A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

SIR ARTHUR WELLESLEY

On Nov. 25, 1808, Sir John Moore, in answer to a question from Lord Castlereagh, wrote the following conclusions as to the practicability of defending Portugal[339]:

‘I can say generally that the frontier of Portugal is not defensible against a superior force. It is an open frontier, all equally rugged, but all equally to be penetrated. If the French succeed in Spain it will be vain to attempt to resist them in Portugal. The Portuguese are without a military force ... no dependence can be placed on any aid that they can give. The British must in that event, I conceive, immediately take steps to evacuate the country. Lisbon is the only port, and therefore the only place from whence the army, with its stores, can embark.... We might check the progress of the enemy while the stores are embarking, and arrangements are being made for taking off the army. Beyond this the defence of Lisbon or of Portugal should not be thought of.’

Four months later, on March 7, 1809, Sir Arthur Wellesley answered the same question, put to him by the same minister, in very different terms.

‘I have always been of opinion that Portugal might be defended, whatever might be the result of the contest in Spain, and that in the meantime measures adopted for the defence of Portugal would be highly useful to the Spaniards in their contest with the French. My notion was that the Portuguese military establishment ought to be revived, and that in addition to those troops His Majesty ought to employ about 20,000 British troops, including about 4,000 cavalry. My opinion was that, even if Spain should have been conquered, the French would not be able to overrun Portugal with a smaller force than 100,000 men. As long as the contest may continue in Spain, this force [the 20,000 British troops], if it could be placed in a state of activity, would be highly useful to the Spaniards, and might eventually decide the contest.’

Between these two divergent views as to the practicability of defending Portugal, Lord Castlereagh had to make his decision. On it—though he could not be aware of the fact—depended the future of Britain and of Bonaparte. He carefully considered the situation; after the disasters of the Corunna retreat it required some moral courage for a minister to advise the sending of another British army to the Peninsula. Moore’s gloomy prognostications were echoed by many military experts, and there were leading men—soldiers and politicians—who declared that the only thing that now remained to be done was to withdraw Cradock’s 10,000 sabres and bayonets from Lisbon, before the French came near enough to that city to make their embarkation difficult.

Castlereagh resolved to stake his faith on the correctness of Wellesley’s conclusions: all through these years of contest he had made him his most trusted adviser on things military, and now he did not swerve from his confidence. He announced to him, privately in the end of March, and officially on April 2[340], that the experiment of a second expedition to Portugal should be tried, and that he himself should have the conduct of it. Reinforcements should at once be sent out to bring the British army at Lisbon up to a total of 30,000 men—the number to which Wellesley, on consideration, raised the original 20,000 of which he had spoken. Beresford had already sailed, with orders to do all that he could for the reorganization of the disorderly native forces of Portugal. The few regiments in England that were ready for instant embarkation were sent off ere March ended, and began to arrive at Lisbon early in April[341]. Others were rapidly prepared for foreign service; but it was a misfortune that the Corunna battalions were still too sickly and depleted to be able to sail, so that troops who had seen nothing of the first campaign had to be sent out. The majority of them were ‘second battalions’ from the home establishment[342], many of them very weak in numbers and full of young soldiers, as they had been drained in the previous year to fill their first battalions up to full strength. Finally, just behind the first convoys of reinforcements, Wellesley himself set sail from Portsmouth, after resigning his position as Under Secretary for Ireland, which, by a curious anomaly, he had continued to hold all through the campaign of Vimiero, and the proceedings of inquiry concerning the Convention of Cintra. He sailed upon April 14, in the Surveillante frigate, had the narrowest of escapes from shipwreck on the Isle of Wight during the first night of his voyage, but soon obtained favourable winds and reached Lisbon on the twenty-second, after a rapid passage of less than eight days. Just before he started there had been received from Portugal not only the correct intelligence that Soult had stormed Oporto upon March 29, but a false rumour that Victor had been joined by the corps of Sebastiani[343] and had after his victory at Medellin laid siege to Badajoz[344]. If this had been true, the Duke of Belluno would have been strong enough to move against Portugal with 25,000 men, after detaching a competent force to watch the wrecks of Cuesta’s army. Fortunately the whole story was an invention: but it kept Wellesley in a state of feverish anxiety till he reached Lisbon. His fears are shown by the fact that he drew up a memorandum for Lord Castlereagh, setting forth the supposed situation, and asking what he was to do on arriving, if he should find that Cradock had already embarked his troops and quitted Portugal[345]. The Secretary of State, equally harrassed by the false intelligence, replied that he was to make an effort to induce the Spaniards to let him land the army at Cadiz, and, if they should refuse, might reinforce the garrison of Gibraltar to 8,000 men, and bring the rest of the expeditionary force back to England[346].

It was therefore an immense relief to Wellesley to find, when he landed, that the news from Estremadura was false, that Victor had not been reinforced, and that the 1st Corps was lying quiescent at Merida. Soult was still at Oporto, Cradock had not been molested, and the French invasion was at a standstill.

