the Marshal that Franceschi came on the rearguard of the Spaniards at La Trepa near Osoño and routed it. Seven skeleton regiments, only 1,200 bayonets in all, under General Mahy, were caught retiring along a hillside and completely ridden down by the French cavalry. Three standards and 400 prisoners were captured, 300 men more were killed, the rest dispersed. But La Romana’s main body, meanwhile, had got away in safety, and Soult had failed to strike the blow which he intended[218]. He was soon to hear of the Marquis again, in quarters where he little expected and still less desired to find him[219].
Meanwhile the Portuguese were left alone to bear the brunt of the attack of the 2nd Corps. It is time to relate and explain their position, their resources, and their designs.
SECTION XIII: CHAPTER II
PORTUGAL AT THE MOMENT OF SOULT’S INVASION: THE NATION, THE REGENCY, AND SIR JOHN CRADOCK
Soult’s vanguard crossed the Portuguese frontier between Monterey and Chaves on March 9, 1809: it was exactly five months since the last of Junot’s troops had evacuated the realm on October 9, 1808. In the period which had elapsed between those two dates much might have been done to develop—or rather to create—a scheme of national defence and a competent army. Unhappily for Portugal the Regency had not risen to the opportunity, and when the second French invasion came upon them the military organization of the realm was still in a state of chaos.
During the autumn months of 1808 the Portuguese Government had been almost as sanguine and as careless as the Spanish Supreme Junta. They had seen Junot beaten and expelled: they still beheld a large British army in their midst; and they did not comprehend the full extent of the impending danger, when the news came that Bonaparte was nearing the Pyrenees, and that the columns of the ‘Grand Army’ were debouching into the Peninsula. It was not till Moore had departed that they began to conceive certain doubts as to the situation: nor was it till Madrid had fallen that they at last realized that the invader was once more at their gates, and that they must prepare to defend themselves.
There were still two months of respite granted to them. Portugal—like Andalusia—was saved for a moment by Moore’s march to Sahagun. The great field army which Napoleon had collected for the advance on Lisbon was turned off northwards to pursue the British, and on the New Year’s day of 1809 the only French force in proximity to the frontier of the realm was the division of Lapisse, which Bonaparte had dropped at Salamanca to form the connecting link between Soult and Ney in Galicia, and the troops under Victor and King Joseph in the vicinity of Madrid.
But the danger was only postponed, not averted, by Moore’s daring irruption into Old Castile. This the Portuguese Regency understood; and during the first two months of 1809 they displayed a considerable amount of energy, though it was in great part energy misdirected. Their chief blunder was that instead of straining every nerve to complete their regular army, on which the main stress of the invasion was bound to fall, they diverted much of their zeal to the task of raising a vast levée en masse of the whole able-bodied population of the realm. This error had its roots in old historical memories. The deliverance of Portugal from the Spanish yoke in the long war of independence in the seventeenth century, had been achieved mainly by the Ordenanza, the old constitutional force of the realm, which resembled the English Fyrd of the Middle Ages. It had done good service again in the wars of 1703-12, and even in the shorter struggle of 1762. But in the nineteenth century it was no longer possible to reckon upon it as a serious line of defence, especially when the enemy to be held back was not the disorderly Spanish army but the legions of Bonaparte. When there were not even arms enough in Portugal to supply the line-battalions with a musket for every man, it was insane to summon together huge masses of peasantry, and to make over to them some of the precious firearms which should have been reserved for the regulars. The majority, however, of the Ordenanza were not even supplied with muskets, they were given pikes—weapons with which their ancestors had done good service in 1650, but which it was useless to serve out in 1809. The Regency had procured some 17,000[220] from the British Government, and had caused many thousands more to be manufactured. Both on the northern and the eastern frontier great hordes of country-folk, equipped with these useless and antiquated arms, were gathered together. Destitute of discipline and of officers, insufficiently supplied with food, the prey of every rumour, true or false, that ran along the border, they were a source of danger rather than of strength to the realm. The cry of ‘treachery,’ which inevitably arises among armed mobs, was always being raised in their encampments. Hence came tumults and murders, for the peasantry had a strong suspicion of the loyalty of the governing classes—the result of the subservience to the French invader which had been displayed by many of the authorities, both civil and military, in 1808. Orders which they did not understand, or into which a sinister meaning could be read by a suspicious mind, generally caused a riot, and sometimes the assassination of the unfortunate commander whom the Regency had placed over the horde. In Oporto the state of affairs was particularly bad: the bishop, though a sincere patriot and a man of energy, had drunk too deeply of the delights of power during his rule in the summer months. After being made a member of the Regency by Dalrymple, he should have remained at Lisbon and worked with his colleagues. But returning to his own flock, he reassumed the authority which he had possessed during the early days of the insurrection, and pursued a policy of his own, which often differed from that of his Regency at large, and was sometimes in flagrant opposition to it. His position, in fact, was similar to that of Palafox at Saragossa, and like the Aragonese general he often practised the arts of demagogy in order to keep firm his influence over the populace. He was all for the system of the levée en masse; and summoned together unmanageable bands which he was able neither to equip nor to control. He praised their zeal, was wilfully blind to their frequent excesses, and seldom tried to turn their energies into profitable channels. Indeed, he was so ignorant of military matters himself, that he had no useful orders to give. He ignored the advice of the Portuguese generals in his district, and got little profit from that of two foreign officers whom the British Government sent him—the Hanoverian General Von der Decken and the Prussian Baron Eben. These gentlemen he seems to have conciliated, and to have played off against the native military authorities. But if they gave him good counsel, there are no signs in his actions that he turned it to account. All the British witnesses who passed through Oporto in January and February 1809, describe the place as being in a state of patriotic frenzy, and under mob law rather than administered by any regular and legal government[221]. The only fruitful military effort made in this part of Portugal was that of the gallant Sir Robert Wilson, who raised there in November and December his celebrated ‘Loyal Lusitanian Legion.’ This was intended to be the core of a subsidiary Portuguese division in British pay, distinct from the national army. When Wilson arrived in Oporto the bishop welcomed him, and forwarded in every way the formation of the corps. In a few days the Legion had 3,000 recruits of excellent quality, of whom Wilson could arm and clothe only some 1,300, for the equipment which he had brought with him was limited. He soon discovered, however, that the bishop’s zeal in his behalf was mainly due to the desire to have a solid force at hand which should be independent of the Portuguese generals. He wished the Legion to be, as it were, his own body-guard. Sir Robert was ill pleased, and being unwilling to mix himself in the domestic feuds of the bishop and the Regency, or to become the tool of a faction, quitted Oporto as soon as his men could march. With one strong battalion, a couple of squadrons of cavalry, and an incomplete battery—under 1,500 men in all—he moved first to Villa Real (Dec. 14), and then to the frontier, where he posted himself near Almeida and took over the task of observing Lapisse’s division, which from its base at Salamanca was threatening the Portuguese border. Of his splendid services in this direction we shall have much to tell. The unequipped portion of the Legion, left behind at Oporto, was handed over to Baron Eben, and became involved in the tumultuous and unhappy career of the bishop[222].
Meanwhile Lisbon was almost as disturbed as Oporto, and might have lapsed into the same state of anarchy, if a British garrison had not been on the spot. The mistaken policy of the Regency had led to the formation of sixteen so-called ‘legions[223]’ in the capital and suburbs. These tumultuary levies had few officers and hardly any arms but pikes. They were under no sort of discipline, and devoted themselves to the self-imposed duty of hunting for spies and ‘Afrancesados.’ Led by demagogues of the streets, they paraded up and down Lisbon to beat of drum, arresting persons whom they considered suspicious, especially foreign residents of all nationalities. The Regency having issued a decree prohibiting this practice [January 29], the armed levies only assembled in greater numbers next night, and engaged in a general chase after unpopular citizens, policemen, and aliens of all kinds. Many fugitives were only saved from death by taking refuge in the guard-houses and the barracks where the garrison was quartered. Isolated British soldiers were assaulted, some were wounded, and parties of ‘legionaries’ actually stopped aides-de-camp and orderlies carrying dispatches, and stripped them of the documents they were bearing. The mob was inclined, indeed, to be ill-disposed towards their allies, from the suspicion that they were intending to evacuate Lisbon and to retire from the Peninsula. They had seen the baggage and non-combatants left behind by Moore put on ship-board; early in February they beheld the troops told off for the occupation of Cadiz embark and disappear. When they also noticed that the forts at the Tagus mouth were being dismantled[224] they made up their minds that the British were about to desert them, without making any attempt to defend Portugal. Hence came the malevolent spirit which they displayed. It died down when their suspicions were proved unfounded by the arrival of Beresford and other British officers, at the beginning of March, with resources for the reorganization of the Portuguese army, and still more when a little later heavy reinforcements from England began to pour into the city. But in the last days of January and the first of February matters at Lisbon had been in a most dangerous and critical condition: the Regency, utterly unable to keep order, had hinted to Sir John Cradock that he must take his own measures against the mob, and for several days the British general had kept the garrison under arms, and planted artillery in the squares and broader streets—exactly as Junot had done seven months before. The ‘legions’ were cowed, and most fortunately no collision occurred: if a single shot had been fired in anger, there would have been an end of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, and it is more than likely that Cradock—a man of desponding temperament—would have abandoned the country.
His force at this moment was by no means large: when Moore marched for Salamanca in October he had left behind in Portugal six battalions of British and four of German infantry[225], three squadrons of the 20th Light Dragoons (the regiment that had been so much cut up at Vimiero), one of the 3rd Light Dragoons of the King’s German Legion, and five batteries, only one of which was horsed. From Salamanca, when on the eve of starting on the march to Sahagun, Sir John had sent back two regiments to Portugal, in charge of his great convoys of sick and heavy baggage[226]. To compensate for this deduction from his army he had called up a brigade of the troops left in Portugal; but only one battalion of it—the 82nd—reached him in time to join in his Castilian campaign[227]. The net result was that seven British infantry regiments from Moore’s army were left behind, in addition to the four German corps. Two more had arrived from England in November[228], and a fresh regiment of dragoons in December[229].
Thus when Sir John Cradock took over the command at Lisbon on December 14, 1808, he had at his disposal in all thirteen battalions of infantry, seven squadrons of cavalry, and five batteries, a force of about 12,000 men[230]. But not more than 10,000 were effective, for Sir John Moore had left behind precisely those of his regiments which were most sickly, when he marched for Spain. He had moreover discharged more than 2,000 additional sick upon Portugal ere he began field operations: they were encumbering the hospitals of Almeida and Lamego when Cradock appeared. The 10,000 men fit for service were scattered all over Portugal: the two battalions, which had just come back from Spain, and the two others which had been too late to join Moore, were in the north, at Almeida and Lamego[231]. One battalion was in garrison at Elvas[232]. Six lay in Lisbon, as also did the whole of the cavalry and guns[233]: two were on the march from Abrantes to Almeida[234].
Such a dispersion of forces would have appalled the most enterprising of generals, and this was a title to which Cradock had certainly no claims. The two obvious courses between which he had to choose, were either to concentrate his little army on the frontier and make as much display of it in the face of the French as might be possible, or to abandon all idea of protecting exterior Portugal, and collect the scattered regiments in or about Lisbon. Cradock chose the second alternative. He argued that he was too weak to be of any effectual service on the frontier, and moreover found that there would be a vast difficulty in moving forward even the Lisbon garrison, for nearly all the available transport had been requisitioned for the use of Moore’s army, and had been carried off into Spain. Neither of these pleas is convincing: with regard to the first, it is merely necessary to point out that Sir Robert Wilson, with 1,500 men of the Lusitanian Legion, not yet three months old, made his presence felt on the frontier, checked Lapisse, and kept the whole province of Salamanca in a state of unrest. Ten thousand British bayonets and sabres could have done much more. As to the food and supplies, Cradock was arguing in the old eighteenth-century style, as if a British army was bound to move with all its baggage and impedimenta, its women and children. If he had chosen to ‘march light,’ and to take the route through the fertile and well-peopled Estremadura, he could have reached Abrantes or Almeida or any other goal that he chose.
The fact was that the reasons for refusing to adopt a ‘forward policy’ were moral and not physical. Cradock, in common with Sir John Moore and many other British officers, believed that Portugal could not be defended, and was thinking more of securing himself a safe embarkation than of exercising any influence on the main current of the war.
When Moore’s army had passed out of sight, and was known to be retiring in the direction of Galicia, it seemed to Cradock that his own position was hopeless. Even if granted time to concentrate his scattered battalions, he would be forced to fly to the sea and take shipping the moment that any serious French force crossed the frontier. He had not sufficiently accurate information to enable him to see that both Lapisse at Salamanca, and the weak divisions of the 4th Corps which lay in the valley of the Tagus, could not possibly move forward against him. It would have been insane for either of these forces to have attacked Portugal—the one was at this moment less than 10,000, the other about 12,000 strong—they were without communications, and separated by 100 miles of pathless sierras. Moreover the troops in the valley of the Tagus were fully occupied in observing the Spanish army of Estremadura. At the opening of the New Year, therefore, Cradock was in absolutely no danger, and might have gone forward either to Abrantes or to Almeida in perfect security. In the first position he would have menaced the flank of the 4th Corps: in the second he would have exercised a useful pressure on Lapisse. In either case he would have encouraged the Portuguese and lent moral support to the Spaniards.
But Cradock was possessed by that miserable theory which was so frequently expounded by the men of desponding mind during the early years of the Peninsular War, to the effect that Portugal was indefensible, and would have to be evacuated whenever a strong French force approached its frontier[235]. It was fortunate for England and for Europe that Wellesley had other views. The history of the next three years was to show that a British general could find something better to do than to pack up his baggage and prepare to embark, whenever the enemy came down in superior strength to the Portuguese border.
No doubt Cradock would have had to take to his transports if the French had possessed on January 1, 1809, an army of 40,000 men available for the invasion of Portugal, and ready to advance. They did not happen to own any such force; and till he was certain that such a force existed, Cradock was gravely to blame for ordering every British soldier to fall back on Lisbon, and for openly commencing to destroy the sea-forts of the capital. It is true that the dispatches which he received from home gave him many directions as to what he was to do if the enemy appeared in overpowering strength: he was to blow up the shore batteries, destroy all military and naval stores, and embark with the British troops and as many Portuguese as could be induced to follow. But this was only to take place ‘upon the actual approach of the enemy towards Lisbon in such strength as may render all further resistance ineffectual[236].’ To commence these preparations when the nearest troops of the enemy were at Salamanca and Almaraz was premature and precipitate in the highest degree. Till the French began to move, every endeavour should have been made to encourage the Portuguese and to maintain a show—even if it were but a vain show—of an intention to defend the frontier. If Lapisse had heard that Cradock was at Almeida he would have been nailed down to Salamanca: if Victor had heard that he was at Alcantara, or even at Abrantes, he would never have dared to pursue Cuesta into southern Estremadura.
Cradock, however, drew into Lisbon every available man: Brigadier Cameron, with the troops from Almeida and Oporto, started back on a weary march from the north, via Coimbra, bringing not only his own four battalions, but 1,500 convalescents and returned stragglers from Moore’s army. Richard Stewart, with the two battalions that had been at Abrantes, also came in to the capital, and all the British troops were concentrated by the beginning of February, save the 40th regiment, which still lay at Elvas. Having thus got together about 10,000 men, Cradock, with almost incredible timidity, began to draw them back to Passo d’Arcos, a place behind Lisbon near the mouth of the Tagus, from which embarkation was easy. When Villiers, the British minister at Lisbon, remonstrated with him on the deplorable political consequences of assuming this ignoble position on the water’s edge, Cradock replied, “I must object to take up a ‘false position,’ say Alcantara, or to occupy the heights in front of Lisbon, which would only defend a certain position, and leave the remainder [of Portugal?] to the power of the enemy, one which we must leave upon his approach, and seek another, bearing the appearance of flight, and yet not securing our retreat. The whole having announced the intention of defending Lisbon, but giving up that idea upon the approach of the enemy, for positions liable to be turned on every side cannot be persevered in by an inferior force.”
On the day [February 15] upon which Cradock wrote this extraordinary piece of English prose composition, whose grammar is as astounding as its argument, the nearest French troops were at Tuy in Galicia, Salamanca in Leon, and the bridge of Arzobispo on the central Tagus, points respectively 230, 250, and 240 miles distant from Lisbon as the crow flies, and infinitely more by road. Further comment is hardly necessary.
At this moment Cradock might have had at his disposal 2,000 more British troops, but he had chosen to fall in with Sir George Smith’s hasty and unauthorized scheme for the occupation of Cadiz[237], and had sent off to that port a whole brigade[238], under General Mackenzie. He also dispatched orders to Colonel Kemmis of the 40th to hand over Elvas to the Portuguese, and march to Seville. The battalion moved into Andalusia, and placed itself at the disposition of Mr. Frere, who found it as useless as the force which Smith had drawn off to Cadiz. It was several months before the 40th rejoined the army of Portugal.