It is comparatively seldom that the historian is able to compare in detail a general’s original conception of a plan of campaign with the actual scheme which he carried out. Still less common is it to find that the commander has placed on record his ideas as to the general policy to be pursued during a war, before he has assumed charge of his army or issued his first orders. It is therefore most fortunate that we have three documents from Wellesley’s hand, written early in 1809, which enable us to understand the principles on which he believed that the Peninsular War should be fought out. These are his Memorandum on the Defence of Portugal, which we have already had occasion to quote, and the two dispatches to Lord Castlereagh and to Mr. Frere which he wrote immediately after his arrival in Lisbon. The first gives us his general view of the war. He believed that an English army of 20,000 or 30,000 men, backed by the levies of Portugal, would be able to maintain itself on the flank of the French army in Spain. Its presence there would paralyse all the offensive actions of the enemy, and enable the Spaniards to make head against the invaders as long as Portugal remained unsubdued. The news that a British army had once more taken the field would, he considered, induce the French to turn their main efforts against Portugal[347], but he believed that considering the geography of the country, the character of its people, and the quality of the British troops, they would fail in their attempt to overrun it. They could not succeed, as he supposed, unless they could set aside 100,000 men for the task, and he did not see how they would ever be able to spare such a large detachment out of the total force which they then possessed in the Peninsula—a force whose numerical strength (in common with all British statesmen and soldiers of the day) he somewhat underrated. Being in the secrets of the Ministry, he was already aware in March that a new war in Germany was about to break out within the next few months. When Austria took the field, Napoleon would not be able to spare a single battalion of reinforcements for Spain. If the Spaniards pursued a reasonable military policy, and occupied the attention of the main armies of the French, the enemy would never be able to detach a force of 100,000 for the invasion of Portugal. He would underrate the numbers required, make his attempt with insufficient resources, and be beaten. When Wellesley landed at Lisbon, and found that Soult had halted at Oporto, that Victor lay quiescent at Merida, and that Lapisse with the troops from Salamanca had gone southward to join the 1st Corps, and so severed the only link which bound together the army in Northern Portugal and the army in Estremadura, he was reassured as to the whole situation. Soult and Victor, isolated as they now were, would each be too weak to beat the Anglo-Portuguese army. They were too far apart to make co-operation between them possible, considering the geography of Central Portugal, and the fact that the whole country behind each was in a state of insurrection[348].

But ‘the best defensive is a vigorous local offensive,’ and Wellesley saw the advantage of the central position of the British army upon the Tagus. A few marches would place it at a point from which it could fall either upon Victor to the right or Soult to the left, before either marshal could be in a position to lend help to his colleague, probably long before he would even be aware that his colleague was in danger. Wellesley could strike at the one or the other, with almost perfect certainty of catching him unreinforced. Ney, it was true, lay behind Soult, but he was known to be entangled in the trammels of the vigorous Galician insurrection. Victor had Sebastiani in his rear, but the 4th Corps was having occupation found for it by the Spanish army of La Mancha. It was improbable that either Soult or Victor, if suddenly attacked, could call up any appreciable reinforcements. Victor, moreover, had Cuesta to observe, and could not move off leaving 20,000 Spaniards behind him. Soult was known to be distracted by Silveira’s operations on the Tamega. Wellesley, therefore, saw that it was well within his power to strike at either of the marshals. He would, of course, be obliged to place a ‘containing force’ in front of the one whom he resolved to leave alone for the present. But this detachment need not be very large, and might be composed for the most part of Portuguese troops: its duty would be to distract, but not to fight the enemy.

On the whole Wellesley thought it would be best to make the first onslaught on Soult. ‘I should prefer an attack on Victor,’ he wrote, two days after landing, ‘in concert with Cuesta, if Soult were not in possession of a fertile province of this kingdom, and of the favourite town of Oporto, of which it is most desirable to deprive him. Any operation upon Victor, connected with Cuesta’s movements, would require time to concert, which may as well be employed in dislodging Soult from the north of Portugal, before bringing the British army to the eastern frontier[349].... I intend to move upon Soult, as soon as I can make some arrangement, on which I can depend, for the defence of the Tagus, to impede or delay Victor’s progress, in case he should come on while I am absent.’ ‘I think it probable,’ he wrote on the same day but in another letter, ‘that Soult will not remain in Portugal when I pass the Mondego: if he does, I shall attack him. If he should retire, I am convinced that it would be most advantageous for the common cause that we should remain on the defensive in the North of Portugal, and act vigorously in co-operation with Cuesta against Victor[350].’

Further forward it was impossible to look: a blow at Soult, followed by another at Victor, was all that could at present be contemplated. Wellesley was directed, by the formal instructions which he had received from Castlereagh, to do all that was possible to clear Portugal and the frontier provinces of Spain from the enemy, but not to strike deep into the Peninsula till he should have received permission from home to do so. Nevertheless he had devoted some thought to the remoter possibilities of the situation. If Portugal were preserved, and Soult and Victor beaten off, more ambitious combinations might become possible. He expressed his conviction that the French occupation of Spain would only be endangered when a very large force, acting in unison under the guidance of a single mind, should be brought together. The co-operation of the English army and that of Cuesta ‘might be the groundwork of further measures of the same and a more extended description[351].’ He was under no delusions as to the easiness of the task before him: he did not hurry on in thought, to dream of the expulsion of the French from the Peninsula as a goal already in sight. But he believed that he and his army ‘might be highly useful to the Spaniards and might eventually decide the contest[352].’

It is the survey of documents such as these that enables us to appreciate Wellesley at his best. He had gauged perfectly well the situation and difficulties of the French. He saw exactly how much was in his own power. The whole history of the Peninsular War for the next two years is foreseen in his prophetic statement, that with 30,000 British troops and the Portuguese levies he would guarantee to hold his own against any force of less than 100,000 French, and that he did not think that the enemy would find it easy to collect an army of that size to send against him. This is precisely what he accomplished: for the first fifteen months after his arrival he held with ease that frontier which Moore had described as ‘indefensible against a superior force.’ When at last Napoleon, free from all other continental troubles, launched against him an army under Masséna, which almost reached the figure[353] that he had described as irresistible in 1809, he showed in 1810-11 that he had built up resources for himself which enabled him to beat off even that number of enemies. Though four-fifths of Spain had been subdued, he held his own, because he had grasped the fundamental truth that (to use his own words) ‘the more ground the French hold down, the weaker will they be at any given point.’ In short, he had fathomed the great secret, that Napoleon’s military power—vast as it was—had its limits: that the Emperor could not send to Spain a force sufficient to hold down every province of a thoroughly disaffected country, and also to provide (over and above the garrisons) a field army large enough to beat the Anglo-Portuguese and capture Lisbon. If the French dispersed their divisions, and kept down the vast tracts of conquered territory, they had no force left with which to take the offensive against Portugal: if they massed their armies, they had to give up broad regions, which immediately relapsed into insurrection and required to be subdued again. This was as true in the beginning of the war as in the end. In 1809 the army that forced Wellesley to retreat after Talavera was only produced by evacuating the whole province of Galicia, which passed back into the hands of the insurgents. In 1812, in a similar way, the overpowering force which beat him back from Burgos, had been gathered only by surrendering to the Spanish Government the whole of the four kingdoms of Andalusia. On the other hand, during the long periods when the enemy had dispersed himself, and was garrisoning the whole south and centre of Spain, e.g. for the first six months of 1810, and for the last six months of 1811, Wellesley held his own on the Portuguese frontier in complete confidence, assured that no sufficient force could be brought up against him, till the enemy either procured new troops from France or gave up some great section of the regions which he was holding down. A detailed insight into the future is impossible to any general, however great, but already in April 1809 Wellesley had grasped the main outlines of the war that was to be.

Before passing on to the details of the campaign on the Douro, with which Wellesley’s long series of victories began, it is well to take a glance at the man himself, as he sat at his desk in Lisbon dictating the orders that were to change the face of the war.

Arthur Wellesley was now within a few days of completing his fortieth year. He was a slight but wiry man of middle stature, with a long face, an aquiline nose, and a keen but cold grey eye. Owning an iron constitution on which no climate or season seemed to make the least impression, he was physically fit for all the work that lay before him—work more fatiguing than that which falls to most generals. For in the Peninsula he was required, as it soon appeared, to be almost as much of a statesman as of a general; while at the same time, owing to the inexperience of the British officers of that day in warfare on a large scale, he was obliged for some time to discharge for himself many of the duties which properly fall to the lot of the chief of the staff, the commissary-general, the paymaster-general, and the quartermaster-general in a well organized army. No amount of toil, bodily or mental, appeared too much for that active and alert mind, or for the body which seven years of service in India seemed to have tanned and hardened rather than to have relaxed. During the whole of his Peninsular campaigns, from 1808 to 1814, he was never prostrated by any serious ailment. Autumn rains, summer heat, the cold of winter, had no power over him. He could put up with a very small allowance of sleep, and when necessary could snatch useful moments of repose, at any moment of the twenty-four hours when no pressing duty chanced to be on hand. His manner of life was simple and austere in the extreme; no commander-in-chief ever travelled with less baggage, or could be content with more Spartan fare. Long after his wars were over the habit of bleak frugality clung to him, and in his old age men wondered at the bare and comfortless surroundings that he chose for himself, and at the scanty meals that sustained his spare but active frame. Officers who had long served in India were generally supposed to contract habits of luxury and display, but Wellesley was the exception that proved the rule. He hated show of any kind; after the first few days of the campaign of 1809 he discarded the escort which was wont to accompany the commander-in-chief. It was on very rare occasions that he was seen in his full uniform: the army knew him best in the plain blue frock coat, the small featherless cocked hat, and the short cape, which have been handed down to us in a hundred drawings. Not unfrequently he would ride about among his cantonments dressed like a civilian in a round hat and grey trousers[354]. He was as careless about the dress of his subordinates as about his own, and there probably never existed an army in which so little fuss was made about unessential trappings as that which served in the Peninsula from 1809 to 1814[355]. Nothing could be less showy than its head-quarters’ staff—a small group of blue-coated officers, with an orderly dragoon or two, riding in the wake of the dark cape and low glazed cocked hat of the most unpretentious of chiefs. It contrasted in the strangest way with the plumes and gold lace of the French marshals and their elaborately ornate staffs[356].