Influenced by the remonstrances of Mr. Villiers, and somewhat comforted by the fact that the French armies had nowhere crossed the Portuguese frontier, Cradock was at last persuaded to give up his position at Passo d’Arcos; he fixed his head quarters at Lumiar, left 2,000 men in garrison at Lisbon, and cantoned the remainder of his army at Saccavem and other places a few miles in front of the city. This was better than leaving them on the sea-shore; but the move was no more than a miserable half measure. It was almost as indicative of an intention to depart without fighting as the retreat to Passo d’Arcos had been. In short, from January to the end of April the British army exercised no influence whatever on the military affairs of the Peninsula. Yet by March it was beginning to grow formidable in numbers: early in that month all the troops which had been drawn off to Cadiz were sent to Lisbon, and by the addition of seven good battalions to his corps[239] Cradock found himself at the head of over 16,000 men. There were but 800 effective cavalry, and of the six batteries only two, incredible as it may seem, were properly horsed, though three months had passed by since the general had begun his first complaints on this point[240]. But 16,000 British troops were a force not to be despised, and if Wellesley or some other competent officer had been in command, we cannot doubt that they would have been turned to some profitable use. Under Cradock they remained cantoned in the suburbs of Lisbon for the whole time during which Soult was completing his conquest of Oporto and northern Portugal, and Victor executing his invasion of Estremadura. It was not till Soult’s advanced guard was on the Vouga [April 6] that Hill and Beresford[241] succeeded in inducing the general to carry forward his head quarters to Leiria and his outposts to Thomar[242]. Fortunately his tenure of command was at last drawing to an end. On April 22 Sir Arthur Wellesley arrived in Lisbon and took over charge of the troops in Portugal. How startling were the consequences of this change of generals we shall soon see: ere May was out the whole Peninsula realized once more that there was a British Army within its limits—a fact that might well have passed unnoticed during the last four months.
SECTION XIII: CHAPTER III
THE PORTUGUESE ARMY: ITS HISTORY AND ITS REORGANIZATION
While the Regency was wasting much of its energy on the arming of the undisciplined masses of the Ordenanza, and while Cradock sat supine at Passo d’Arcos and at Saccavem, one useful piece of work at least was being taken in hand. This was the reorganization of the Portuguese regular army, a task which the Regency determined, though only so late as February, 1809, to hand over to a British general officer.
To explain the chaotic condition of the force at the moment when Soult was just about to enter Portugal, a short account of its previous history is necessary. It had received its existing shape from a foreign hand, that of the well-known ‘Conde de La Lippe,’ i.e. the German Marshal, Frederick Count of Lippe-Bückeburg, who had been entrusted with its command during the short war with Spain in 1762. He it was who first gave Portugal an army of the modern type, modelled on the ordinary system of the eighteenth century, and showing many traces of adaptations from a Prussian original. The Marshal was a great organizer and a man of mark: his name is perhaps best remembered in connexion with the citadel of Elvas, which he rebuilt, and christened La Lippe after himself: under that designation we shall repeatedly have to mention it while describing the early years of the Peninsular War.
As he left it, the Portuguese army consisted of twenty-four regiments of the line, each forming a single battalion of seven companies and 806 men. There were twelve regiments of cavalry, each originally composed of no more than 240 sabres, and three regiments of artillery of eight batteries each, besides a few garrison companies of that arm. After La Lippe’s departure the army had shared in the general decay of strength and organization in the kingdom, which prevailed during the reign of the mad queen Maria, and her son the feeble Prince-Regent John. But the lack of mere numerical strength was not nearly so fatal to its efficiency as the rustiness and rottenness of its internal machinery. Under an octogenarian commander-in-chief, the Duke of Alafoens, every department of the army had been decaying in the latter years of the eighteenth century. All the typical faults of an army of the ancien régime after a long period of peace were developed to the highest possible pitch. Commissions were sold, or given away by intrigue and corruption, often to persons of unsuitable rank and education[243]: promotion was slow and perfectly arbitrary: the pay of the officers was very low, while every incentive to petty jobbing and embezzlement was afforded by the vicious system under which the colonel contracted with the government for his regiment, and the captain with the colonel for his company. In the Portuguese army, as in all others where this antiquated practice prevailed, the temptation to fill the muster-rolls with ‘dead-heads’ and absentees, so that the contractor might save their food and pocket their pay, had been too strong for the ordinary officer to resist. Hence came the empty ranks of the battalions, the ludicrous disproportion of horses to men in the cavalry, the depleted condition of the regimental stores and equipment.
The short Spanish war of 1801-2 had revealed the complete disorganization of the army. Hasty measures were taken to strengthen it: in the moment of panic every infantry regiment was ordered to raise a second battalion, and though the number of companies per battalion was lowered from seven to five, yet as each of them was now to consist of 150 instead of 116 men, the total strength of each infantry corps was raised to 1,500 officers and men. At the same time the cavalry regiments were supposed to have been increased to 470 sabres[244], and a fourth regiment of artillery was created. Nor was this all: an ‘Experimental Legion’ for light infantry service, eight companies strong, with a couple of squadrons and a horse-artillery battery attached to it, was soon afterwards raised by the Marquis D’Alorna.
But after the peace of Badajoz had been signed the army was allowed to sink back into its old sloth and inefficiency. When Junot entered Portugal in December, 1807, it is doubtful if there were as many as 20,000 troops really embodied, though the nominal total of the national army reached nearly 50,000 men[245].
Portugal had a few keen soldiers (such as Gomez Freire de Andrade, and the renegade D’Alorna), who had received abroad a good military education, and had even written military books. But the majority of the officers were slack, ignorant, and incompetent; while the men were half-drilled, badly disciplined, and ill-equipped. The only attempt which had been made to introduce any of the modern military discoveries which had been worked out in the wars of the French Revolution, consisted in the creation of the already-mentioned ‘Experimental Legion’ which D’Alorna had been allowed to raise and to train with a new light-infantry drill, adapted by himself from French models. The main body of the army looked with some jealousy and suspicion on this corps, and had made no effort to copy it.
The French invasion of Portugal had dashed to pieces the old regular army. Junot, it will be remembered, had disbanded the greater part of the men, and formed with the remainder a few battalions, which he had begun to send off to France ere the insurrection of June, 1808, broke out. Some of them took an involuntary share in the first siege of Saragossa: others were hurled into the red holocaust of Wagram.
When Portugal rose against the invader, the local juntas endeavoured to call back to arms all the dispersed officers and men, to serve as a nucleus for the insurrectionary hosts. The system of recruiting which La Lippe had introduced made this comparatively easy: he had instituted regimental districts in a very complete form. Each corps was named after a particular town or region[246], drew its conscripts from that locality, and was usually quartered in it. When Junot disbanded the old army, the men naturally returned to their homes. It resulted that when, for example, the Oporto Junta summoned out to service the late members of the 6th and 18th regiments of the line, the two units belonging to the Oporto district, it could be certain of finding the greater part of the rank and file without much difficulty. To reconstitute in a hurry the corps of officers was a much harder matter: a disproportionate number of the more competent holders of commissions had been drafted into the contingent sent to France: comparatively few resided in their proper regimental districts, many in Lisbon, which was still in Junot’s hands. Hence the battalions which fought under Leite at Evora, or accompanied Wellesley to Vimiero, bore their old names indeed, but were not merely ill-equipped and low in numbers, but lacked a due supply of officers. Considering the inefficiency of the regiments even before they were destroyed by Junot, they might now be described as no more than ‘the shadow of a shade.’
When the French had been driven out of Portugal, and the Junta of Regency took in hand the reconstruction and enlargement of the army, the problem of organization seemed almost insoluble. The government decreed that the regiments of infantry of the line should be raised to their full establishment of 1,500, a figure which they had never really attained in the old days. It was also decided to create six new battalions of riflemen (Cazadores), a class of infantry of which D’Alorna’s ‘Experimental Legion’ had hitherto been the sole representatives in Portugal. As to the cavalry and artillery, it was an obvious fact that the dearth of horses in the kingdom made it impossible to enlarge the number of units. The twelve old regiments of horse[247], the thirty-two old batteries of artillery were to be reconstructed, but no new ones were to be created.
Considering that the old corps of officers in Portugal was notoriously incompetent, it was hard to see how the expanded army was to be drilled and disciplined. About 25,000 recruits were suddenly shot into the old cadres; they could be readily procured, for not only were volunteers forthcoming in great numbers, but if they ran short a stringent conscription law was in existence. But how were the regiments to be officered? It was true that a considerable amount of the raw material for officers was obtainable, for patriotic enthusiasm was driving the young men of the upper classes into the army, in a way that had never before been seen—the service had not hitherto been popular, owing to its poor pay and prospects. But one cannot officer raw recruits with equally raw ensigns, and call the result a regular army. Moreover, arms and equipment were lamentably deficient: Junot had confiscated and destroyed almost all the store of arms belonging to the old army: it is said that the insurgents had not 10,000 serviceable muskets among them when Wellesley landed. The British had distributed some 42,000 more between August and December[248]; but what were these among so many? There were to be over 50,000 regulars, when the establishment was completed, and the Regency hoped to call out some 40,000 militia when the first line of defence had been equipped, and after that to arm the vast masses of the Ordenanza.
Portuguese Dragoon of the 1st (Alcantara) Regiment
From a drawing of 1809.
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.
The natural results followed. In obedience to the decree issued by the Regency, a considerable number of men were collected at each regimental dépôt. Of these about one-third, on an average, were old soldiers: but the proportion varied, for some corps had suffered more than others from the drafts of trained men which Junot had sent off to France. A good many of the regiments succeeded, so far as numbers went, in constituting their two battalions without much difficulty. Others were less fortunate, and could only raise one: two were so hopelessly incomplete that Beresford distributed the few hundred men whom they could produce among other corps, and temporarily disbanded them[249]. It was the same with the cavalry, of which two regiments were wholly without horses, and several were so absurdly short of mounts that they could not be used[250]. Even of the corps which were not dissolved, several were so weak that they had not recruited themselves up to half their nominal strength even by September[251]. This was more especially the case in the Alemtejo, where the population displayed an apathy that contrasted strongly with the turbulent enthusiasm prevalent in Lisbon and in the North.
Two invaluable sets of Returns, in the Record Office, show us that, as far as mere numbers went, the Regency had not done so much as it should, in the way of increasing the total of men under arms, during the two months that followed the Convention of Cintra. On September 13, according to a report from Baron Decken, who had gone round the insurrectionary armies of Freire, Leite, and the Monteiro Mor, there were under arms 13,272 line infantry, 3,384 light infantry (Cazadores), 1,812 cavalry, and 19,000 militia: the force of artillery is not given. But of these 37,000 men only 13,600 had serviceable weapons and equipment, and were fit to take the field[252].
On November 26 these figures had risen to 22,361 infantry, 3,422 cavalry, 4,031 artillery, and 20,880 militia. But, owing to the importation of English muskets during the last two months, there were now 31,833 men properly equipped, of whom 2,052 were mounted men. The remaining 19,000 had still nothing more than pikes, or non-military firearms, such as fowling-pieces and blunderbusses: 1,400 cavalry were still without horses[253].
The figures are very moderate, but the worst part of the situation was that a collection of 1,000 or 1,500 men does not constitute a regiment, even if 300 or 400 of them chance to have been old soldiers. There were not, it is clear, muskets enough to arm more than two-thirds of the rank and file: belts, pouches, knapsacks, and other equipment were still more deficient. Yet the really fatal point was that there was a wholly inadequate number of officers, and that of those who were forthcoming the elder men were mostly incompetent, and the younger entirely untrained. In the official correspondence of the early months of 1809 the most prominent fact that emerges is the difficulty that was found in discovering colonels and majors capable of licking into shape the incoherent mass of men at the regimental head quarters, and of teaching the newly-appointed junior officers their duty. It seemed that their long peace-service in small garrison towns had taken all energy and initiative out of the seniors of the army of the ancien régime. They gazed with despair on the task before them, and seemed quite incapable of coping with it. When a British general took over the command of the Portuguese army, he complained that ‘Long habits of disregard to duty, and consequent laziness, make it not only difficult but almost impossible to induce the senior officers of this service to enter into any regular and continued attention to the duties of their situations, and neither reward nor punishment will induce them to bear up against the fatigue[254].’ It was only when a whole generation of colonels had been cleared away that the army grew efficient, and the reorganized regiments began to distinguish themselves in the field.
For the purpose of mobilization every regiment had been sent in the autumn of 1808 to its proper head quarters, in the centre of its recruiting district. There they still lay in the end of February, when Soult was drawing near the frontier. There was absolutely no Portuguese army in the field, only a number of battalions, squadrons, and batteries, in a more or less imperfect state of organization, scattered broadcast over the country. They were, as we have already seen, still insufficiently supplied with arms and equipment. Of transport and train, to enable them to move, there was hardly a trace. The only thing approaching a concentration of force was that in Lisbon and its immediate vicinity there were seven regiments of foot and three of horse, which were there assembled simply because their head quarters and their recruiting ground lay in this quarter[255]. Of the remainder of the infantry two regiments were in Algarve, in the far south; five in the Alemtejo; four in Beira; two in the Tras-os-Montes, four in Oporto and the adjoining province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. It was with the last six alone that Soult had to deal when he invaded northern Portugal[256]: not one of the others was moved up to aid the northern regiments in holding him back.
Impressed with the state of hopeless disarray in which their army lay, and conscious that for stores and weapons to equip it, and money to pay it, they could look only to Great Britain, the Regency asked in February for the appointment of a British commander-in-chief. This was the best pledge that they could give of their honest intention to place all their military resources at the disposition of their allies. It had another obvious advantage: Bernardino Freire, Leite, Silveira, the Monteiro Mor, and the other Portuguese generals commanding military districts were at feud with each other. It would be very difficult to place one above the rest, and to secure for him loyal co-operation from his subordinates. It was probable that an Englishman, a stranger to their quarrels and intrigues, would be better obeyed.
The Regency, it would seem, suggested that they would be glad to see the post of commander-in-chief given to Sir Arthur Wellesley. But the victor of Vimiero refused to accept it, probably because he had already secured from Lord Castlereagh the promise that he should be sent out again to Portugal to supersede Cradock. When he had declined the offer it was, to the surprise of most men, passed on to General Beresford. This officer had the advantage of knowing Portuguese; he had commanded one of Moore’s brigades during the Corunna retreat, and had seen much service on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a comparatively young man, being only in his forty-first year, and was very junior in his rank, having only become a major-general in 1807. Many officers who were his elders had coveted the post, and some friction was caused by the fact that with his new Portuguese commission he outranked several of his seniors in Cradock’s army. Beresford was a good fighting-man, and a hard worker; but he was neither a tactician nor a strategist, and did not shine when placed in independent command—as witness Albuera. When Wellington had learnt his limitations, he never gave him a task of any great difficulty, and in the later years of the war either kept him under his own eye or sent him on errands where it was not easy to go wrong. For really responsible work in 1812-14 he always used Hill, Hope, or Graham. But in 1809 Beresford was, but for his undoubted courage, more or less of an unknown quantity to his colleagues and his subordinates. Fortunately he turned out a good organizer, if a mediocre general. For what he did in the way of reforming, and almost recreating, the Portuguese army he deserves considerable credit. Every one will remember the quaint story of how he was received by his army after a short absence, with the ingenuous cry of ‘Long live Marshal Beresford—who takes care of our stomachs[257].’ This in one way was a high compliment—it was not every general, English, French, or Spanish, who succeeded in filling his soldiers’ bellies during the Peninsular War. The power to do so was not the least among the qualities necessary for a commander-in-chief.
Why the British cabinet chose Beresford, from among many possible candidates, for the very responsible post now put in his charge, it is hard to see. Castlereagh knew him, as being (like himself) one of a powerful Anglo-Irish family connexion, with strong parliamentary influence. This may have told in his favour: it was perhaps also remembered that he was a personal friend of Wellesley, whom Castlereagh was intending to send out to command the British army in Portugal, and moreover his junior. This would facilitate matters when the two generalissimos had to act together; Beresford would probably prove a more tractable colleague and subordinate to the self-confident, autocratic, and frigid Wellesley, than any officer who was a stranger to him or his senior in years and service. It is by no means impossible that Castlereagh nominated him at Sir Arthur’s private suggestion. But into the secrets of ministerial patronage it is useless to pry.
Appointed to his new post in February, only a month after he had returned from the Corunna expedition, Beresford at once set sail for Lisbon, and took up the command ere three weeks had expired since his appointment. He arrived at the very moment at which Soult was about to pass the northern frontier, and was at once gazetted as a Portuguese field marshal. After a short survey of those parts of his command which lay in and about Lisbon, he reported to the Regency that the dearth of officers, and especially of competent superior officers, was so great, that he could not hope to reorganize the army unless he were allowed to give commissions in the Portuguese service to many foreigners. As a preliminary measure he asked for volunteers from Sir John Cradock’s army, and obtained about enough English officers to give three to each regiment. The main inducement which attracted candidates was Beresford’s pledge that every one accepted for the Portuguese service should gain a step—a lieutenant would become a captain, a captain a major. The Marshal at once placed all the battalions with notoriously inefficient commanders in charge of British officers, and drafted into them a larger proportion of his volunteers than was given to those which were in better state. He also got leave from the British cabinet to offer Portuguese commissions to officers serving in corps on the home station. This gave him by the end of the year some scores of men of the sort required, and it was by them that the new army was mainly formed and disciplined[258]. The British drill was introduced, and to teach it Beresford was allowed to borrow many non-commissioned officers from Cradock’s regiments[259]. As was but natural, there arose considerable friction between the new comers and the native Portuguese officers, over whose heads they were often placed. This was inevitable, but led to less harm than might have been expected, because the rank and file, quick to recognize soldierly qualities, took kindly to their new commanders, and served them loyally and well.
In the beginning Beresford’s reorganization only extended to the regiments in Lisbon and the south. Those stationed beyond the Douro were already in the field, and actively engaged with Soult. They had hardly received any assistance, either of officers or of arms and equipment, before they became involved in the campaign of March, 1809[260]. In fairness to them this must be borne in mind, when their conduct in battle is compared with that of the reorganized army in the following year. The Portuguese Regency, in their report on the Oporto campaign sent to their Prince on May 31, 1809, pleaded with truth ‘that the armies formed in the northern provinces were motley assemblies, whose numbers and good will bore witness to the zeal of the people, and their determination not to accept the French yoke, but which could not with any propriety be called regular troops. They were composed of incomplete and fractional regiments, and the larger proportion of the rank and file consisted of recruits, many of whom had not been a month under arms. Some of the corps were short of muskets: those which had them were armed with weapons of bad quality[261], and various calibre. All were deficient in the most essential articles of equipment. It was not fair to expect that such troops could oppose with any prospect of success a well-armed and well-disciplined veteran army like that of France[262].’