Considered as a man Wellesley had his defects and his limitations; we shall have ere long to draw attention to some of them. But from the intellectual point of view he commands our undivided admiration as a practical soldier[357]. A careful study of his dispatches leaves us in a state of wonder at the imbecility of the school of writers—mostly continental—who have continued to assert for the last eighty years that he was no more than a man of ordinary abilities, who had an unfair share of good luck, and was presented with a series of victories by the mistakes and jealousies of the generals opposed to him. Such assertions are the results of blind ignorance and prejudice. When found in English writers they merely reflect the bitter hatred that was felt toward Wellesley by his political opponents during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. In French military authors they only represent the resentful carpings of the vanquished army, which preferred to think that it was beaten by anything rather than by the ability of the conqueror. In 1820 every retired colonel across the Channel was ready to demonstrate that Toulouse was an English defeat, that Talavera was a drawn battle, and that Wellesley was over-rash or over-cautious, a fool or a coward, according as their thesis of the moment might demand[358]. They were but echoing their Emperor’s rancorous remark to Soult, on the hillside of La Belle Alliance, when after telling the Marshal that he only thought his old adversary a good general because he had been beaten by him, he added, ‘Et moi, je vous dis que Wellington est un mauvais général, et que les Anglais sont de mauvaises troupes[359].’

Bonaparte consistently refused to do justice to the abilities of the Duke. He regarded him as a bitter personal enemy, and his whole attitude towards Wellesley was expressed in the scandalous legacy to Cantillon[360] which disgraces his last will and testament. In strict conformity with their master’s pose, his followers, literary and military, have refused to see anything great in the victor of June 18, 1815. Even to the present day too many historians from the other side of the straits continue to follow in the steps of Thiers, and to express wonder at the inexplicable triumphs of the mediocre general who routed in succession all the best marshals of France.

To clear away any lingering doubts as to Wellesley’s extraordinary ability, the student of history has only to read a few of his more notable dispatches. The man who could write the two Memoranda to Castlereagh dated September 5, 1808, and March 7, 1809[361], foresaw the whole future of the Peninsular War. To know, at that early stage of the struggle, that the Spaniards would be beaten when—and wherever they offered battle, that the French, in spite of their victories, would never be able to conquer and hold down the entire country, that 30,000 British troops would be able to defend Portugal against any force that could be collected against them, required the mind of a soldier of the first class. When the earliest of those memoranda was written, most Englishmen believed that the Spaniards were about to deliver their country by their own arms: Wellesley saw that the notion was vain and absurd. When, on the other hand, he wrote the second, the idea was abroad that all was lost, that after Corunna no second British army would be sent to the Peninsula, and that Portugal was indefensible. Far from sharing these gloomy views he asks for 30,000 men, and states that though Spain may be overrun, though the Portuguese army may be in a state of hopeless disarray, he yet hopes with this handful of men to maintain the struggle, and eventually to decide the contest. How many generals has the world seen who could have framed such a prophecy, and have verified it?

To talk of the good fortune of Wellesley, of his ‘lucky star,’ is absurd. He had, like other generals, his occasional uncovenanted mercies and happy chances: but few commanders had more strokes of undeserved disappointment, or saw more of their plans frustrated by a stupid subordinate, an unexpected turn of the weather, an incalculable accident, or a piece of false news. He had his fair proportion of the chances of war, good and bad, and no more. If fortune was with him at Oporto in 1809, or at El Bodon in 1811, how many were the occasions on which she played him scurvy tricks? A few examples may suffice. In May 1809 he might have captured the whole of Soult’s army, if Silveira had but obeyed orders and occupied the impregnable defile of Salamonde. On the night of Salamanca he might have dealt in a similar fashion with Marmont’s routed host, if Carlos d’España had not withdrawn the garrison of Alba de Tormes, in flat disobedience to his instructions, and so left the fords open to the flying French. It is needless to multiply instances of such incalculable misfortune; any serious student of the Peninsular War can cite them by the dozen. Masséna’s invasion of Portugal in 1810 would have been checked by the autumn rains, and never have penetrated far within the frontier, but for the unlucky bomb which blew up the grand magazine at Almeida, and reduced in a day a fortress which ought to have held out for a month. In the autumn of 1812 the retreat beyond the Douro need never have been made, if Ballasteros had obeyed orders, and moved up from Granada to threaten Soult’s flank, instead of remaining torpid in his cantonments 200 miles from the theatre of war.

Wellington was not the child of fortune; he was a great strategist and tactician, placed in a situation in which the military dangers furnished but half his difficulties. He had to cherish his single precious British army corps, and to keep it from any unnecessary loss, because if destroyed it could not be replaced. With those 30,000 men he had promised to keep up the war; the home government was reluctant to risk the whole of its available field army in one quarter, and for years refused to raise his numbers far above that total. It was not till the middle of 1810 that his original five divisions of infantry were increased to six, nor till 1811 that his seventh and eighth divisions were completed[362]. Right down to 1812 it was certain that if he had lost any considerable fraction of his modest army, the ministry might have recalled him and abandoned Portugal. He had to fight with a full consciousness that a single disaster would have been irreparable, because it would have been followed not by the sending off of reinforcements to replace the divisions that might be lost, but by an order to evacuate the Peninsula. His French opponents fought under no such disabilities; when beaten they had other armies at hand on which to fall back, and behind all the inexhaustible reserve of Napoleon’s conscription. Considering the campaigns of 1809-10-11 it is not Wellington’s oft-censured prudence that we find astonishing, but his boldness. Instead of wondering that he did not attempt to relieve Rodrigo or Almeida in July-August 1810, or to fall upon Masséna at Santarem in January 1811, we are filled with surprise at the daring which inspired the storming of Oporto, and the offering of battle at Busaco and Fuentes d’Oñoro. When a defeat spelt ruin and recall, it required no small courage to take any risks: but Wellesley had the sanest of minds; he could draw the line with absolute accuracy between enterprise and rashness, between the possible and the impossible. He had learned to gauge with wonderful insight the difficulties and disabilities of his enemies, and to see exactly how far they might be reckoned upon in discounting the military situation. After some time he arrived at an accurate estimate of the individual marshals opposed to him, and was ready to take the personal equation into consideration, according as he had to deal with Soult or Masséna, Marmont or Jourdan. In short, he was a safe general, not a cautious one. When once the hopeless disparity between his own resources and those of the enemy had ceased to exist, in the year 1812, he soon showed the worth of the silly taunts which imputed timidity to him, by the smashing blows which reduced Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, and the lightning-stroke which dashed to pieces Marmont’s army at Salamanca. In the next year, when for the first time he could count on an actual superiority of force[363], his irresistible march to Vittoria displayed his mastery of the art of using an advantage to the uttermost. Napoleon himself never punished a strategic fault on the part of the enemy with such majestic ease and confidence.

Of Wellington as a tactician we have already had occasion to speak in the first volume of this work[364]. It is only necessary to repeat here that the groundwork of his tactics was his knowledge of the fact that the line could beat the column, whether on the offensive or the defensive. The data for forming the conclusions had been in possession of any one who chose to utilize them, but it was Wellesley who put his knowledge to full account. Even before he left India, it is said, he had grasped the great secret, and had remarked to his confidants that ‘the French were sweeping everything before them in Europe by the use of the formation in column, but that he was fully convinced that the column could and would be beaten by the line[365].’ Yet even though the epoch-making, yet half-forgotten, fight of Maida had occurred since then, the first Peninsular battles came as a revelation to the world. After Vimiero and Talavera it became known that the line was certainly superior for the defensive, but it was only the triumphant line-advance of Salamanca that finally divulged the fact that the British method was equally sure and certain for the attack. If Wellesley’s reputation rested on the single fact that he had made this discovery known to the world, he would have won by this alone a grand place in military history. But his reputation depends even more on his strategical than on his tactical triumphs. He was a battle-general of the first rank, but his talents on the day of decisive action would not have sufficed to clear the French out of Spain. His true greatness is best shown by his all-embracing grasp of the political, geographical, and moral factors of the situation in the Peninsula, and by the way in which he utilized them all when drawing up the plans for his triumphant campaigns.

As to tactics indeed, there are points on which it would be easy to point out defects in Wellesley’s method—in especial it would be possible to develop the two old, but none the less true, criticisms that he was ‘pre-eminently an infantry general,’ and that ‘when he had won a battle he did not always utilize his success to the full legitimate end.’ The two charges hang closely together, for the one defect was but the consequence of the other; a tendency to refrain from making the greatest possible use of his cavalry for breaking up an enemy who had already begun to give ground, and for pursuing him à outrance when he was well on the run, was the natural concomitant of a predilection for the use of infantry in the winning of battles. If Napoleon had commanded the British army at Salamanca, Marmont’s troops would have been annihilated by a rapid cavalry pursuit, instead of merely scattered. If Wellington had commanded the French army in the Jena-Auerstadt campaign, it is reasonably certain that Hohenlöhe’s broken divisions would have escaped into the interior, instead of being garnered in piecemeal by the inexorable and untiring chase kept up by the French horse. The very distrust which Wellington expressed for the capacities of the British cavalry[366], who after all were admirable troops when well handled, is but an illustration of the fact that he was no true lover of the mounted arm. But of this we have already spoken, and it is unnecessary to dwell at greater length on his minor deficiencies than on his numerous excellencies on the day of battle.

A far more serious charge against Wellesley than any which can be grounded on his tactical faults, is that, though he won the confidence of his army, he could never win their affection. ‘The sight of his long nose among us on a battle morning,’ wrote one of his veterans, ‘was worth ten thousand men, any day of the week[367].’ But it was not personal attachment to him which nerved his soldiers to make their best effort: he was feared, respected, and followed, but never loved. He was obeyed with alacrity, but not with enthusiasm. His officers and his men believed, and believed rightly, that he looked upon them as admirable tools for the task that had been set him, and did his best to keep those tools unbroken and in good repair, but that he felt no deep personal interest in their welfare. It is seldom that the veterans who have served under a great commander have failed to idolize as well as to respect him. But Wellesley’s men, while acknowledging all his greatness, complained that he systematically neglected both their feelings and their interests[368]. It was but too true: he showed for his army, the officers no less than the rank and file, a certain coldness that was partly bred of intellectual contempt, partly of aristocratic hauteur. There are words of his on record concerning his men which can never be forgiven, and words, too, not spoken in the heat of action or the moment of disappointment, but in the leisure of his later years. Take, for example, the passage in Lord Stanhope’s Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, where he is speaking of the rank and file: ‘they are the scum of the earth; English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink. That is the plain fact—they have all enlisted for drink[369].’ He described the men who won Talavera as ‘a rabble who could not bear success,’ and the Waterloo troops as ‘an infamous army’—the terms are unpardonable. His notions of discipline were worthy of one of the drill sergeants of Frederic the Great. ‘I have no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers,’ he once said before a Royal Commission, ‘by anything but the fear of immediate corporal punishment.’ Flogging was the one remedy for all evils, and he declared that it was absolutely impossible to manage the army without it. For any idea of appealing to the men’s better feeling, or moving them by sentiment, he had the greatest contempt.