The regular troops, and the totally undisciplined Ordenanza levies, did not form the whole military force of Portugal. There also existed, mainly on paper, another line of defence for the kingdom. This was the militia: according to the old military system of the realm each regimental district had to supply not only its line battalion, but also two (or sometimes one) battalions of militia. There should have been forty-three such regiments in existence in 1808, and early in 1809 the Regency ordered that they should be raised to forty-eight, and that each should consist of two battalions of 500 men each[263]. This force, however, was purely a paper army: the militia had not been called out since the war of 1802; there were a few officers bearing militia commissions, but no rank and file. When the Regency decreed its mobilization, all that could be done was that the local authorities should tell off such eligible young men as had not been embodied in the regular army, for militia recruits. But as there were neither officers to drill them, nor muskets to arm them, the conscription was but a farce. The men were not even called out in many districts, since it was useless to do so till arms could be procured for them. But in the two northern provinces, when Soult crossed the frontier, the militia-men took the field alongside with the Ordenanza, from whom they were distinguished by name alone, for they were almost as destitute of uniform, weapons, and officers as the levée en masse itself. It would seem that most of the other border regiments of militia were also mobilized in the spring of 1809, in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Castello Branco, and Elvas. That they were perfectly useless was shown in Mayne’s fight with Victor at the bridge of Alcantara (May 14), when their conduct contrasted shamefully with the steady and obstinate fighting of the Lusitanian Legion[264]. In June, Wellesley ordered that all men for whom there were no arms should be sent home on furlough, and that the regiments should endeavour to drill and exercise their men by relays of 200 at a time, each batch being kept two months under arms. This was apparently because there were not arms, officers, or drill-sergeants enough to provide for more than a small proportion of the available number of militia-men[265]. In this way between 8,000 and 10,000 militia were to be out during the times of the year when the country-side could best spare them from the labour of the fields. The rest were to be left at home, unless an actual invasion of Portugal should occur. From the modest scope of this plan, it may easily be guessed what the state of the militia had been four months earlier, when Soult was in the Tras-os-Montes, and Beresford had barely begun his work of reorganization.
The militia-men were supposed to provide their own uniforms, the result of which was that few save the officers ever owned uniforms at all. In 1810 Wellesley had to make formal representation to Masséna that they were part of the armed force of the Portuguese kingdom, and not banditti, as the Marshal threatened to deny the rights of regular combatants to any prisoners not wearing a military dress. The officers, however, had a blue uniform similar to that of the line, save that they had silver instead of gold lace on their collars and wrists. The militia were not entitled to any pay when mobilized within the limits of their own province. When taken over its border officers and men were supposed to draw half the pay of the regulars of corresponding rank, but did not find it easy to obtain the modest stipend to which they were entitled.
Throughout the war the Portuguese militia were only intermittently in the field: the longest continuous piece of service which they performed was that during Masséna’s invasion, when they were all mobilized for more than a year on end, from June 1810 to July 1811. At other times, the whole or parts of various regiments were under arms for periods of varying length, either to relieve the regulars from garrison duty, or to watch the less-exposed frontier points in times when the French were active in the neighbouring districts of Spain. They were very seldom exposed to the ordeal of battle, as their presence in the line would have been a source of danger rather than a help. But they were useful for secondary work, such as guarding convoys, maintaining lines of communication, and (most of all) restraining minor raids by small bodies of the enemy. During Masséna’s invasion the greater part of them were not drawn within the lines of Torres Vedras, like the Portuguese regulars, but left out in the country-side, to shift for themselves. Here they did invaluable service in cutting the Marshal’s line of communication with Spain, and harassing all his detachments. It was they who surprised and captured his wounded and his dépôt at Coimbra, who worried Drouet, and who turned back Gardanne, when he tried to push forward from Almeida in order to join the main French army.
But all this was in the far future when the spring campaign of 1809 began. At that date, as we have already seen, the militia were as undisciplined, as ill-armed, and as useless as the mass of Ordenanza levies, with which they were confused.
A word must be added as to the theoretical organization of this last force. It dated back to the Middle Ages, and had been regularly used during the days of the enfranchisement of Portugal from the yoke of the Spanish Hapsburgs, in the seventeenth century. The ‘ordinance’ was a Royal decree summoning to arms all males between sixteen and sixty with the exception of ecclesiastics. In districts owning a feudal lord, that person was ex-officio declared chief-captain (capitão mor) of his fief, and charged with the summoning of his vassals to the field. Where manorial customs had disappeared, the senior magistrate of the town, village, or district had to take up the post of capitão mor, unless a substitute was named by the crown. It was the duty of this commander to call out all the able-bodied men of his region, to divide them into companies of 250 men, and to name a captain, ensign, sergeant, clerk (meirinho), and ten corporals for each of these bodies. Persons able to provide a horse were to serve apart, as cavalry, under separate commanders; but no one ever saw or heard of mounted Ordenanza troops during the Peninsular War; all the horses of the country did not suffice to provide chargers even for the twelve regiments of the regular army. The whole levy was supposed to be called out twice a year by the capitão mor, in order that it might be seen that every man was properly enrolled in a company. But as a matter of fact the Ordenanza had not been summoned out, save in 1762 and 1802, since the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Nor had any care been taken to see that every householder possessed a weapon of some sort, as the law directed. When they mustered in 1809, the men with pikes outnumbered those with fowling-pieces or blunderbusses, and the men furnished with no more than scythes on poles, or goads, or such-like rustic weapons, were far more numerous than the pikemen.
The whole mass was perfectly useless; it was cruel to place it in the field and send it against regular troops. Tumultuous, undisciplined, unofficered, it was doomed to massacre whenever it allowed the enemy to approach. It would have been well to refrain from calling it out altogether, and to turn over the few serviceable arms which it possessed to the militia.
Note.—By far the best account of the Portuguese army and military system is to be found in Halliday’s Present state of Portugal and the Portuguese Army, an invaluable book of 1812. Something can be gleaned from Dumouriez’s Essay on the military topography of Portugal [1766]. A little information comes from Foy, but many of his statements in his vol. ii. are inaccurate. The Wellington and Beresford dispatches in the Record Office are, of course, full of information, but would be very unintelligible but for Halliday’s explanatory memoir, as they presuppose knowledge of the details of organization, but do not generally describe them. For the Lusitanian Legion, see Mayne’s monograph on that corps, and the dispatches of Sir Robert Wilson. I have inserted in [an appendix] a table of the reorganized army as it stood in the autumn of 1809.
Portuguese Infantry
a Private of the Lisbon Regiment and a man of the Algarve Ordenanza.
From a drawing of 1809.
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.
SECTION XIII: CHAPTER IV
COMBATS ABOUT CHAVES AND BRAGA: CAPTURE OF OPORTO (MARCH 10-29, 1809)
When La Romana marched off to the east, and abandoned his Portuguese allies to their own resources, the duty of defending the frontier fell upon General Francisco Silveira, the military governor of the Tras-os-Montes. He had mobilized his forces at Chaves the moment that Soult’s departure from Orense became known, and had there gathered the whole levy of his province. The total amounted to two incomplete line regiments[266] four battalions of disorderly and ill-equipped militia[267], the skeletons of two cavalry regiments, with hardly 200 horses between them[268], and a mass of the local Ordenanza, armed with pikes, goads, scythes, and fowling-pieces. The whole mass may have numbered some 12,000 men, of whom not 6,000 possessed firearms of any kind[269]. Against them the French marshal was marching at the head of 22,000 veterans, who had already gained experience in the art of mountain-warfare from their recent campaign in Galicia. The result was not difficult to foresee. If the Portuguese dared to offer battle they would be scattered to the winds.
Silveira’s levies were not the only force in arms on the frontier. The populous province of the Entre-Douro-e-Minho[270], roused to tumultuous enthusiasm by the bishop of Oporto, had sent every available man, armed or unarmed, to the front. A screen of militia and regulars under General Botilho was watching the line of the lower Minho: a vast mass of Ordenanza, backed by a very small body of line troops lay in and about Braga, under General Bernardino Freire; another multitude was still thronging the streets of Oporto and listening to the windy harangues of the bishop. But none of these masses of armed men were sent to the aid of Silveira. He was not one of the bishop’s faction, nor was he on good terms with his colleague Freire. Neither of them showed any inclination to combine with him, and their followers, in the true spirit of provincial particularism, thought of nothing but defending their own hearths and homes, and left the Tras-os-Montes to take care of itself. Yet they had for the moment no enemy in front of them but the small French garrison of Tuy, and could have marched without any risk to join their compatriots.
Relying on the aid of La Romana, General Silveira had taken post at Villarelho on the right bank of the Tamega, leaving the defence of the left bank to the Spaniards, whom he supposed to be still stationed about Monterey and Verin. On the very day upon which the Army of Galicia absconded, the Portuguese general sent forward a detachment, consisting of a line regiment and a mass of peasants, to menace the flank of the French advance. This force, having crossed the Spanish frontier, got into collision with the enemy near Villaza. Since Franceschi’s horsemen and Heudelet’s infantry had turned off to the east in pursuit of La Romana, the Portuguese fell in with the leading column of Soult’s main body—a brigade of Lahoussaye’s dragoons supported by Delaborde’s division. This force they ventured to attack, but were promptly beaten off by Foy, the brigadier of the advanced guard, who routed them and captured their sole piece of artillery. The shattered column fell back on the main body at Villarelho, and then Silveira, hearing of the departure of the Spaniards, resolved to retire and to look for a defensive position which he might be able to hold by his own unaided efforts. There was none such to be found in front of Chaves, for the valley of the Tamega widens out between Monterey and the Portuguese frontier fortress, and offers no ground suitable for defence. Accordingly Silveira very prudently decided to withdraw his tumultuary army to the heights of San Pedro, a league to the south of the town, where the space between the river and the mountains narrows down and offers a short and compact line of resistance. But he waited to be driven in, and meanwhile left rear-guards in observation at Feces de Abaxo on the left, and Outeiro on the right bank, of the Tamega.
Soult halted three days at Monterey in order to allow his rearguard and his convoy of sick to close up with the main body. But on March 10 he resumed his advance, using the two parallel roads on the two banks of the Tamega. Franceschi’s light horse and Heudelet’s division pushed down the eastern side, Caulaincourt’s brigade of dragoons[271] and Delaborde’s infantry down the western side of the river. Merle and Mermet were still near Verin. As the Tamega was unfordable in most places, the army seemed dangerously divided, but Soult knew well that he was running little or no risk. Both at Feces and Outeiro the Portuguese detachments, which covered Silveira’s main body, tried to offer serious resistance. They were of course routed, with the loss of a gun and many prisoners.
On hearing that his enemy was drawing near, Silveira ordered his whole army to retreat behind Chaves to the position of San Pedro[272]. This command nearly cost him his life; the ignorant masses of militia and Ordenanza could only see treason in the proposed move, which abandoned the town to the French. The local troops refused to march, and threatened to shoot their general: he withdrew with such of his men as would still obey orders, but a mixed multitude consisting of part of the 12th regiment of the line (the Chaves regiment), and a mass of Ordenanza and militia, remained behind to defend the dilapidated town. Its walls had never been repaired since the Spaniards had breached them in 1762; of the fifty guns which armed them the greater part were destitute of carriages, and rusting away in extreme old age; the supply of powder and cannon-balls was wholly insufficient for even a short siege. But encouraged by the advice of an incompetent engineer officer[273], who said that a few barricades would make the place impregnable, 3,000 men shut themselves up in it, and aided by 1,200 armed citizens, defied Soult, and opened a furious fire upon the vedettes which he pushed up to the foot of the walls. The Marshal sent in a fruitless summons to surrender, and then invested the place on the evening of the tenth; all night the garrison kept up a haphazard cannonade, and shouted defiance to the French. Next morning Soult resolved to drive away Silveira from the neighbouring heights, convinced that the spirits of the defenders of Chaves would fail the moment that they saw the field army defeated and forced to abscond. The divisions of Delaborde and Lahoussaye soon compelled Silveira to give ground: he displayed indeed a laudable prudence in refusing to let himself be caught and surrounded, and made off south-eastward towards Villa Real with 6,000 or 7,000 men. The Marshal then summoned Chaves to surrender for the second time; the garrison seem to have tired themselves out with twelve hours of patriotic shouting, and to have used up great part of their munitions in their silly nocturnal fireworks. When they saw Silveira driven away, their spirits sank, and they allowed their leader, Magelhaes Pizarro, to capitulate, without remonstrance. In short, they displayed even more cowardice on the eleventh than indiscipline upon the tenth of March. On the twelfth the French entered the city in triumph.
Soult was much embarrassed by the multitude of captives whom he had taken: he could not spare an escort strong enough to guard 4,000 prisoners to a place of safety. Accordingly he made a virtue of necessity, permitted the armed citizens of Chaves to retire to their homes, and dismissed the mass of 2,500 Ordenanza and militia-men, after extracting from them an oath not to serve against France during the rest of the war. The 500 regulars of the 12th regiment were not treated in the same way. The Marshal offered them the choice between captivity and enlisting in a Franco-Portuguese legion, which he proposed to raise. To their great discredit the majority, both officers and men, took the latter alternative—though it was with the sole idea of deserting as soon as possible. At the same moment Soult made an identical offer to the Spanish prisoners captured from Mahy’s division at the combats of Osoño and La Trepa on March 6: they behaved no better than the Portuguese: several hundred of them took the oath to King Joseph, and consented to enter his service[274].
The Duke of Dalmatia had resolved to make Chaves his base for further operations in Portugal. He brought up to it from Monterey all his sick and wounded, including those who had been transported from Orense; the total now amounted to 1,325, of whom many were convalescents already fit for sedentary duty. To guard them a single company of a French regiment, and the inchoate ‘Portuguese Legion,’ were detailed, while the command was placed in the hands of the chef de bataillon Messager. The flour and unground wheat found in the place fed the army for several days, and the small stock of powder captured was utilized to replenish its depleted supply of cartridges.
From Chaves Soult had the choice of two roads for marching on Oporto. The more obvious route on the map is that which descends the Tamega almost to its junction with the Douro, and then strikes across to Oporto by Amarante and Penafiel. But here, as is so often the case in the Peninsula, the map is the worst of guides. The road along the river, frequently pinched in between the water and overhanging mountains, presents a series of defiles and strong positions, is considerably longer than the alternative route, and passes through difficult country wellnigh from start to finish.
The second path from Chaves to Oporto is that which strikes westward, crosses the Serra da Cabrera, and descends into the valley of the Cavado by Ruivaens and Salamonde. From thence it leads to Braga, on the great coast-road from Valenza to Oporto. The first two or three stages of this route are rough and difficult, and pass through ground even more defensible than that on the way to Amarante and Penafiel. But when the rugged defiles of the watershed between the Tamega and the Cavado have been passed, and the invader has reached Braga, the country becomes flat and open, and the coast plain, crossed by two excellent roads, leads him easily to his goal. It has also to be remembered that, by adopting this alternative, Soult took in the rear the Portuguese fortresses of the lower Minho, and made it easy to reopen communications with Tuy and the French forces still remaining in Galicia.
If any other persuasion were needed to induce the Marshal to take the western, and not the eastern, road to Oporto, it was the knowledge of the position of the enemy which he had attained by diligent cavalry reconnaissances. It was ascertained that Silveira with the remains of his division had fallen back to Villa Pouca, more than thirty miles away, in the direction of Villa Real. He could not be caught, and could retreat whithersoever he pleased. Freire, on the other hand, was lying at Braga with his unwieldy masses, and had made no attempt to march forward and fortify the passes of the Serra da Cabrera. By all accounts that the horsemen of Franceschi could gather, the defiles were blocked only by the Ordenanza of the mountain villages.
This astounding news was absolutely correct. Freire’s obvious course was to defend the rugged watershed, where positions abounded. But he contented himself with placing mere observation posts—bodies of thirty or 100 men—in the passes, while keeping his main army concentrated. The truth was that he was in a state of deep depression of mind, and prepared for a disaster. Judging from the line which he adopted in the previous year, while co-operating with Wellesley in the campaign against Junot, we may set him down as a timid rather than a cautious general. He had no confidence in himself or in his troops: the indiscipline and mutinous spirit of the motley levies which he commanded had reduced him to despair, and he received no support from the Bishop of Oporto and his faction, who were omnipotent in the province. Repeated demands for reinforcements of regular troops had brought him nothing but the 2nd battalion of the Lusitanian Legion, under Baron Eben. The Bishop kept back the greater part of the resources of which he could dispose, for the defence of his own city, in front of which he was erecting a great entrenched camp. Freire had also called on the Regency for aid, but they had done no more than order two line battalions under General Vittoria to join him, and these troops had not yet crossed the Douro. When he heard that the French were on the march, and that he himself would be the next to receive their visit, he so far lost heart that he contemplated retiring on Oporto without attempting to fight. Instead of defending the defiles of Ruivaens and Salamonde, he began to send to the rear his heavy stores, his military chest, and his artillery of position. This timid resolve was to be his ruin, for the excitable and suspicious multitude which surrounded him had every intention of defending their homes, and could only see treason and cowardice in the preparations for retreat. In a few days their fury was to burst forth into open mutiny, to the destruction of their general and their own ultimate ruin.