The most distressing feature in Wellington’s condemnation of the character of his soldiery is that he was sinning against the light: officers, of less note but of greater heart, were appealing to the self-respect, patriotism, and good feeling of their men, with the best results, at the very moment that Wellesley was denouncing them as soulless clods and irreclaimable drunkards. It was not by the lash that regiments like Donnellan’s 48th or Colborne’s 52nd, or many other corps of the Peninsular army were kept together. The reminiscences of the Napiers, and many other regimental officers of the better class, are full of anecdotes illustrating the virtues of the rank and file. There are dozens of diaries and autobiographies of sergeants and privates of Wellesley’s old divisions, which prove that there were plenty of well-conditioned, intelligent, sober and religious men in the ranks—it is only necessary to cite as examples the books of Surtees, Anton, Morris, and Donaldson[370]. If there were also thousands of drunkards and reckless brutes in the service, the blame for their misdoings must fall to a great extent on the system under which they were trained. The ruthless mediaeval cruelty of the code of punishment alone will account for half the ruffianism of the army.

The same indiscriminate censure which Wellesley poured on his men he often vented on his officers, denouncing them en masse in the most reckless fashion. There were careless colonels and stupid subalterns enough under him, but what can excuse such sweeping statements as that ‘When I give an order to an officer of the line it is, I venture to say, a hundred to one against its being done at all,’ or for his Circular of November, 1812, declaring that all the evils of the Burgos retreat were due ‘to the habitual inattention of the officers of regiments to their duty.’ It was a bitter blow to the officers of the many battalions which had kept their order and discipline, to find themselves confused with the offending corps in the same general blast of censure. But by 1812 they were well accustomed to such slashing criticism on the part of their commander.

Such a chief could not win the sympathy of his army, though he might command their intellectual respect. Equally unfortunate were his autocratic temper and his unwillingness to concede any latitude of instructions to his subordinates, features in his character which effectually prevented him from forming a school of good officers capable of carrying out large independent operations. He trained admirable generals of division, but not commanders of armies, for he always insisted on keeping the details of operations, even in distant parts of the theatre of war, entirely under his own hand. His preference for Hill as a commander of detached corps came entirely from the fact that he could trust that worthy and gallant officer to make no movements on his own initiative, and to play a safe waiting game which gave his chief no anxiety. In his younger days, while serving under other generals, Wellesley had been by no means an exponent of blind obedience or unquestioning deference to the orders of his superiors. But when placed in command himself he was autocratic to a fault. He was prone to regard any criticism of his directions as insubordination. He preferred a lieutenant on whom he could rely for a literal obedience to orders, to another of more active brain who possessed initiative and would ‘think for himself.’ There was hardly an officer in the Peninsular army to whom he would grant a free hand even in the carrying out of comparatively small tasks[371]. His most trusted subordinates were liable to find themselves overwhelmed with rebukes delivered in the most tempestuous fashion if they took upon themselves to issue a command on their own responsibility, even when the great chief was many leagues away. Sometimes when their inspirations had been obviously useful and successful, he would wind up his harangue, not with an expression of approval, but with a recommendation to the effect that ‘matters had turned out all right, but they must never again act without orders[372].’ This was not the way to develop their strategical abilities, or to secure that intelligent co-operation which is more valuable than blind obedience. It may be pleaded in Wellesley’s defence that at the commencement of the war he had many stupid and discontented officers under him, and that their carpings at his orders were often as absurd as they were malevolent. But it was not only for them that he reserved his thunders. They fell not unfrequently on able and willing men, who had done no more than think for themselves, when an urgent problem had been presented to them. He was, it must be confessed, a thankless master to serve: he was almost as pitiless as Frederic the Great in resenting a mistake or an apparent disobedience to orders. The case of Norman Ramsay may serve as an example. Ramsay was perhaps the most brilliant artillery officer in the Peninsular army: the famous charge of his guns through a French cavalry regiment at Fuentes d’Oñoro is one of the best-known exploits of the whole war. But at Vittoria he made an error in comprehending orders, and moved forward from a village where the commander-in-chief had intended to keep him stationed. He was placed under arrest for three weeks, cut out of his mention in dispatches, and deprived of the brevet-majority which had been promised him. His career was broken, and two years later he fell, still a captain, at Waterloo.

It would almost seem that Wellesley had worked out for himself some sort of general rule, to the effect that incompetent being more common than competent subordinates, it would be safer in the long run to prohibit all use of personal initiative, as the occasions on which it would be wisely and usefully employed would be less numerous than those on which it would result in blunders and perils. He had a fine intellectual contempt for many of the officers whom he had to employ, and never shrank from showing it. When once he had made up his mind, he could not listen with patience to advice or criticism. It was this that made him such a political failure in his latter days: he carried into the cabinet the methods of the camp, and could not understand why they were resented. His colleagues ‘started up with crotchets,’ he complained: ‘I have not been used to that in the early part of my life. I was accustomed to carry on things in quite a different manner. I assembled my officers and laid down my plan, and it was carried into effect without any more words[373].’ For councils of war, or other devices by which a weak commander-in-chief endeavours to discharge some of the burden of responsibility upon the shoulders of his lieutenants, Wellesley had the greatest dislike. He never allowed discussion as long as he held supreme authority in the field: he would have liked to enforce the same rule in the cabinet when he became prime minister of England. Sometimes he had glimpses of the fact that it is unwise to show open scorn for the opinion of others, especially when they are men of influence or capacity[374]. But it was not often that the idea occurred to him. His reception of an officer who came with a petition or a piece of advice was often such that the visitor went away boiling with rage, or prostrated with nervous exhaustion. Charles Stewart is said to have wept after one stormy interview with his chief, and Picton, whose attempts at familiarity were particularly offensive to the Duke, would go away muttering words that could not be consigned to print[375]. A passage from the memoir of the chief of one of his departments may suffice to paint the sort of scene which used to occur:—

‘One morning I was in his Lordship’s small apartment, when two officers were there, to request leave to go to England. A general officer, of a noble family, commanding a brigade, advanced, saying, “My Lord, I have of late been suffering much from rheumatism—.” Without allowing him time to proceed further, Lord Wellington rapidly said—“and you must go to England to get cured of it. By all means. Go there immediately.” The general, surprised at his Lordship’s tone and manner, looked abashed, while he made a profound bow. To prevent his saying anything more, his Lordship turned to address me, inquiring about the casualties of the preceding night[376],’ &c.

Hardly less humiliating to many of Wellesley’s subordinates than personal interviews of this kind, were the letters which they received from him, when he chanced to be at a distance. He had not the art, probably he had not the wish, to conceal the fact that he despised as well as disliked many of those whom the fortune of war, or the exigencies of home patronage, placed under his command. The same icy intellectual contempt which he showed for the needy peers, the grovelling place-hunters, and the hungry lawyers of Dublin, when he was under-secretary for Ireland, pierces through many of his letters to the officers of the army of Portugal. Very frequently his mean opinion of their abilities was justifiable—but there was no need to let it appear. In this part of the management of men Wellesley was deficient: he failed to see that it is better in the end to rule subordinates by appealing to their zeal and loyalty than to their fears, and that a little commendation for work well performed goes further in its effect on an army than much censure for what has been done amiss. When he has to praise his officers in a dispatch, the terms used are always formal and official in the extreme—it is the rarest thing to find a phrase which seems to come from the heart. The careful reader will know what importance to attach to these expressions of approval, when he notes that the names of subordinates whom Wellesley despised and distrusted are inserted, all in due order of seniority, between those of the men who had really done the work[377]. All commanders-in-chief have to give vent to a certain amount of these empty and meaningless commendations, but few have shown more neglect in discriminating between the really deserving men and the rest than did the victor of Salamanca and Waterloo. Occasionally this carelessness as to the merits and the feelings of others took the form of gross injustice, more frequently it led to nothing worse than a complete mystification of the readers of the dispatch as to the relative merits of the persons mentioned therein[378].

The explanation of this feature in Wellesley’s correspondence is a fundamental want of broad sympathy in his character. He had a few intimates to whom he spoke freely, and it is clear that he often showed consideration and even kindness to his aides-de-camp and other personal retainers; there were one or two of his relatives to whom he showed an unswerving affection, and whose interests were always near his heart[379]. Among these neither his wife nor his elder brother Richard, the great Governor-General of India, were to be numbered. He quarrelled so bitterly with the latter that for many years they never met. No doubt there were faults on both sides, yet Wellington might have borne much from the brother who started him on his career. But for him the position of Resident in Mysore would not have been given to so junior an officer, nor would the command of the army that won Assaye and Argaum have been placed in his hands. It is small wonder that the grievances and petty ambitions of the average line officer never touched the heart of the man who could be estranged from his own brother by a secondary political question.

It has often been noted that when the wars were over he showed little predilection for the company of his old Peninsular officers. Some of his most trusted subordinates hardly looked upon his face after 1815: he clearly preferred the company of politicians and men of fashion to that of the majority of his old generals. They only met him at the formal festivity of the annual Waterloo Banquet.

The remembrance of the countless panegyrics upon Wellington, not only as a general but as a man, which have appeared during the last sixty years, has made it necessary, if painful, to speak of his limitations. For two whole generations it seemed almost treasonable to breathe a word against his personal character—so great was the debt that Britain owed him for Salamanca and Waterloo. His frigid formalism was regarded with respect and even admiration: his lack of geniality and his utter inability to understand the sentimental side of life were even praised as signs of Spartan virtue. Certain episodes which did not fit in too happily with the ‘Spartan hero’ theory were deliberately ignored[380]. The popular conception of Arthur Wellesley has been largely built up on laudatory sketches written by those who knew him in his old age alone. He lives in our memories as a kind of Nestor, replete with useful and interesting information, as Lord Stanhope drew him in his Conversations with the Duke of Wellington. This was not the man known to his contemporaries in the years of the Peninsular War.