Soult meanwhile had set out from Chaves on March 14, with Franceschi and Delaborde at the head of his column, as they had been in all the operations since their departure from Orense. Mermet and Lahoussaye’s dragoons followed on the fifteenth: Heudelet, with whom were the head quarters’ staff and the baggage, marched on the sixteenth: Merle, covering the rear of the army, came in from Monterey on that day, and started from Chaves on the seventeenth. Only Vialannes’ brigade of dragoons[275] was detached: these two regiments were directed to make a feint upon Villa Real, with the object of frightening and distracting Silveira, lest he should return to his old post when he heard that the French army had departed, and fall upon the rear of the marching columns. They beat up his outposts at Villa Pouca, announced everywhere the Marshal’s approach with his main body, and retired under cover of the night, after having deceived the Tras-os-Montes troops for a couple of days.
The divisions of Delaborde and Franceschi, while clearing the passes above Chaves, met with a desperate but futile resistance from the Ordenanza of the upper Cavado valley. Practically unaided by Freire, who had only sent to the defile of Salamonde 300 regular troops—a miserable mockery of assistance—the gallant peasantry did their best. ‘Even the smallest villages,’ wrote an aide-de-camp of Soult, ‘tried to defend themselves. It was not rare to see a peasant barricade himself all alone in his house, and fire from the windows on our men, till his door was battered in, and he met his death on our bayonets. The Portuguese defended themselves with desperation, and never asked for quarter: if only these brave and devoted fellows had possessed competent leaders, we should have been forced to give up the expedition, or else we should never have got out of the country. But their resistance was individual: each man died defending his hamlet or his home, and a single battalion of our advanced guard easily cleared the way for us. I saw during these days young girls in the fighting-line, firing on us, and meeting their death without recoiling a step. The priests had told them that they were martyrs, and that all who died defending their country went straight to paradise. In these petty combats, which lasted day after day, we frequently found, among the enemy’s dead, monks in their robes, their crucifixes still clasped in their hands. Indeed, while advancing we could see from afar these ecclesiastics passing about among the peasants, and animating them to the combat[276].... While the columns were on the march isolated peasants kept up a continual dropping fire on us from inaccessible crags above the road: at night they attacked our sentries, or crept down close to our bivouacs to shoot at the men who sat round the blaze. This sort of war was not very deadly, but infinitely fatiguing: there was not a moment of the day or night when we had not to be upon the qui vive. Moreover, every man who strayed from the ranks, whether he was sick, drunk, tired, or merely a marauder, was cut off and massacred. The peasants not only murdered them, but tortured them in the most horrid fashion before putting them to death[277].’
Among scenes of this description Franceschi and Delaborde forced their way down the valley of the Cavado, till they arrived at the village of Carvalho d’Este, six miles from Braga, where they found a range of hills on both sides of the road, occupied by the whole horde of 25,000 men who had been collected by Freire. The division which followed the French advanced guard had also to sustain several petty combats, for the survivors of the Ordenanza whom Delaborde had swept out of the way, closed in again to molest each column, as it passed by the defiles of Venda-Nova, Ruivaens, and Salamonde. Mermet’s division, which brought up the rear, had to beat off a serious attack from Silveira’s army[278]. For that general, as soon as he discovered that he had been fooled by Lorges’ demonstration, sent across the Tamega a detachment of 3,000 men, who fell upon Soult’s rear. But a single regiment drove them off without much difficulty: they drew back to their own side of the mountains, and did not quit the valley of the Tamega.
It was on March 17 that Franceschi and Delaborde pushed forward to the foot of the Portuguese position, which swept round in a semicircle on each side of the high-road. Its western half was composed of the plateau of Monte Adaufé, whose left overhangs the river Cavado, while its right slopes upward to join the wooded Monte Vallongo. This latter hill is considerably more lofty than the Monte Adaufé and less easy of access. In front of the position, and bisected by the high-road, is the village of Carvalho d’Este: at the foot of the Monte Vallongo is another village, Lanhozo, whose name the French have chosen to bestow on the combat which followed. To the left-rear of the Monte Adaufé, pressed in between its slopes and the river, is a third village, Ponte do Prado, with a bridge across the Cavado, which is the only one by which the position can be turned. The town of Braga lies three miles further to the rear. The invaders halted on seeing the whole range of hills, some six miles long, crowned with masses of men in position. Franceschi would not take it upon himself to attack such a multitude, even though they were but peasantry and militia, of the same quality as the horde that had been defeated near Chaves a few days before. He sent back word to the Marshal, and drew up in front of the position to await the arrival of the main body. But noting that a long rocky spur of the Monte Adaufé projected from the main block of high ground which the enemy was holding, he caused it to be attacked by Foy’s brigade of infantry, and drove back without much difficulty the advanced guard of the Portuguese. The possession of this hill gave the French a foothold on the heights, and an advantageous emplacement for artillery such as could not be found in the plain below.
It was three days before the rest of Soult’s army joined the leading division—not until the twentieth was his entire force, with the exception of Merle’s infantry, concentrated at the foot of the enemy’s position, and ready to attack. This long period of waiting, when every mind was screwed up to the highest pitch of excitement, had completely broken down the nerve of the Portuguese, who spent the hours of respite in hysterical tumult and rioting. Freire, as we have already seen, had been planning a retreat on Oporto, but he found the spirit of his army so exalted that he thought it better to conceal his project. He pretended to have abandoned the idea of retiring, and gave orders for the construction of entrenchments and batteries on the Monte Adaufé, to enfilade the main approach by the high-road. But he could not disguise his down-heartedness, nor persuade his followers to trust him. Presently the wrecks of the Ordenanza levies, who had fought at Salamonde, fell back upon Braga, loudly accusing him of cowardice, for not supporting them in their advanced position. The whole camp was full of shouting, objectless firing in the air, confused cries of treason, and mutinous assemblies. On the day when the French appeared in front of the position Freire grew so alarmed at the threats against his life, which resounded on every side, that he secretly quitted Braga to fly to Oporto. But he was recognized and seized by the Ordenanza of Tobossa, a few miles to the rear. They brought him back to the camp as a prisoner, and handed him over to Baron Eben, the colonel of the 2nd battalion of the Lusitanian Legion, who had been acting as Freire’s second-in-command. This officer, an ambitious and presumptuous man, and a great ally of the Bishop of Oporto, played the demagogue, harangued the assembled multitude, and readily took over the charge of the army. He consigned his unfortunate predecessor to the gaol of Braga, and led on the mutineers to reinforce the array on Monte Adaufé. When Eben had departed, a party of Ordenanza returned to the city, dragged out the wretched Freire, and killed him in the street with their pikes. The same afternoon they murdered Major Villasboas, the chief of Freire’s engineers, and one or more of his aides-de-camp. They also seized and threw into prison the corregidor of Braga, and several other persons accused of sympathy with the French. Eben appears to have winked at these atrocities—much as his friend the Bishop of Oporto ignored the murders which were taking place in that city. By assuming command in the irregular fashion that we have seen, he had made himself the slave of the hysterical horde that surrounded him, and had to let them do what they pleased, lest he should fall under suspicion himself[279].
It would seem, however, that Eben did the little that was possible with such material in preparing to oppose Soult. He threw up more entrenchments on the Monte Adaufé, mounted the few guns that he possessed in commanding situations, and did his best to add to the lamentably depleted store of munitions on hand. Even the church roofs were stripped for lead, when it was found that there was absolutely no reserve of cartridges, and that the Ordenanza had wasted half of their stock in demonstrations and profitless firing at the French vedettes. On the morning of the nineteenth he extended his right wing to some hills below the Monte Vallongo, beyond the village of Lanhozo, a movement which threatened to outflank and surround that part of the French army which was in front of him, and to cut it off from the divisions still in the rear. This could not be tolerated, and Mermet’s infantry were dispatched to dislodge the 2,000 men who had taken up this advanced position. They were easily beaten out of the village and off the hill, and retired to their former station on the Monte Vallongo. The French here captured two guns and some prisoners. Soult gave these men copies of a proclamation which he had printed at Chaves, offering pardon to all Portuguese who should lay down their arms, and sent them back into Eben’s lines under a flag of truce. When the Ordenanza discovered what the papers were, they promptly put to death the twenty unfortunate men as traitors, without listening to their attempts to explain the situation.
On the morning of March 20, Soult had been joined by Lorges’ dragoons and his other belated detachments, and prepared to attack the enemy’s position. To defend it Eben had now, beside 700 of his own Legion[280], one incomplete line regiment (Viana, no. 9), the militia of Braga and the neighbouring places, and some 23,000 Ordenanza levies, of whom 5,000 had firearms, 11,000 pikes, and the remaining 7,000 nothing better than scythes, goads, and instruments of husbandry. There were about fifteen or twenty pieces of artillery distributed along the front of the six-mile position, the majority of them in the entrenchments on the Monte Adaufé, placed so as to command the high-road.
Knowing the sort of rabble that was in front of him, Soult made no attempt to turn or outflank the Portuguese, but resolved to deliver a frontal attack all along the line, in the full belief that the enemy would give way the moment that the charge was pushed home. He had now about 3,000 cavalry and 13,000 infantry with him—Merle being still absent. He told off Delaborde’s division with Lahoussaye’s dragoons to assail the enemy’s centre, on both sides of the high-road, where it crosses the Monte Adaufé. Mermet’s infantry and Franceschi’s light horse attacked, on the left, the wooded slopes of the Monte Vallongo. Heudelet’s division, on the right, sent one brigade to storm the heights above the river, and left the other brigade as a general reserve for the army. Lorges’ dragoons were also held back in support.
As might have been expected, Soult’s dispositions were completely successful. When the columns of Delaborde and Heudelet reached the foot of the enemy’s position, the motley horde which occupied it broke out into wild cheers and curses, and opened a heavy but ineffective fire. They stood as long as the French were climbing up the slopes, but when the infantry debouched on to the plateau of Monte Adaufé they began to waver and disperse[281]. Then Soult let loose the cavalry of Lahoussaye, which had trotted up the high-road close in the rear of Delaborde’s battalions, the 17th Dragoons leading. There was no time for the reeling mass of peasants to escape. ‘We dashed into them,’ wrote one officer who took part in the charge[282]; ‘we made a great butchery of them; we drove on among them pell-mell right into the streets of Braga, and we pushed them two leagues further, so that we covered in all four leagues at full gallop without giving them a moment to rally. Their guns, their baggage, their military chest, many standards fell into our power[283].’
Such was the fate of the Portuguese centre, on each side of the high-road. Further to the right, above the Cavado, Heudelet was equally successful in forcing his way up the northern slopes of the Monte Adaufé; the enemy broke when he reached the plateau, but as he had no heavy force of cavalry with him, their flight was not so disastrous or their loss so heavy as in the centre. Indeed, when they had been swept down into the valley behind the ridge, some of the Portuguese turned to bay at the Ponte do Prado, and inflicted a sharp check on the Hanoverian legion, the leading battalion in Heudelet’s advance. It was not till the 26th of the line came up to aid the Germans that the rallied peasantry again broke and fled. They only lost 300 men in this part of the field.
Far to the left, in the woods on the slope of the Monte Vallongo, Mermet and Franceschi had found it much harder to win their way to the edge of the plateau than had the troops in the centre. But it was only the physical obstacles that detained them: the resistance of the enemy was even feebler than in the centre. By the time that the infantry of Mermet emerged on the crest of the hill, the battle had already been won elsewhere. The Portuguese right wing crumpled up the moment that it was attacked, and fled devious over the hillsides, followed by Franceschi’s cavalry, who made a dreadful slaughter among the fugitives. Five miles behind their original position a body of militia with four guns rallied under the cliffs on which stands the village of Falperra. The cavalry held them in check till Mermet’s leading regiment, the 31st Léger, came up, and then, attacked by both arms at once, the whole body was ridden down and almost exterminated. ‘The commencement was a fight, the end a butchery,’ wrote an officer of the 31st; ‘if our enemies had been better armed and less ignorant of the art of war, they might have made us pay dearly for our victory. But for lack of muskets they were half of them armed with pikes only: they could not manœuvre in the least. How was such a mob to resist us? they could only have held their ground if they had been behind stone walls[284].’
The rout and pursuit died away in the southern valleys beyond Braga, and Soult could take stock of his victory. He had captured seventeen guns, five flags, and the whole of the stores of Eben’s army: he had killed, according to his own estimate, some 4,000 men[285], and taken only 400 prisoners. This shocking disproportion between the dead and the captives was caused by the fact that the French in most parts of the field had given no quarter. Some of their historians explain that their cruelty resulted from the discovery that the Portuguese had been murdering and mutilating the stragglers who fell into their hands[286]. But it was really due to the exasperation of spirit that always accompanies guerrilla warfare. Constantly worried by petty ambushes, ‘sniped’ in their bivouacs, never allowed a moment of rest, the soldiers were in a state of nervous irritation which found vent in needless and unjustifiable cruelty. In the fight they had lost only forty killed and 160 wounded, figures which afford no excuse for the wholesale slaughter in the pursuit to which they gave themselves up.
In the first flush of victory the French supposed that they had made an end of the Ordenanza, and that northern Portugal was at their feet. ‘Cette journée a été fatale à l’insurrection portugaise,’ wrote one of the victors in his diary[287]. But no greater mistake could have been made: though many of the routed horde dispersed to their homes, the majority rallied again behind the Avé, only ten or twelve miles from the battle-field. Nor did the battle of Braga even open the way to Galicia: General Botilho, with the levies of the Valenza and Viana district, closed in behind Soult and blocked the way to Tuy, the nearest French garrison. The Marshal had only conquered the ground on which he stood, and already his communication with Chaves, his last base, had been intercepted by detachments sent into the passes by Silveira.
Soult halted three days at Braga, a time which he utilized for the repair of his artillery, and the replenishing of the cartridge boxes of his infantry from the not too copious supply of munitions captured from the Portuguese. His cavalry scoured the country down the Cavado as far as Barcelos, and southward to the line of the Avé, only to find insurgents everywhere, the bridges broken, and the fords dredged up and staked.
The Marshal, however, undaunted by the gloomy outlook, resolved to march straight for his destined goal, without paying any attention to his communications. He now made Braga a temporary base, left there Heudelet’s division in charge of 600 sick and wounded, and moved on Oporto at the head of his three remaining infantry divisions and all his cavalry.
Two good chaussées, and one additional mountain road of inferior character, lead from Braga to Oporto, crossing the Avé, the one four, the next six, the third twenty-four miles from the sea. The first and most westerly passes it at Ponte de Avé, the second at Barca de Trofa, where there is both a bridge and a wide ford, the third and least obvious at Guimaraens not far from its source in the Serra de Santa Catalina. Soult resolved to use all three for his advance, wisely taking the difficult road by Guimaraens into his scheme, since he guessed that it would probably be unwatched by the Portuguese, precisely because it was far less eligible than the other two. He was perfectly right: the Bishop of Oporto, the moment that he heard of the fall of Braga, pushed up some artillery and militia to aid the Ordenanza in defending both the Ponte de Avé and the Barca de Trofa bridges. Each was cut: batteries were hastily thrown up commanding their approaches, and entrenchments were constructed in their rear. At Barca de Trofa the ford was dredged up and completely blocked with chevaux de frise. But the remote and secondary passage at Guimaraens was comparatively neglected, and left in charge of such of the local Ordenanza as had returned home after the rout of Braga.
Soult directed Lorges’ dragoons against the western road: he himself with Delaborde’s and Merle’s infantry and Lahoussaye’s cavalry took the central chaussée by Barca de Trofa. On the difficult flanking path by Guimaraens he sent Franceschi’s light horse and Mermet’s infantry. On both the main roads the Portuguese positions were so strong that the advancing columns were held back: Soult would not waste men—he was beginning to find that he had none to spare—in attempting to force the entrenched positions opposite him. After feeling them with caution, he pushed a column up-stream to a small bridge at San Justo, which had been barricaded but not broken. Here he established by night a heavy battery commanding the opposite bank. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he opened fire on the Portuguese positions across the water, and, when the enemy had been well battered, hurled the brigade of General Foy at the fortified bridge. It was carried, and Delaborde’s division was beginning to pass, when it met another French force debouching on the same point. This was composed of Mermet and Franceschi’s men: they had beaten the local Ordenanza at Guimaraens, crossed the Avé high up, and were now pushing along the southern bank to take the Barca de Trofa position in the flank. Thus Soult found that, even if his frontal assault at San Justo had failed, his left-hand column would have cleared the way for him a few hours later, being already across the river and in the enemy’s rear. Indeed his lateral detachment had done all that he had expected from it, and at no great cost. For though the Ordenanza had opposed it bravely enough, they had never been able to hold it back. The only notable loss that had been sustained was that of General Jardon, one of Mermet’s brigadiers, who had met his death by his own recklessness. Finding his men checked for a moment, he had seized a musket and charged on foot at the head of his skirmishing line. This was not the place for a brigadier-general, and Jardon died unnecessarily, doing the work of a sub-lieutenant.
Finding the French across the river at San Justo, the Portuguese, who were defending the lower bridges, had to give way, or they would have been surrounded and cut off. They yielded unwillingly, and at Ponte de Avé actually beat off the first attempt to evict them. But in the end they had to fly, abandoning the artillery in the redoubts that covered the two bridges[288].
On the twenty-seventh, therefore, Soult was able to press close in to Oporto, for the line of the Avé is but fifteen miles north of the city. On approaching the heights which overhang the Douro the French found them covered with entrenchments and batteries ranged on a long front of six or seven miles, from San João de Foz on the sea-shore to the chapel of Bom Fin overlooking the river above the town. Ever since the departure of the French from Orense and their crossing of the frontier had become known, the whole of the populace had been at work on the fortifications, under the direction of Portuguese and British engineer officers. In three weeks an enormous amount of work had been done. The rounded summits of the line of hills, which rise immediately north of the city, and only half a mile in advance of its outermost houses, had been crowned with twelve redoubts armed with artillery of position. The depressions between the redoubts had been closed by palisades and abattis. Further west, below the city, where the line of hills is less marked, the front was continued by a deep ditch, fortified buildings, and four strong redoubts placed in the more exposed positions. It ended at the walls of San João da Foz, the old citadel which commands the mouth of the Douro, and had in this direction an outwork in another ancient fort, the castle of Quejo, on the sea-shore a mile north of the estuary. There were no less than 197 guns of various calibres distributed along the front of the lines. Nor was this all: the main streets of the place had been barricaded to serve as a second line of defence, and even south of the river a battery had been constructed on the height crowned by the Serra Convent, which overlooks the bridge and the whole city.
To hold this enormous fortified camp the Bishop of Oporto had collected an army formidable in numbers if not in quality. There was a strong nucleus of troops of the regular army: it included the two local Oporto regiments (6th and 18th of the line), two more battalions brought in by Brigadier-General Vittoria, who had been too late to join in the defence of Braga, a battalion of the regiment of Valenza (no. 21), a fraction of that of Viana (no. 9), with the wrecks of the 2nd battalion of the Lusitanian Legion, which had escaped from Eben’s rout of the twentieth, and the skeleton of an incomplete cavalry regiment (no. 12, Miranda). In all there cannot have been less than 5,000 regular troops in the town, though many of the men were recruits with only a few weeks of service. To these may be added three or four militia regiments in the same condition as were the rest of the corps of that force, i.e. half-armed and less than half-disciplined[289]. But the large majority of the garrison was composed of the same sort of levies that had already fought with such small success at Chaves and Braga—there were 9,000 armed citizens of Oporto and a somewhat greater number of the Ordenanza of the open country, who had retired into the city before Soult’s advancing columns. The whole mass—regulars and irregulars—may have made up a force of 30,000 men—nothing like the 40,000 or 60,000 of the French reports[290]. Under the Bishop the military commanders were three native brigadier-generals, Lima-Barreto, Parreiras, and Vittoria. Eben had been offered the charge of a section of the defences, but—depressed with the results of his experiment in generalship at Braga—he refused any other responsibility than that of leading his battalion of the Lusitanian Legion. The Bishop had allotted to Parreiras the redoubts and entrenchments on the north of the town, to Vittoria those on the north-east and east, to Lima-Barreto those below the town as far as St. João da Foz. The regulars had been divided up, so as to give two or three battalions to each general; they were to form the reserve, while the defences were manned by the militia and Ordenanza. There was a lamentable want of trained gunners—less than 1,000 artillerymen were available for the 200 pieces in the lines and on the heights beyond the river. To make up the deficiency many hundreds of raw militia-men had been turned over to the commanders of the batteries. The natural result was seen in the inferior gunnery displayed all along the line upon the fatal twenty-ninth of March.
To complete the picture of the defenders of Oporto it must be added that the anarchy tempered by assassination, which had been prevailing in the city ever since the Bishop assumed charge of the government, had grown to a head during the last few days. On the receipt of the news of the disaster at Braga it had culminated in a riot, during which the populace constituted a sort of Revolutionary Tribunal at the Porto do Olival. They haled out of the prisons all persons who had been consigned to them on a charge of sympathizing with the French, hung fourteen of these unfortunates, including the brigadier-general Luiz da Oliveira, massacred many more in the streets, and dragged the bodies round the town on hurdles. The Bishop, though he had 5,000 regular troops at hand, made no attempt to intervene—‘he could not stand in the way of the righteous vengeance of the people upon traitors.’ On the night of the twenty-eighth he retired to a place of safety, the Serra Convent across the river, after bestowing his solemn benediction upon the garrison, and handing over the further conduct of the defence to the three generals whose names we have already cited.
The town of Oporto was hidden from Soult’s eyes by the range of heights, crowned by fortifications, which lay before him. For the place was built entirely upon the downslope of the hill towards the Douro, and was invisible till those approaching it were within half a mile of its outer buildings. It is a town of steep streets running down to the water, and meeting at the foot of the great pontoon-bridge, more than 200 yards long, which links it to the transpontine suburb of Villa Nova, and the adjacent height of the Serra do Pilar. The river front forms a broad quay, along which were lying at the time nearly thirty merchant ships, mostly English vessels laden with port wine, which were wind-bound by a persistent North-Wester, and could not cross the bar and get out to sea.
Although his previous attempts to negotiate with the Portuguese had not been very fortunate, the Marshal thought it worth while to send proposals for an accommodation to the Bishop. He warned him not to expose his city to the horrors of a sack, pointed out that the raw levies of the garrison must inevitably be beaten, and assured him that ‘the French came not as enemies, but as the deliverers of Portugal from the yoke of the English. It was for the benefit of these aliens alone that the Bishop would expose Oporto to the incalculable calamities attending a storm[291].’ The bearer of the Marshal’s letter was a Portuguese major taken prisoner at Braga, who would have been massacred at the outposts if he had not taken the precaution of explaining to his countrymen that Soult had sent him in to propose the surrender of the French army, which was appalled at the formidable series of defences to which it found itself opposed! The reply sent by the Bishop and his council of war was, of course, defiant, and bickering along the front of the lines immediately began. While the white flag was still flying General Foy, the most distinguished of Soult’s brigadiers, trespassed by some misconception within the Portuguese picquets and was made prisoner. While being conducted into the town he was nearly murdered, being mistaken for Loison, for whom the inhabitants of Oporto nourished a deep hatred[292].
On finding that the Portuguese were determined to fight, Soult began his preparations for a general assault upon the following day. He drove in the enemy’s outposts outside the town, and captured one or two small redoubts in front of the main line. Having reconnoitred the whole position, he told off Delaborde and Franceschi to attack the north-eastern front, Mermet and one brigade of Lahoussaye’s dragoons to storm the central parts of the lines, due north of the city, where the fortifications were most formidable, Merle and the other brigade of Lahoussaye to press in upon the western entrenchments below the city. There was no general reserve save Lorges’ two regiments of cavalry, and these had the additional task imposed upon them of fending off any attack on the rear of the army which might be made by scattered bodies of Ordenanza, who were creeping out into the woods along the sea-coast, and threatening to turn the Marshal’s right flank.
Soult had but 16,000 men available,—of whom 3,000 were cavalry, and therefore could not be employed till the infantry should have broken through the line of fortifications which completely covered the Portuguese front. Nevertheless he had no doubts of the result, though he had to storm works defended by 30,000 men and lined with 197 cannon. He now knew the exact fighting value of the Portuguese levies, and looked upon Oporto as his own.
The Marshal’s plan was not to repeat the simple and simultaneous frontal attack all along the line by which he had carried the day at Braga. There was a good deal of strategy in his design: the two flank divisions were ordered to attack, while the centre was for a time held back. Merle, in especial, was directed to do all that he could against the weakest point of the Portuguese line, in the comparatively level ground to the west of the city. Soult hoped that a heavy attack in this direction would lead the enemy to reinforce his left from the reserves of his centre, and gradually to disgarnish the formidable positions north of the city, when no attack was made on them. If they committed this fault, he intended to hurl Mermet’s division, which he carefully placed under cover till the critical moment, at the central redoubts. A successful assault at this point would finish the game, as it would cut the Portuguese line in two, and allow the troops to enter the upper quarters of the city in their first rush.
The French were under arms long ere dawn, waiting for the signal to attack. The Portuguese also were awake and stirring in the darkness, when at three o’clock a thunderstorm, accompanied by a terrific hurricane from the north-west, swept over the city. In the midst of the elemental din some of the Portuguese sentinels thought that they had seen the French columns advancing to the assault: they fired, the artillery followed their example, and for half an hour the noise of the thunderstorm was rivalled by that of 200 guns of position firing at nothing. Just as the gunners had discovered their mistake, the tempest passed away, and soon after the day broke. So drenched and weary were the French, who had been lying down under the torrential rain, that Soult put off the assault for an hour, in order to allow them to dry themselves and take some refreshment; the pause also allowed the sodden ground to harden.
At seven all was again ready, and Merle’s and Delaborde’s regiments hurled themselves at the entrenchments above and below the city. Both made good progress, especially the former, who lodged themselves in the houses and gardens immediately under the main line of the Portuguese left wing, and captured several of its outlying defences. Seeing the position almost forced, Parreiras, the commander of the central part of the lines, acted just as Soult had hoped, and sent most of his reserve to reinforce the left. The Marshal then bade Merle halt for a moment, but ordered Delaborde, on his eastern flank, to push on as hard as he could. The general obeyed, and charged right into the Portuguese entrenchments, capturing several redoubts and actually breaking the line and getting a lodgement in the north-east corner of the city. Parreiras, to aid his colleague in this quarter, drew off many of his remaining troops, and sent them away to the right, thereby leaving his own section of the line only half manned. Thereupon Soult launched against the central redoubts his main assaulting column, Mermet’s division and the two regiments of dragoons. The central battalion went straight for the main position above the high-road, where the great Portuguese flag was flying on the strongest redoubt. The others attacked on each side. This assault was decisive: the Portuguese gunners had only time to deliver two ineffective salvos when the French were upon them. They charged into the redoubts through the embrasures, pulled down the connecting abattis, and swept away the depleted garrison in their first rush. The line of the defenders was hopelessly broken, and Mermet’s division hunted them down the streets leading to the river at full speed.
The centre being thus driven in, the Portuguese wings saw that all was lost, and gave way in disorder, looking only for a line of retreat. Vittoria, with the right wing, abandoned his section of the city and retreated east along the Vallongo road, towards the interior: he got away without much loss, and even turned to bay and skirmished with the pursuing battalions of Delaborde when once he was clear of the suburbs. Far other was the lot of the Portuguese left wing, which had the sea behind it instead of the open country. General Lima-Barreto, its commander, was killed by his own men: he had given orders to spike the guns and double to the rear the moment that he saw the central redoubts carried. Unfortunately for himself, he was among a mass of men who wished to hold on to their entrenchments in spite of the disaster on their right. When he reiterated his order to retreat, he was shot down for a traitor. But Merle’s division soon evicted his slayers, and sent them flying towards St. João da Foz and the sea. There was a dreadful slaughter of the Portuguese in this direction: some escaped across the river in boats, a large body slipped round Merle’s flank and got away to the north along the coast (though Lorges’ dragoons pursued them among the woods above the water and sabred many): others threw themselves into the citadel of St. João and capitulated on terms. But several thousands, pressed into the angle between the Douro and the ocean, were slaughtered almost without resistance, or rolled en masse into the water.
The fate of the Portuguese centre was no less horrible. Their commander, Parreiras, fled early, and got over the bridge to report to the Bishop the ruin of his army. The main horde followed him, though many lingered behind, endeavouring to defend the barricades in the streets. When several thousands had passed the river, some unknown officer directed the drawbridge between the central pontoons to be raised, in order to prevent the French from following. This was done while the larger part of the armed multitude was still on the further bank, hurrying down towards the sole way of escape. Nor was it only the fighting-men whose retreat was cut off: when the news ran round the city that the lines were forced, the civil population had rushed down to the quays to escape before the sack began. It was fortunate that half the people had left Oporto during the last two days and taken refuge in Beira. But tens of thousands had lingered behind, full of confidence in their entrenchments and their army of defenders. A terrified mass of men, women, and children now came pouring down to the bridge, and mingled with the remnants of the routed garrison. The pontoons were still swinging safely on their cables, and no one, save those in the front of the rush, discovered that there was a fatal gap in the middle of the passage, where the drawbridge had been raised. There was no turning back for those already embarked on the bridge, for the crowds behind continued to push them on, and it was impossible to make them understand what had happened. The French had now begun to appear on the quays, and to attack the rear of the unhappy multitude: their musketry drowned the cries of those who tried to turn back. At the same time the battery on the Serra hill, beyond the river, opened upon the French, and the noise of its twenty heavy guns made it still more impossible to convey the news to the back of the crowd. For more than half an hour, it is said, the rush of fugitives kept thrusting its own front ranks into the death-trap, forty feet broad, in the midst of the bridge. If anything more was needed to add to the horror of the scene, it was supplied by the sudden rush of a squadron of Portuguese cavalry, which—cut off from retreat to the east—galloped down from a side street and ploughed its way into the thickest of the crowd at the bridge-head, trampling down hundreds of victims, till it was brought to a standstill by the mere density of the mass into which it had penetrated. So many persons, at last, were thrust into the water that not only was the whole surface of the Douro covered with drowning wretches, but the gap in the bridge was filled up by a solid mass of the living and the dead. Over this horrid gangway, as it is said, some few of the fugitives scrambled to the opposite bank[293].
At first the French, who had fought their way down to the quay, had begun to fire upon the rear of the multitude which was struggling to escape. But they soon found that no resistance was being offered, and saw that the greater part of the flying crowd was composed of women, children, and non-combatants. The sight was so sickening that their musketry died down, and when they saw the unfortunate Portuguese thrust by thousands into the water, numbers of them turned to the charitable work of helping the strugglers ashore, and saved many lives. The others cleared the bridge-head by forcing the fugitives back with the butt ends of their muskets, and edging them along the quays and into the side streets, till the way was open. In the late afternoon some of Mermet’s troops mended the gap in the bridge with planks and rafters, and crossed it, despite of the irregular fire of the Portuguese battery on the heights above. They then pushed into the transpontine suburb, expelled its defenders, and finally climbed the Serra hill and captured the guns which had striven to prevent their passage.
Meanwhile the parts of Oporto remote from the pontoon-bridge had been the scene of a certain amount of desultory fighting. Many small bodies of the garrison had barricaded themselves in houses, and made a desperate but ineffectual attempt to defend them. In the Bishop’s palace at the south end of the town 400 militia held out for some hours, and were all bayonetted when the gates were at last burst open. Street-fighting always ends in rapine, rape and arson, and as the resistance died down the victors turned their hands to the usual atrocities that follow a storm. It was only a small proportion of them who had been sobered and sickened by witnessing the catastrophe on the bridge. The rest dealt with the houses and with the inhabitants after the fashion usual in the sieges of that day, and Oporto was thoroughly sacked. It is to the credit of Soult that he used every exertion to beat the soldiers off from their prey, and restored order long ere the following morning. It is to be wished that Wellington had been so lucky at Badajoz and San Sebastian.
The French army had lost, so the Marshal reported, no more than eighty killed and 350 wounded, an extraordinary testimony to the badness of the Portuguese gunnery. How many of the garrison and the populace perished it will never be possible to ascertain—the figures given by various contemporary authorities run up from 4,000 to 20,000. The smaller number is probably nearer the truth, but no satisfactory estimate can be made. It is certain that some of the regiments which took part in the defence were almost annihilated[294], and that thousands of the inhabitants were drowned in the river. Yet the town was not depopulated, and of its defenders the greater proportion turned up sooner or later in the ranks of Silveira, Botilho, and Trant. The slain and the drowned together may perhaps be roughly estimated at 7,000 or 8,000, about equally divided between combatants and non-combatants.
Soult meanwhile could report to his master that the first half of his orders had been duly carried out. He had captured 200 cannon, a great store of English ammunition and military equipment, and more than thirty merchant vessels, laden with wine. He had delivered Foy and some dozens of other French captives—for it would be doing the Portuguese injustice to let it be supposed that they had killed or tortured all their prisoners. In short, the victory and the trophies were splendid: yet the Marshal was in reality almost as far from having completed the conquest of northern Portugal as on the day when he first crossed its frontier. He had only secured for himself a new base of operation, to supersede Chaves and Braga. For the next month he could do no more than endeavour ineffectually to complete the subjugation of one single province. The main task which his master had set before him, the capture of Lisbon, he was never able to contemplate, much less to take in hand. Like so many other French generals in the Peninsula, he was soon to find that victory is not the same thing as conquest.
N.B.—The sources for this part of the Portuguese campaign are very full. On the French side we have, besides the Marshal’s dispatches, the following eye-witnesses: Le Noble, Soult’s official chronicler; St. Chamans (one of the Marshal’s aides-de-camp); General Bigarré, King Joseph’s representative at the head quarters of the 2nd Corps; Naylies of Lahoussaye’s dragoons; and Fantin des Odoards of the 31st Léger. On the Portuguese side we have the lengthy dispatches of Eben, the narrative of Hennegan (who had brought the British ammunition to Oporto), some letters from Brotherton, who was first with La Romana and then with Silveira, and a quantity of official correspondence in the Record Office, between Beresford and the Portuguese.
SECTION XIII: CHAPTER V
SOULT’S HALT AT OPORTO: OPERATIONS OF WILSON AND LAPISSE ON THE PORTUGUESE FRONTIER: SILVEIRA’S DEFENCE OF AMARANTE
Oporto had been conquered: the unhappy levies of the Bishop had been scattered to the winds: by the captures which it had made the French army was now, for the first time since its departure from Orense, in possession of a considerable store of provisions and an adequate supply of ammunition. Soult was no longer driven forward by the imperative necessity for finding new resources to feed his troops, nor forced to hurry on the fighting by the fear that if he delayed his cartridges would run short. He had at last leisure to halt and take stock of his position. The most striking point in the situation was that he was absolutely ignorant of the general course of the war in the other regions of the Peninsula. When he had been directed to march on Oporto, he had been assured that he might count on the co-operation of Lapisse, who was to advance from Salamanca with his 9,000 men, and of Victor, who was to stretch out to him a helping hand from the valley of the Tagus. It was all-important to know how far the promised aid was being given: yet the Marshal could learn nothing. More than two months had now elapsed since he had received any dispatches from the Emperor. It was a month since he had obtained his last news of the doings of his nearest colleague, Ney, which had been brought to him, as it will be remembered, just as he was about to leave Orense. At that moment the Duke of Elchingen had been able to tell him nothing save that the communications between Galicia and Leon had been broken, and that the insurrection was daily growing more formidable. After this his only glimpse of the outer world had been afforded by Portuguese letters, seized in the post-offices of Braga and Oporto, from which he had learnt that his garrisons left behind at Vigo and Tuy were being beleaguered by a vast horde of Galician irregular levies. ‘The march of the 2nd Corps,’ wrote one of Soult’s officers, ‘may be compared to the progress of a ship on the high seas: she cleaves the waves, but they close behind her, and in a few moments all trace of her passage has disappeared[295].’ To make the simile complete, Fantin des Odoards should have compared Soult to the captain of a vessel in a dense fog, forging ahead through shoals and sandbanks without any possibility of obtaining a general view of the coast till the mists may lift. To all intents and purposes, we may add, the fog never dispersed till May had arrived, and Wellesley hurtled down in a dreadful collision on the groping commander, ere he had fully ascertained his own whereabouts.
When the whole country-side is up in arms, as it was in Galicia and northern Portugal in the spring of 1809, it is useless to dispatch small bodies of men in search of news. They are annihilated in a few hours: but to make large detachments and send them out on long expeditions, so weakens the main army that it loses its power of further advance. This was the fate of the 2nd Corps after the fall of Oporto. Soult, compelled to seek for information at all costs, had to send one of his four infantry divisions back towards Galicia, to succour Tuy and Vigo and obtain news of Ney, while another marched eastward to the Tras-os-Montes, to look for signs of the advance of Lapisse from Salamanca. When these detachments had been made, the remainder of the army was too weak to resume the march on Lisbon which the Emperor had commanded, and was forced to remain cantoned in the neighbourhood of Oporto.
The details of Soult’s disposition of his troops after the fall of Oporto were as follows: Franceschi’s cavalry, supported by Mermet’s division of infantry, were pushed forward across the Douro on the road to Coimbra, to watch the movements of the wrecks of the Bishop’s army, which had retired to the line of the Vouga. Merle’s division and half Delaborde’s remained in garrison at Oporto, while Lorges’ and one brigade of Lahoussaye’s dragoons were kept not far from them, in the open country north of the city, about Villa de Conde and Vallongo. The other brigade of Lahoussaye’s division, supported by Foy’s infantry, was sent out on an expedition towards the Tras-os-Montes, with orders to brush away Silveira and seek for news of the expected approach of Lapisse. Loison was placed in command of this detachment. Finally, Heudelet’s division, which had been guarding the sick and the stores of the army at Braga, was ordered to send on all the impedimenta to Oporto, and then to prepare to march northward in order to relieve Tuy and Vigo, and to get into touch with Ney and the 6th Corps.
It was clear that the further movements of the Duke of Dalmatia would depend on the intelligence which Loison and Heudelet might obtain. If Ney should have crushed the Galician insurgents, if Lapisse should be met with somewhere on the borders of Spain, matters would look well for the resumption of the advance on Lisbon. It was also to be hoped that Lapisse would be able to give some information as to the doings of Victor and the 1st Corps. For it was necessary to find out how the Duke of Belluno had been faring in Estremadura, and to know whether he was prepared to co-operate in that general movement against the Portuguese capital which the Emperor had prescribed in his parting instructions from Valladolid.
As a matter of fact, Victor, having beaten Cuesta at Medellin on the day before Soult captured Oporto (March 28), had reached the end of his initiative, and was now lying at Merida, incapable, according to his own conception, of any further offensive movement till he should have received heavy reinforcements. Ney in Galicia was fighting hard against the insurgents, and beginning to discover that though he might rout them a dozen times he could not make an end of them. He had not a man to spare for Soult’s assistance.
There remained Lapisse, who in his central position at Salamanca should have been, according to Napoleon’s design, the link between Ney, Victor, and Soult. He had been directed, as it will be remembered[296], to move on Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, to capture both these fortresses, and then to advance into Portugal and to strike at Abrantes: when he arrived there it was hoped that he would find Soult on his right and Victor on his left, and would join them in the general assault on Lisbon. There can be no doubt that Napoleon was giving too heavy a task to Lapisse: he had but a single division of infantry—though it was a strong one of twelve battalions—and one provisional brigade of cavalry[297], in all about 9,000 men. This was ample for the holding down of the southern parts of the kingdom of Leon, or even for the attack on Almeida and Rodrigo: but it was a small force with which to advance into the mountains of central Portugal or to seize Abrantes. If he had carried out his instructions, Lapisse would have had to march for nearly 200 miles through difficult mountain country, beset every day by the Ordenanza, as Soult had been in his shorter route from Orense to Oporto. And if he had ever cut his way to Abrantes, he ought to have found himself faced by Cradock’s 9,000 British troops and by the reorganized Portuguese regular army, which lay in and about Lisbon, with a strength which even in February was not less than 12,000 men.
Napoleon had given Lapisse too much to do: but on the other hand that general performed far too little. Though he could never have reached Abrantes, he ought to have reached Almeida, where his presence would have been of material assistance to Soult, more especially if he had from thence pushed exploring columns towards Lamego and Vizeu, before plunging into the mountains on the road to the south. As a matter of fact, Lapisse in February and March never advanced so much as fifty miles from Salamanca, and allowed himself to be ‘contained’ and baffled, for two whole months, by an insignificant opposing force, commanded by a general possessing that enterprise and initiative which he himself entirely lacked.
The officer who wrecked this part of Napoleon’s plan for the invasion of Portugal was Sir Robert Wilson, one of the most active and capable men in the English army, and one who might have made a great name for himself, had fortune been propitious. But though he served with distinction throughout the Napoleonic war, and won golden opinions in Belgium and Egypt, in Prussia and Poland, no less than in Spain, he never obtained that command on a large scale which would have enabled him to show his full powers. It may seem singular that a man who won love and admiration wherever he went, who was decorated by two emperors for brilliant feats of arms done under their eyes, who was equally popular in the Russian, the Austrian, or the Portuguese camp, who had displayed on a hundred fields his chivalrous daring, his ready ingenuity, and his keen military insight, should fail to achieve greatness. But Wilson, unhappily for himself, had the defects of his qualities. When acting as a subordinate his independent and self-reliant character was always getting him into trouble with his hierarchical superiors. He was not the man to obey orders which he believed to be dangerous or mistaken: he so frequently ‘thought for himself’ and carried out plans quite different from those which had been imposed upon him, that no commander-in-chief could tolerate him for long. His moves were always clever and generally fortunate, but mere success did not atone for his disobedience in the eyes of his various chiefs, and he never remained for long in the same post. All generals, good and bad, agree in disliking lieutenants who disregard their orders and carry out other schemes—even if they be ingenious and successful ones[298]. It must be added that Wilson dabbled in politics on the Whig side, and was not a favourite with Lord Castlereagh, a drawback when preferments were being distributed.
But when trusted with any independent command, and allowed a free hand, Wilson always did well. Not only had he all the talents of an excellent partisan chief, but he was one of those genial leaders who have the power to inspire confidence and enthusiasm in their followers, and are able to get out of them double the work that an ordinary commander can extort. He was in short one of those men who if left to themselves achieve great things, but who when placed in a subordinate position quarrel with their superiors and get sent home in disgrace. From the moment when Beresford assumed command of the Portuguese army his relations with Wilson were one long story of friction and controversy, and Wellesley (though acknowledging his brilliant services) made no attempt to keep him in the Peninsula. He wanted officers who would obey orders, even when they did not understand or approve them, and would not tolerate lieutenants who wished to argue with him[299].
It was Wilson who first showed that the new levies of Portugal could do good service in the field. While Silveira and Eben were meeting with nothing but disaster in the Tras-os-Montes and the Entre-Douro-e-Minho, he was conducting a thoroughly successful campaign on the borders of Leon. From January to April, 1809, he, and he alone, protected the eastern frontier of Portugal, and with a mere handful of men kept the enemy at a distance, and finally induced him to draw off and leave Salamanca, just at the moment when Soult’s operations on the Douro were becoming most dangerous.
The force at his disposal in January, 1809, consisted of nothing more than his own celebrated ‘Loyal Lusitanian Legion.’ We have already had occasion to mention this corps while speaking of the reorganization of the Portuguese army (see [page 199]). On December 14, as we have seen, he had led out his little brigade of Green-coats towards the frontier[300].
Wilson’s reasons for moving forward were partly political, partly military: on the one hand he wished to get away from the neighbourhood of the Bishop of Oporto, whose intrigues disgusted him; on the other he saw that it was necessary to bring up a force to cover the frontier of Portugal, when Moore marched forward into Spain. As long as Moore had remained at Salamanca, there was a strong barrier in front of Portugal: but when he departed it was clear that the kingdom must defend itself. Wilson therefore advanced to Pinhel, near Almeida, and there established his little force in cantonments.
He was at this place when the startling developments of the campaign in the last ten days of December, 1808, took place. Moore retired on Galicia, Napoleon’s army swept on into Leon, and Wilson found himself left alone with the whole defence of the north-eastern frontier of Portugal thrown on his hands. He soon heard of the storming of Zamora and Toro, and learnt that Lapisse’s division had arrived at Salamanca. Three marches might bring that general to the border.
A few days later Wilson received from Sir John Cradock the news that he had ordered the British garrison to evacuate Almeida[301], and to retire on Lisbon, as the whole remaining force in Portugal would probably have to embark in a few days. The new commander-in-chief added that he should advise Wilson to bring off his British officers and depart with the rest, as the Portuguese would be unable to make any head against Bonaparte, and it would be a useless sacrifice to linger in their company and be overwhelmed. This pusillanimous counsel shocked and disgusted Wilson: he called together his subordinates, and found that they agreed with him in considering Cradock’s advice disgraceful. They resolved that they could not desert their Portuguese comrades, and were in honour bound to see the campaign to an end, however black the present outlook might appear[302].
When therefore the British garrison of Almeida was withdrawn, Wilson entered that fortress with the Legion and took charge of it. He obtained from the Regency leave to appoint his lieutenant-colonel, William Mayne, as the governor, and also received permission to assume command of the local levies in the neighbourhood. These consisted of the skeletons of two line regiments (nos. 11 and 23) whose reorganization had but just begun. There were also two militia regiments (Guarda and Trancoso) to be raised in the district, but at this moment they existed only in name, and possessed neither officers nor arms. For immediate action Wilson could count upon nothing but the 1,300 men of the Lusitanian Legion.
Nevertheless he resolved to advance at once, and to endeavour to impose on Lapisse by a show of activity. Leaving the Portuguese regulars and 700 men of the Legion to garrison Almeida, he crossed the frontier with his handful of cavalry (not 200 sabres), two guns, and 300 men of his light companies. Passing the Spanish fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo he advanced some distance on the Salamanca road, and took up his position behind the Yeltes river, with his right resting on the inaccessible Sierra de Francia, and his left at San Felices, half way to the Douro. His whole force constituted no more than a thin line of pickets, but he acted with such confidence and decision, beating up the French outposts with his dragoons, raiding well forward in the direction of Ledesma and Tamames, and stirring up the peasants of the mountain country to insurrection, that Lapisse gave him credit for having a considerable force at his back. The French general had expected to meet with no opposition on his way to Almeida, believing that Cradock was about to embark, and that the Portuguese would not fight. He was accordingly much surprised to find a long line in his front, occupied by troops dressed like British riflemen, and commanded by British officers—whose strength he was unable to ascertain. He halted, in order to take stock of his opponent, when a bold push would have shown him that only a skeleton army was before him. In an intercepted dispatch of February[303] he reported that the peasantry informed him that Wilson had 12,000 men, and that as many more were in garrison at Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida.
As the weeks wore on, and the winter drew to an end, Wilson obtained some slight reinforcements. When he first advanced the Spaniards could give him no help, for the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo itself consisted of nothing but its six companies of urban militia, and a new battalion of 500 men, which had been on the point of setting out to join La Romana when its way to Leon was intercepted by the French. There were 1,400 men to man a fortress which required a garrison of 4,000[304]! But before January was out, Pignatelli, the captain-general of Castile, had sent into the place a regiment which he had raised in the mountains of Avila, and Carlos d’España[305] had begun to form some new battalions from the peasantry of the Ciudad Rodrigo district, stiffened by stragglers from La Romana’s army[306]. In February the Central Junta gave Wilson a provisional command over the Spanish forces in Leon, and he used his authority to draw upon the garrison of Rodrigo for detachments to strengthen his outposts. He also requisitioned men from Almeida, when the Portuguese regiments there placed had begun to fill up their ranks to a respectable strength. A few cavalry of the re-formed 11th of the line were especially useful to him for scouting work.
With this small assistance, Wilson, whose total force never exceeded 400 horse and 3,000 infantry, kept Lapisse employed throughout February and March. He beat up the French quarters on several occasions, and twice captured large convoys of provisions which were being directed on Salamanca; to fall upon one of these, a great requisition of foodstuffs from Ledesma, he dashed far within Lapisse’s lines, but brought out all the wagons in safety and delivered them to the governor of Ciudad Rodrigo. At last, emboldened by his adversary’s timidity, he extended his right beyond the Sierra de Francia, and established part of the Legion under Colonel Mayne in the Puerto de Baños, the main pass between Salamanca and Estremadura. Thus Lapisse was completely cut off from all communication with Victor and the French army on the Tagus, save by the circuitous route through Madrid.
Jourdan, writing in the name of King Joseph, had duly transmitted to Lapisse the Emperor’s orders to march on Abrantes, the moment that it should be known that Soult had arrived at Oporto. He had even reiterated these directions in February, though both he and the King doubted their wisdom. Victor had written to Madrid to suggest that Alcantara would be a much better and safer objective for the division to aim at than Abrantes[307]. He wished to draw Lapisse’s troops (which properly belonged to the 1st Corps) into his own sphere of operations, and repeatedly declared that without them he had no hope of bringing his Estremaduran campaign to a happy end, much less of executing any effective diversion against Portugal. Jourdan agreed with him, opining that Lapisse would miscarry, if he invaded central Portugal on an independent line of operations. But no one was so convinced of this as Lapisse himself, who, with his exaggerated ideas of the strength of Wilson, was most reluctant to move forward. As late as the end of March the Emperor’s orders were still ostensibly in vigour[308], and the general only excused himself for not marching, by pretending that he could not venture to advance till he had certain news of Soult’s movements. This the Galician insurgents were obliging enough to keep from him.
At last, however, Jourdan yielded to Victor’s wishes, and authorized Lapisse to drop down on to Alcantara, keeping outside the limits of Portugal, instead of making the attack on Rodrigo and the subsequent dash at Abrantes which the Emperor had prescribed[309]. Overjoyed at escaping from the responsibility which he dreaded, Lapisse first prepared to march southward by the Puerto de Baños. But when he found it held by Mayne and the troops of Wilson’s right wing, he made no attempt to force the passage, but resolved to carry out his design by stratagem. Massing his division, he marched on Ciudad Rodrigo upon April 6. He pierced with ease the feeble screen of Wilson’s outposts and appeared in front of the Spanish fortress, which he duly summoned to surrender. But though the place might easily have been carried by a coup de main in January, it was now safe against anything but a formal siege, and Lapisse had neither a battering-train nor any real intention of attacking. When the governor returned a defiant answer, the French division made a show of sitting down in front of the walls. This was done in order to draw Wilson to the aid of the place, and the move was successful. Calling in all his outlying detachments from the nearer passes and collecting some of Carlos d’España’s levies, Sir Robert took post close to the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo, with a battalion of the Legion under Colonel Grant, some other Portuguese troops and four guns[310].
Having thus lured Wilson away from the passes, the French general suddenly broke up by night, and made a forced march for the Puerto de Perales, the nearest mountain-road to Alcantara. He thus obtained a full day’s start, and got off unmolested. Sir Robert and Carlos d’España followed on his track as soon as they discovered his departure, and Mayne also pursued, from the Puerto de Baños, but none of them could do more than harass his rearguard, with which they skirmished for three days in the passes. It would not have been wise of them to attempt more, even if they could have got into touch with the main body, for the French division was double their strength. Meanwhile the peasantry of the Sierra de Gata endeavoured to stop Lapisse’s progress, by blocking the defiles; but he swept them away with ease, and they never succeeded in delaying him for more than a few hours. Their incessant ‘sniping’ and night attacks exasperated the French, who dealt most ruthlessly with the country-side as they passed. When they arrived at Alcantara, and found the little town barricaded, they not only refused all quarter to the fighting-men when they stormed the place, but committed dreadful atrocities on the non-combatants. Not only murder and rape but mutilation and torture are reported by credible witnesses[311]. After the houses had been sacked, the very tombs in the churches were broken open in search of plunder. Leaving Alcantara full of corpses and ruins [April 12], the division marched on by Caceres and joined Victor in his camp near Merida[312] [April 19].
Since Lapisse, then, had moved off far to the south, and thrown in his lot with his old comrades of the 1st Corps, it was in vain that Soult sought for news of him on the Douro after the fall of Oporto. When Loison set out to cross the Tamega and to enter the Tras-os-Montes, in order that he might obtain information of the movements of the division at Salamanca, that division was making ready for its march to Alcantara; a fortnight later it had disappeared from the northern theatre of operations altogether, and Soult’s last chance of obtaining external help for his invasion of Portugal was gone. This section, in short, of Napoleon’s great plan for the march on Lisbon had been foiled, and foiled almost entirely by Sir Robert Wilson’s happy audacity and resourceful generalship. But for him, the timidity of Cradock, the impotence of the Spaniards, and the disorganization of the Portuguese army might have brought about the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, at the same moment that Soult was entering Portugal on its northern frontier. His services have never received their proper meed of praise, either from the government which he served so well, or from the historians who have told the annals of the Peninsular War.
We must now return to the details of the Duke of Dalmatia’s operations. His movements were clearly dependent on the results of the two expeditions under Heudelet and Loison, which he had sent out to the north and the east after his victory of March 29.
Heudelet, after discharging on to Oporto the sick and wounded and the stores which he had been guarding at Braga, started out northward on April 6, with the 4,000 infantry of his own division and Lorges’ dragoons, whom the Marshal had ordered up to his aid from Villa de Conde. Heudelet was ordered to disperse the insurgents in the valleys of the Lima and Minho, and to relieve Tuy and Vigo, where the French garrisons were known to be in a state of siege. To reach them it was necessary to pierce through the screen of militia and Ordenanza under General Botilho, which had cut off all communication between Galicia and the army of Portugal since the month of February.
On April 7 the French general neared the line of the Lima, only to find the bridges barricaded and Botilho’s horde entrenched behind them. After some preliminary skirmishing, fords were discovered, which Heudelet’s infantry passed upon the following morning, sending the unfortunate Portuguese flying in every direction and capturing the three guns which formed their sole artillery. On the tenth the frontier fortress of Valenza was reached: it was found to be in a dilapidated condition, and garrisoned by only 200 men, who surrendered at the first summons. Tuy, where General Lamartinière had been shut up for the last seven weeks, faces Valenza across the broad estuary of the Minho, so that Heudelet was now in full communication with it.
Lamartinière, as it will be remembered[313], had been left behind, with Soult’s heavy artillery, wheeled transport, and sick, when the 2nd Corps marched for Orense on February 16. He had gathered in several belated detachments which had started from Santiago in the hope of joining the rear of the marching column, so that he had the respectable force of 3,300 men, though 1,200 of them were invalids or convalescents. The walls of Tuy were in a bad state of repair, but the governor had found no great difficulty in maintaining himself against the Galician insurgents on his own side of the Minho, and the Portuguese levies from the other bank which Botilho sent to the aid of the Spaniards. But he had been completely shut in since Soult’s departure, and could give no information concerning Ney’s operations in northern Galicia, or the general progress of the war in the other parts of Spain. The only news which he could supply was that Vigo, the next French garrison, had fallen into the hands of the enemy. On his way to Portugal Soult had dropped a force of 700 men at that fortress, lest its excellent harbour should be utilized by the British for throwing in supplies to the Galician insurgents. The paymaster-general of the 2nd Corps, with his treasure and its escort, had lagged behind during the Marshal’s advance, and, being beset by the peasantry, had entered Vigo instead of pushing on to Tuy.
When Soult had passed out of sight on the way to Orense, the Galicians of the coast-land, headed by Pablo Morillo, a lieutenant of the regular army whom La Romana had sent down from the interior, and by Manuel Garcia Del Barrio[314], a colonel dispatched by the Central Junta from Seville, had taken arms in great numbers, and blockaded Vigo. The French commander, Colonel Chalot, found himself unable to defend the whole extent of the fortifications for sheer want of men, and could not prevent the insurgents from establishing themselves close under the walls and keeping up a continual fire upon the garrison. He believed that a serious assault would infallibly succeed, and only refused to surrender because he was ashamed to yield to peasants. On March 23 two English frigates, the Lively and Venus, appeared off the harbour mouth, and began to supply the insurgents with ammunition, and to land heavy naval guns for their use. On the twenty-seventh one of the gates was battered in, and the Galicians were preparing to storm the place, when Chalot surrendered at discretion, only stipulating that he and his men should be handed over to the British, and not to the Spaniards. This request was granted, and Captain Mackinley received twenty-three officers and nearly 800 men as prisoners, besides a number of sick and several hundred non-combatants belonging to the train, and camp-followers. The plunder taken consisted of sixty wagons, 339 horses, and more than £6,000 in hard cash, composing the military chest of the 2nd Corps [March 28].
The Galicians had somewhat relaxed the blockade of Tuy in order to press that of Vigo, and on the very day when Chalot surrendered, General Lamartinière had sent out a flying column to endeavour to communicate with his colleague. It returned pursued by the Spaniards, to report to the governor that Vigo had fallen[315]. On its way back to Tuy it suffered a loss of seventy prisoners and nearly 200 killed and wounded.
Heudelet and Lamartinière had now some 7,000 men collected at Tuy, a force with which they could easily have routed the whole of the insurgents of the Minho, and forced them to retire into the mountains. But Soult’s orders to his lieutenants were to avoid operations in Galicia, and to concentrate towards Portugal. Tuy was evacuated, and its garrison transferred across the frontier-river to the Portuguese fortress of Valenza. Before the transference was completed, the French generals received an unexpected visit from some troops of the 6th Corps. Ney, disquieted as to the condition of Tuy and Vigo, had sent a brigade under Maucune to seek for news of their garrisons. This force, cutting its way through the insurgents, came into Tuy on April 12. Thus Heudelet was at last able to get news of the operations of Ney. The information received was not encouraging: the Duke of Elchingen was beset by the Galicians on every side: La Romana had cut off one of his outlying garrisons, that of Villafranca, and his communications with Leon were so completely cut off that he had no reports to give as to the progress of affairs in the rest of Spain. Finding that Vigo was lost, and the garrison of Tuy relieved, Maucune retraced his steps and returned to Santiago, harassed for the whole of his march by the insurgents of the coast-land.
Meanwhile Heudelet’s communication with Oporto had been interrupted, for the Portuguese, routed on the Lima a week before, had come back to their old haunts, seized Braga, and blocked the high-road and the bridges. Soult only got into touch with his expeditionary force by sending out Lahoussaye with 3,000 men to reopen the road to the North. When this was done, he bade Heudelet evacuate Valenza (whose fortifications turned out to be in too bad order to be repaired in any reasonable space of time), and to disperse his division in garrisons for Braga, Viana, and Barcelos. The whole of the convoy and the sick from Tuy were sent up to Oporto.
The net result of Heudelet’s operations was that the Marshal, at the cost of immobilizing one of his four infantry divisions, obtained a somewhat precarious hold upon the flat country of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. The towns were in his hands, but the Ordenanza had only retired to the hills, and perpetually descended to worry Heudelet’s detachments, and to murder couriers and foraging parties. Meanwhile 4,000 men were wasted for all purposes of offensive action. Vigo, Tuy, and Valenza had all been abandoned, and touch with the army of Galicia had been completely lost.
Even this modest amount of success had been denied to Soult’s second expedition, that which he had sent under Loison towards the Tras-os-Montes. The enemy with whom the French had to deal in this region was Silveira, the same officer who had been defeated between Monterey and Chaves in the early days of March, when the 2nd Corps crossed the Portuguese frontier. He had fled with the wrecks of his force towards Villa Real, at the moment when Soult marched on Braga, and the Marshal had fondly hoped that he was now a negligible quantity in the campaign. This was far from being the case: the moment that Silveira heard that the French had crossed the mountains and marched on Braga, he had rallied his two regular regiments and his masses of Ordenanza, and pounced down on the detachment under Commandant Messager, which Soult had left in garrison at Chaves. This, it will be remembered, consisted of no more than a company of infantry, a quantity of convalescents and stragglers, and the untrustworthy Spanish-Portuguese ‘legion,’ which had been formed out of the prisoners captured on March 6 and 12[316]. On the very day upon which Soult was routing Eben in front of Braga, Silveira appeared before the walls of Chaves with 6,000 men. Messager retired into the citadel, abandoning on the outer walls of the town a few guns, which the Portuguese were thus enabled to turn against the inner defences. After a siege of five days and much ineffective cannonading, the governor surrendered, mainly because the native ‘legion’ was preparing to open the gates to Silveira. Twelve hundred men were captured, of whom only one-third were Frenchmen capable of bearing arms, the rest being sick or ‘legionaries.’
Having made this successful stroke, Silveira marched down the Tamega to Amarante, making a movement parallel to Soult’s advance on Oporto. His recapture of Chaves brought several thousands more of Ordenanza to his standard, and at Amarante he was joined on the thirtieth by many of the fugitives who had escaped from the sack of Oporto on the previous day. He spread his army, now amounting to 9,000 or 10,000 men, along the left bank of the Tamega, whose bridges and fords he protected with entrenchments. Advanced guards were pushed out on the further side of the river on the three roads which lead to Oporto.
When, therefore, the troops under Loison, which Soult had sent out towards the Tras-os-Montes, drew near the Tamega, they found the Portuguese in force. The cavalry could get no further forward than Penafiel; when Foy’s infantry came up (April 7) Loison tried to force the enemy back, both on the Amarante and on the Canavezes road. He failed at each point, and sent back to the Marshal to ask for reinforcements. Seeing him halt, Silveira, whose fault was not a want of initiative, actually crossed the river with his whole army, and fell upon the two French brigades. He was checked, but not badly beaten, and Loison remained on the defensive (April 12).
At this moment Soult heard of the fall of Chaves, full seventeen days after it had happened. Realizing that Silveira was now growing formidable, he sent to Loison’s aid General Delaborde with the second of his infantry brigades, and Lorges’ dragoons. These reinforcements brought the troops facing Silveira up to a total of some 6,500 men—nearly a third of Soult’s whole disposable force. As Heudelet was still absent on the Minho with 4,000 men more, the Marshal had less than 10,000 left in and about Oporto. It was clear that the grand march on Lisbon was not likely to begin for many a long day.
On April 18 Loison advanced against Silveira, who boldly but unwisely offered him battle on the heights of Villamea in front of Amarante. Considering that he had but 2,000 regulars and 7,000 or 8,000 half-armed militia and Ordenanza, his conduct can only be described as rash in the extreme. He was, of course, beaten with great loss, and hustled back into the town of Amarante. He would have lost both it and its bridge, but for the gallantry of Colonel Patrick, an English officer commanding a battalion of the 12th of the line, who rallied his regiment in the streets, seized a group of houses and a convent at the bridge-head and beat off the pursuers[317]. Patrick was mortally wounded, but the passage of the river was prevented. This saved the situation: Silveira got his men together, planted his artillery so as to command the bridge, and took post in entrenchments already constructed on the commanding heights on the left bank. Next day Loison stormed the buildings at the bridge-head, but found that he could get no further forward. The town was his, but he could not debouch from it, as the bridge was palisaded, built up with a barricade of masonry and raked by the Portuguese artillery. Soult now sent up to aid Loison still further reinforcements, Sarrut’s brigade of infantry from Merle’s division and the second brigade of Lahoussaye’s dragoons. Thus no less than 9,000 French troops, nearly half the army of Portugal, were concentrated at Amarante.
The fact that twelve whole days elapsed between the arrival of these last succours and the forcing of the passage of the Tamega had no small influence on the fate of Soult’s campaign. Hitherto the initiative had lain with him, and he had faced adversaries who could only take the defensive. This period was nearly at an end, for on April 22 Wellesley had landed at Lisbon, the English reinforcements had begun to arrive, and an army, differing in every quality from the hordes which the Marshal had encountered north of the Douro, was about to assume the offensive against him. By the time that Loison at last forced the bridge of Amarante, the British were already on the march for Coimbra and Oporto.
Silveira and his motley host, therefore, were doing admirable service to the cause of their country when they occupied 9,000 out of Soult’s 21,000 men from April 20 to May 2 on the banks of the Tamega. The ground was in their favour, but far stronger positions had been forced ere now, and it was fortunate that this one was maintained for so many days. The town of Amarante, it must be remembered, lies on comparatively low ground: its bridge is completely commanded by the heights on which Silveira had planted his camp and his batteries. The river flows in a deep-sunk ravine, and was at this moment swollen into an impassable torrent by the melting of the mountain snows. Loison more than once sent swimmers by night, in search of places where the strength of the current might be sufficiently moderate to allow of an attempt to pass on rafts or boats. Not one of these explorers could get near the further bank: they were swept off by the rushing water and cast ashore far down stream, on the same side from which they had started. There had been bridges above Amarante at Mondim and Aroza, and below it at Canavezes, but reconnaissances showed that they had all three been blown up, and that Portuguese detachments were watching their ruins, to prevent any attempt to reconstruct them. Loison found, therefore, that he could not turn Silveira’s position by a flanking movement: there was nothing to do save to wait till the river should fall, or to attempt to force the bridge of Amarante at all costs. Continual rains made it hopeless to expect the subsidence of the Tamega for many days, wherefore Loison devoted all his energies to the task of capturing the bridge. Even here there was one difficulty to be faced which might prove fatal: the French engineers had discovered that the structure was mined. It was necessary, therefore, not only to drive back the Portuguese, but to prevent them from blowing up the bridge at the moment of their retreat.
Loison had entrusted the details of the attack on the bridge to Delaborde, whose infantry held the advanced posts. That officer first tried to approach the head of the bridge by means of a flying sap; but when it had advanced a certain distance the fire of the Portuguese from across the river became so deadly, that after many men had been killed in the endeavour to work up to the palisades on the bridge, the attempt had to be abandoned. The next device recommended by the engineers was that an attempt should be made to lay a trestle bridge at a spot some way below the town, where a mill-dam contracted the width of the angry river. This was found to be impossible, the stream proving to be far deeper than had been supposed, while the Portuguese from the left bank picked off many of the workmen [April 25].
Soult was now growing vexed at the delay, and sent two guns of position from Oporto to Loison, to enable him to subdue the fire of the enemy’s batteries. He also offered to call up Heudelet’s division from Braga, even at the cost of abandoning his hold on the northern part of the province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. But a mere increase of his already considerable force would have been of no service to Loison; it was a device for passing the Tamega that he needed.
Such a scheme was at last laid before him by Captain Bouchard, one of his engineers[318]. The French officers had discovered, by a careful use of their glasses, that the Portuguese mine, which was to destroy the bridge, was situated in its left-hand arch, and that the mechanism by which it was to be worked was not a ‘sausage’ or a train of powder[319], but a loaded musket, whose muzzle was placed in the mine, while to its trigger was attached a cord which ran to the nearest trenches beyond the river. The musket was concealed in a box, but its cord was visible to those provided with a good telescope. Bouchard argued that if the cord could be cut or broken, the enemy would not be able to touch off the mine, and he had thought out a plan for securing his end. He maintained that an explosion at the French side of the bridge would probably sever the cord without firing the mine, and that a sudden assault, made immediately after the explosion, and before the Portuguese could recover themselves, might carry the barricades. In spite of the strongly-expressed doubts of Foy and several other generals, Bouchard was finally permitted to carry out his scheme.
He executed it on the night of May 2, when a dense fog chanced to favour his daring and hazardous proceedings. Having first told off some tirailleurs to keep up a smart fire on the enemy’s trenches and distract his attention, he sent four sappers, each provided with a small powder-barrel, on to the bridge. The men, dressed in their grey capotes, crawled on hands and knees, each rolling his barrel (which was wrapped in cloth to deaden the sound) before him. They kept in the shadow, and getting close under the parapet of the bridge crept on till they reached the outermost Portuguese palisade. One after another, at long intervals, each got forward unobserved, left his barrel behind, and crawled back. The fourth sapper, starting to his feet on his return journey, was observed by the Portuguese and shot down, but Silveira’s men did not realize what he had been doing, and merely took him for some daring explorer who was endeavouring to spy out the state of the defences. After waiting for an hour, Bouchard sent out a fifth sapper, who dragged behind him a ‘sausage’ of powder thirty yards long, which he successfully connected with the four barrels. All was now ready, and a battalion of picked grenadiers from Delaborde’s division, filed silently down into the street near the bridge-head: a whole brigade came behind them.
At two o’clock Bouchard fired his sausage, and the explosion followed. There were two chances of failure—one that the apparatus for firing the mine might not be disturbed by the concussion, the other that the shock might prove too strong, reach the mine, and destroy the bridge. Neither of these fatalities took place: the explosion duly broke the cord, shattered the nearest palisades, but did not affect the mine. Before the smoke had cleared away Delaborde’s grenadiers had dashed out on to the bridge, scrambled over the barricades, and driven off the guard on the further side. Regiment after regiment followed them, and charged up the mountain-side towards Silveira’s batteries and entrenchments. None of the Portuguese were under arms, save the few companies guarding the debouches from the bridge. These were swept away, and the French columns came storming into the bivouacs of the enemy before he was well awake. Hardly half a dozen cannon shots were fired on them from the batteries, and the greater part of the army of the Tras-os-Montes fled without firing a shot. Silveira escaped almost naked by the back window of the house above the bridge in which he had been sleeping.
All the ten guns in the Portuguese batteries, five standards, and several hundred prisoners fell into the hands of the victorious French, who lost (it is said) no more than two killed and seven wounded. Their good fortune had been extraordinary: without the opportune fog which hid their advance, their preliminary operations would probably have been discovered. If their explosion had done a little more or a little less than was hoped, the bridge might have been totally destroyed, or its barricades left practically uninjured—either of which chances would have foiled Bouchard’s plan. But the luck of the army of Portugal was still in the ascendant, and all went exactly as had been intended.
Thus the Tamega was passed, and Silveira decisively beaten: his levies had fled in all directions, and Soult opined that it would take a long time to rally them. The day after the fight Loison was joined at Amarante by Heudelet’s division from Braga, which, in obedience to the Marshal’s orders, had marched to join the expeditionary force, leaving only a single battalion behind to hold Viana. This was an unfortunate move, as on Heudelet’s departure the Ordenanza came down from the Serra de Santa Catalina, and overran the district which had been evacuated, in spite of Lorges’ dragoons, who had been directed to keep the roads clear after the infantry had been withdrawn.
Meanwhile there were far more troops at Amarante than were needed for the pursuit of Silveira, so Soult called back to Oporto the division of Delaborde, leaving to Loison the infantry of Heudelet and Sarrut, with Lahoussaye’s two brigades of dragoons, a force of about 7,000 men. He ordered his lieutenant to scour the country as far as Villa Real, and to send reconnaissances on the roads toward Chaves and Braganza, with the object of frightening the insurgents to retreat as far as possible. But Loison was not to advance for more than two days’ march into the Tras-os-Montes, for rumours were beginning to arrive concerning the appearance of British troops in the direction of Coimbra, and the Marshal wished to keep his various divisions close enough to each other to enable them to concentrate with ease. If there were any truth in the news from the south, it would be dangerous to allow a force which formed a third of the whole army of Portugal to go astray in the heart of the mountains beyond the Tamega. Loison accordingly marched off on May 8 towards Villa Real, which he occupied without meeting with resistance. He learnt that Silveira and his regulars had crossed the Douro, and gone off in the direction of Lamego; but Botilho had fled up the Tamega towards Chaves, and the Ordenanza were lurking in the hills. He then returned to Amarante, where we may leave him, at the end of his tether, while we describe the state of affairs in Oporto.
SECTION XIII: CHAPTER VI
INTRIGUES AT OPORTO: THE CONSPIRACY OF ARGENTON
It will have occurred to every student of the operations of the army of Portugal during the month of April, that it was strange that Marshal Soult should have remained quiescent at Oporto, while the fate of his entire campaign was at stake during the fighting on the Tamega. His head quarters were only thirty miles from Amarante—but one day’s ride for himself and his staff—yet he never paid a single flying visit to the scene of operations, even after he had come to the conclusion that Loison was mismanaging the whole business. He sent his lieutenant many letters of reproach, forwarded to him guns of position, and ample reinforcements, but never came himself to the spot to urge on the advance, even when ten and twelve days had elapsed since the first unsuccessful attempts to force the passage of the Tamega.
The explanation of this persistent refusal of the Marshal to quit Oporto is to be found in the political not the military state of affairs. At Chaves he had proclaimed himself Viceroy of Portugal: his viceroyalty at that moment embraced only just so much soil as was covered by the encampments of his battalions. But after the capture of Oporto and the occupation of the neighbouring towns of the Entre-Douro-e-Minho, his position assumed an air of reality, and he himself allowed the duties of the viceroy to trespass on those of the commander of the Second Corps d’Armée. Nay more, there is good reason to believe that he was not merely dreaming of setting up a stable government in northern Portugal, but of something else. The evidence as to his intentions is hard to weigh, for most of it comes from the letters and diaries of men who disliked him, but there are certain facts which cannot be disguised, and the inference from them is irresistible.
With the example of Murat’s exaltation before them, the more ambitious and capable of Napoleon’s marshals could not refrain from dreaming of crowns and sceptres. Nothing seemed impossible in those astounding days, when the Emperor was creating sovereigns and realms by a stroke of the pen, whenever the notion seized him. The line between an appanaged duke and a vassal prince was a very thin one—as the case of Berthier shows. Junot had dreamed of royalty at Lisbon in 1808, and there seems little doubt that the same mirage of a crown floated before Soult’s eyes at Oporto in 1809. The city itself suggested the idea: in the Treaty of Fontainebleau Napoleon had put on paper the project for creating a ‘king of Northern Lusitania,’ with Oporto as his capital and the Entre-Douro-e-Minho as his realm. Soult was cautious and wary, but he was also greedy and ambitious. If, on the one hand, he had a wholesome fear of his master, he had on the other good reasons for believing that it might be possible to force his hand by presenting him with a fait accompli.
There was in the city the nucleus of a party which was not wholly indisposed to submit to the French domination. It was mainly composed of those enemies of the Bishop of Oporto who had been suffering from his anarchical rule of the last two months. They were the friends and relatives of those who had perished by the dagger or the rope, during the mob-law which had prevailed ever since Dom Antonio returned from Lisbon. To these may be added some men of purely material interests, who saw that the insurrection was ruining them, and a remnant of the old corrupt bureaucracy which had submitted once before to Junot—whose only thought was to keep or gain profitable posts under the government of the day, whatever that government might be. The whole body of dissidents from the cause of patriotism and independence was so small and weak, that it is impossible to believe that they would have taken any overt action if they had not received encouragement from Soult.
This much is certain—that when the disorders which accompanied the capture of Oporto were ended, Soult showed himself most anxious to conciliate the Portuguese, not only by introducing a regular and orderly government, but by going out of his way to soothe and flatter any notable who lingered in the city. In his anxiety to win over the clergy he caused new silver vessels and candelabra to be made to replace those which had been stolen from the churches in the sack[320]. He filled up all civil appointments, whose holders had fled, from the small number of persons who were ready to adhere to the French. He again, as already at Chaves, endeavoured to enlist a native military force, by putting tempting offers before those officers of the regular army who had been made prisoners. All this might have had no other cause than the wish to build up a party of Afrancesados, such as already existed in Spain, and Soult openly declared that such was his object[321]. This was the only purpose that he avowed in his dispatches to the Emperor, and in his communications with his colleagues.
But if the Marshal had no ulterior object in view, it is singular that all his native partisans concurred in setting on foot a movement for getting him saluted as king of northern Portugal. The new municipal authorities, whom he had established in the half-deserted towns occupied by his troops, sent in petitions begging him to assume the position of sovereign. Documents of this kind came in from Braga, Barcelos, Guimaraens, Feira, Oliveira and Villa de Conde. In Oporto proclamations were posted on the walls declaring that ‘the Prince Regent by his departure to Brazil had formally resigned his crown, and that the only salvation for Portugal would be that the Duke of Dalmatia, the most distinguished of the pupils of the great Napoleon, should ascend the vacant throne[322].’ A priest named Veloso and other persons went about in the street delivering harangues in favour of the creation of the ‘kingdom of Northern Lusitania.’ A register was opened in the municipal buildings to be signed by all persons who wished to join in the petition to the Marshal to assume the regal title, and a certain number of signatures were collected. A newspaper, called the Diario do Porto, was started, to support the movement, and ran for about a month. It is said that Soult’s partisans even succeeded in gathering small crowds together, before the mansion where his head quarters were established, to shout Viva o Rei Nicolao! and that the acclamations were acknowledged by showers of copper coins thrown from the windows[323]. The latter part of this story is no doubt an invention of Soult’s enemies, but it was believed at the time by the majority of the French officers, and ‘Le Roi Nicolas’ was for the future his nickname in the army of Portugal[324]. On April 19 the Marshal ordered his chief of the staff, General Ricard, to issue a circular letter to the generals of divisions and brigades[325], inviting their co-operation in the movement, and assuring them that no disloyalty to the Emperor would be involved even if the Marshal assumed regal powers[326]. This document is the most convincing piece of evidence that exists as to Soult’s intentions. In it there is no attempt made to conceal the movement that had been set on foot: the writer’s only preoccupation is to show that it was not directed against Napoleon. When, five months later, Ricard’s circular came under the Emperor’s eye, it roused his wrath to such a pitch that he wrote in the most stinging and sarcastic terms to Soult. ‘He is astounded,’ he says, ‘to find the chief of the staff suggesting to the generals that the Marshal should be requested to take up the reins of government, and assume the attributes of supreme authority. If he had assumed sovereign power on his own responsibility, it would have been a crime, clear lèse-majesté, an attack on the imperial authority. How could a man of sense, like Soult, suppose that his master would permit him to exercise any power that had not been delegated to him? No wonder that the army grew discontented, and that rumours got about that the Marshal was working for himself, not for the Emperor or France. After receiving this circular, it is doubtful whether any French officer would not have been fully justified in refusing to obey any further orders issued from Oporto[327].’
This was written from Vienna, before the Emperor had received any full and exact account of the details of Soult’s intrigues. Had he but known them all, it is doubtful if he would have granted his lieutenant the complete pardon and restoration to favour with which his dispatch concludes[328].
There can be no doubt that the Duke of Dalmatia might have put a stop to all the activity of his Portuguese friends by merely raising his hand. It would have sufficed for him to assure the deputations which visited him that his duty as the lieutenant of the Emperor forbade him to listen to their proposals. He could have caused the proclamations to be torn down, and have silenced the street orators. ‘They could not have made him king against his own will,’ as one of his officers remarked[329]. But no action of the kind was taken; and the movement was openly encouraged. The Marshal’s explanation, that he was only taking the best means in his power to build up a French party in Oporto, will not stand examination. Why should the scheme involve his own promotion to the throne, if his views were disinterested, and his actions merely intended to serve his master’s ends? Is it conceivable that the Portuguese should, of their own accord, and without any suggestion from without, have hit upon the idea of crowning a conqueror whose very name was strange to them three weeks before, and whose hands were red with the blood of thousands of their fellow countrymen? Clever and cautious though the Marshal was, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he had for once allowed his ambition to take the bit between its teeth, and to whirl him off into an enterprise that was worthy of the most hair-brained of adventurers.
Meanwhile the consequences of his intrigue were strange and various. The army received the news of what was going on at Oporto with puzzled surprise. Of those who were not present at the centre of affairs, some refused to believe the stories that reached them, and merely observed that the Marshal was not such a fool as to take in hand a plan that was both treasonable to his master and preposterous in itself[330]. Others, particularly his personal enemies, not only credited the information but began to concert measures for resisting him if he should try to carry out his scheme. This party was very strong among the officers of Junot’s old army of Portugal, who had been transferred in large numbers to the 2nd Corps. They disliked the expedition, had been prophesying disaster from the first, and had criticized every move of the Marshal. Now they found in the news of his intrigue another excuse for running counter to his orders. There is good reason for believing that Loison and Delaborde had actually conferred on the necessity for seizing and imprisoning the Marshal if he should take the final step and allow himself to be proclaimed king. Both these generals were faithful adherents of Napoleon, and had no thought save that of serving their master. But there were other officers who watched the progress of affairs with very different eyes.
There had existed in the French army from the day when the empire was first proclaimed, a party of malcontents who still regarded Bonaparte as a usurper, and were only biding their time till it might be safe to deal a blow at him. Hitherto his career had been so uniformly successful that no opportunity had arisen. But secret societies, of which the Philadelphes was the best known, were at work all through the years of the Emperor’s reign: their one object was to be ready for a coup d’état when the favourable moment should arrive. The history of these associations is so obscure that it is impossible to estimate their strength at any given time—no trustworthy historian ever arose from their ranks to tell the story of their schemes, when lips were unsealed by the fall of Napoleon[331]. It is only by the sudden appearance of phenomena like Malet’s conspiracy of 1812, and the plot which we are now about to describe, that the reality of the existence of these secret societies is proved.
In the army of Portugal there was a group of officers who belonged to the band of the discontented, and were perfectly prepared to execute a pronunciamiento against the empire if the times and circumstances proved propitious. We know the names of four[332]: Donadieu, colonel of the 47th of the line; Lafitte, colonel of the 18th Dragoons; his brother, a captain in the same regiment, who was serving on Soult’s staff; and Argenton, another captain, who was adjutant of Lafitte’s regiment; two other plotters are hidden under the assumed names of ‘Dupont’ and ‘Garis,’ by which they were introduced to Wellesley. There were certainly other officers implicated, for it is inconceivable that six men could have planned an insurrection unless they were sure of a certain measure of support. At this moment they were carrying on an active propaganda of discontent, especially among the officers of Delaborde’s division and of Lahoussaye’s dragoons. There were many men who saw the full iniquity of the Spanish War, and were disgusted at finding themselves involved in it[333]. Others loathed the hanging and burning, the shooting of priests and women, the riding down of half-armed peasants, which had been their lot for the last two months. Still more were simply discontented at being lost in a remote corner of Europe, where glory and profit were both absent, and where ignominious death at the hands of the lurking ‘sniper’ or the midnight assassin came all too frequently—sometimes death accompanied by torture. It was three months since the army had received a mail from France; they might as well have been in Egypt or America, and they felt themselves forgotten by their master. In many a mind the question arose whether the game was worth playing: must they for ever persist in this wretched interminable campaign, in order that the Duke of Dalmatia might become a king, or even in order that the Emperor might be able to apply the Continental System in its full rigour to this land of brutish peasants and fanatical monks? A speedy return to France seemed the one thing desirable.
It is easy to understand that the conspirators found many sympathizers, so long as they confined themselves to setting forth the miseries of the campaign, and to criticizing the Marshal and the Emperor. But they erred when they took a general readiness to grumble for a sign that the army was ripe for revolt. However discontented the officers might be, there were very few of them who were prepared to engage in the game of high treason. The vast majority were still unable to dissociate the idea of the Emperor from the idea of France. It was only a few who could rise (or sink) to the conception of turning their arms against Bonaparte in order to free France from autocracy. This bore too close a resemblance to treachery to be palatable to men of honour. None save exalted Jacobins, or men of overweening ambition and few scruples, could contemplate the idea with patience. When we find that the plans of the conspirators included not merely a pronunciamiento, but the conclusion of a secret pact with the enemies in arms against them, we are driven to conclude that they belonged to the last-named of these classes—that their heads were turned with the grandiose notion of getting an army into their power and changing the fate of Europe.
The conspirators, observing the course of affairs at Oporto, were fully convinced that Soult would within a few days declare himself ‘King of Northern Lusitania.’ This act would produce an outburst of wrath in the army, and they hoped to turn the inevitable mutiny to their own profit. They intended to seize the Marshal, and then to make an appeal to the soldiery, not in the name of Napoleon but in that of France. They were also prepared to lay hands on any general who might attempt to assume command of the troops in the Emperor’s interest[334]. Donadieu and Lafitte had secured some of the officers of their own regiments, and believed that the men would follow them. The other corps, as they hoped, would be drawn away after them, and the cry of liberty and the promise of an instant return to France would lure the whole army into rebellion. So far the plot, though rash and hazardous, might conceivably have been carried out. But their next step was to be the issue of an appeal to Ney’s divisions and the other French troops in northern Spain to join them, and march upon the Pyrenees. Even though there were members of the secret societies scattered all through the army, it seems absolutely impossible to believe that they could have carried away with them into open revolt the whole of their companions. The movement of protest against Napoleon would have begun and ended with the 2nd Corps, if even it got so far as the initial pronunciamiento[335]. To be effective it would have required a strong backing in France, and the list of the leaders in that country, on whom the conspirators said that they relied for aid, does not give us a high opinion of the strength and organization of the plot. The persons named were the old Jacobin general Lecourbe, Macdonald who—though they did not know it—had just been taken back into favour by the Emperor, and Dupont, who was in prison and incapable for the moment of helping himself or any one else[336]. They also spoke of sending for Moreau from America, and placing him at the head of the whole movement. But it is clear that they were not in actual communication with the generals in France, much less with the exiled victor of Hohenlinden. The whole plan was ill-considered; it was the result of the intense irritation against Soult and Bonaparte felt by the officers of the army of Portugal, acting upon the disordered ambition of a knot of intriguers. Anger and vain self-confidence blinded them to the inadequacy of their resources.
It was a main condition of the projected outbreak that Soult’s position should be made impossible: the most favourable course of events, so the conspirators held, would be that he should persist in his monarchical ambitions and proclaim himself king. When he did so, the party loyal to Bonaparte among his officers would make an attempt—successful or unsuccessful—to seize his person. Chaos and civil strife within the army would result, and it was then that the conspirators intended to show their hand. It would seem that their Machiavellian foresight went so far that they proposed to wait till the Marshal should be imprisoned, or should find himself involved in hostilities with the Bonapartists, and then offer him the aid of their regiments, on condition that he should put himself at the head of the anti-imperialist movement. All this was too ingenious for practical work. But the next development of the plot was even more astonishing in its futile cunning.
The conspirators wished to draw the English commander at Lisbon into their scheme—it was Cradock whom they had in view, for Wellesley was in England when the plot began, and when it developed he had landed indeed, but his arrival was not known. The part which they had allotted to Cradock was twofold—he was to be asked to send secret advice to the Portuguese notables of the north, ordering them to feign an enthusiastic approval of Soult’s designs on the crown, and to join with all possible clamour in the demonstrations at Oporto. When this unexpected outburst of devotion to his person should be forthcoming, they supposed that the Marshal would not hesitate any longer to assume the crown. Then would follow civil strife and the desired opportunity for intervention by the conspirators. The second request which they intended to make was that Cradock should bring up the British army to the front, and place it so as to make it dangerous or impossible for Soult to force his way out of Portugal in the direction of the middle Douro and Salamanca. They suggested Villa Real in the Tras-os-Montes as a suitable position for him. Their idea in making this proposal was that the army would be filled with despair at seeing its best line of retreat cut off (that by Galicia was growing to be considered impossible), and would therefore be more incensed against Soult, and at the same time more inclined to secure safety by coming to a pact and agreement with the enemy[337].
The officer who volunteered for the dangerous task of going within the English lines was Captain Argenton, the adjutant of Lafitte’s regiment of dragoons. He was a vain, ready, plausible man, full of resources but destitute of firmness: his character is sufficiently shown by the fact that he ultimately wrecked the plot by his indiscretion in tampering with loyal Bonapartists, who delated him, and that when seized he betrayed the whole scheme to Soult in the hope of saving his life. Clearly he was deficient both in the caution and in the stoic courage required for a conspirator—successful or unsuccessful.
We must note that he started from the camp of Lahoussaye’s dragoons, near Amarante, on April 19, that he reached the French outposts on the Vouga and got into communication with Major Douglas, one of Beresford’s officers in the Portuguese service, on the twenty-first, finally, that at the invitation of Douglas and Beresford he came into Lisbon and reached that city on the twenty-fifth, just in time to meet the newly-landed Wellesley. The plot meanwhile stood still in his absence, for the Duke of Dalmatia did not take the overt step which would have given the plotters their opportunity—he refrained from accepting the crown which his Portuguese partisans were so continually pressing him to assume. Nothing decisive had occurred, when the situation was suddenly changed by the appearance of the British army upon the offensive on May 7[338].
N.B.—For some documents bearing on Argenton’s conspiracy see [Appendix] at the end of this volume.