Yet there was much to admire in Wellesley’s personal character. England has never had a more faithful servant. Though intensely ambitious, he never allowed ambition to draw him aside from the most tedious and thankless daily tasks. When once convinced that it was his duty to undertake a piece of work, he carried it through with unswerving industry and perseverance, if not always with much tact or consideration for the feelings of others[381]. He was unsparing of himself, careless of praise or blame, honest in every word and deed. He was equally ready to offend his king or to sacrifice his popularity with the multitude, when he thought that he had to face a question in which right and wrong were involved. He was essentially, what he once called himself, using a familiar Hindustani phrase, ‘a man of his salt.’ In spite of all his faults he stands out a majestic figure in the history of his time. It is the misfortune of the historian that when he sees so much to admire and to respect, he finds so little that commands either sympathy or affection.

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SECTION XIV: CHAPTER II

WELLESLEY RETAKES OPORTO

On arriving at Lisbon, Wellesley, as we have already seen, was overjoyed to find that the situation in Portugal remained just as it had been when he set sail from Portsmouth: Victor was still quiescent in his cantonments round Merida: Soult had not moved forward on the road toward Coimbra, and was in the midst of his unfruitful bickerings with the army of Silveira. Lapisse had disappeared from his threatening position in front of Ciudad Rodrigo, and had passed away to Estremadura. All the rumours as to an immediate French advance on Badajoz and Abrantes, which had arrived just as the new commander-in-chief was quitting England, had turned out to be baseless inventions. There were reassuring dispatches awaiting him from the English attachés with the armies of Cuesta and La Romana[382], which showed that Galicia was in full insurrection, and that a respectable force was once more threatening Victor’s flank. Accordingly it was possible to take into consideration plans for assuming the offensive against the isolated French armies, and the defensive campaign for the protection of Lisbon, which Wellesley had feared to find forced upon him, was not necessary.

Within thirty-six hours of his arrival the British commander-in-chief had made up his mind as to the strategy that was incumbent on him. He resolved, as we have already seen, to leave a containing force to watch Victor, while he hastened with the main body of his army to strike a blow at Soult, whose corps was clearly in a state of dispersion, which invited attack. The Duke of Dalmatia was operating at once upon the Minho, the Tamega, and the Vouga, and it seemed likely that a prompt stroke might surprise him, in the midst of the movement for concentration which he would be compelled to make, when he should learn that the British were in the field.

The forces available for Wellesley’s use consisted of some 25,000 British[383] and 16,000 Portuguese troops. Cradock, urged on by Hill and Beresford, had advanced with the main body of his army to Leiria and lay there upon the twenty-fourth, the day upon which he received Wellesley’s notification that he had been superseded and was to sail to take up the governorship of Gibraltar. But four or five newly arrived corps still lay at Lisbon, and more were expected. The army was very weak in cavalry, there were but four regiments and fractions of two others available[384]. Of the infantry there were only present five of the battalions[385] which had served at Vimiero and knew the French and their manner of fighting. The rest were all inexperienced and new to the field, and the majority indeed were weak second battalions, which had not originally been intended for foreign service, and had been made up to their present numbers by large and recent drafts from the militia[386]. Even at Talavera, six months after the campaign had begun, it is on record that many of the men were still showing the names and numbers of their old militia regiments on their knapsacks. The battalions which had joined in Moore’s march into Spain only began to reappear in June, when Robert Craufurd brought back to Lisbon the 1/43rd, 1/52nd and 1/95th, which were to form the nucleus of the famous Light Division. The remainder of the Corunna troops, when they had been rested and recruited, were drawn aside to take part in the miserable expedition to Walcheren. When Wellesley first took the field therefore, these veterans of the campaign of 1808 were only represented by the two ‘battalions of detachments’ which General Cameron had organized from the stragglers and convalescents of Moore’s army.

The Portuguese troops which Wellesley found available for the campaign against Soult consisted entirely of the line regiments from Lisbon and the central parts of the realm, which Beresford had been reorganizing during the last two months. The troops of the north had been destroyed at Oporto, or were in arms under Silveira on the Tamega. Those of the south were garrisoning Elvas, or still endeavouring to recruit their enfeebled cadres at their regimental head quarters. But Beresford had massed at Thomar and Abrantes ten[387] line regiments, some with one, some with their statutory two battalions, three newly raised battalions of Cazadores, and three incomplete cavalry regiments, a force amounting in all to nearly 15,000 sabres and bayonets. Though Wellesley considered that they ‘cut a bad figure,’ and that the rank and file were poor and the native officers ‘worse than anything he had ever seen,’ he was yet resolved to give them a chance in the field. Beresford assured him that they had improved so much during the last few weeks, and were showing such zeal and good spirit, that it was only fair that they should be given a trial[388].

Accordingly Wellesley resolved to brigade certain picked battalions among his English troops, and to take them straight to the front, while he told off others to form part of the ‘containing force’ which was to be sent off to watch Victor and the French army of Estremadura. The remainder, under Beresford himself, were to act as an independent division during the march on Oporto.

Five days of unceasing work had to be spent in Lisbon before Wellesley could go forward, but while he was making his arrangements with the Portuguese regency, drawing out a new organization for Beresford’s commissariat, and striving to get into communication with Cuesta, the British troops were already being pushed forward from Leiria towards Coimbra, and the Portuguese were converging from Thomar on the same point, so that no time was being lost. It was during this short and busy stay at Lisbon that Wellesley was confronted with the conspirator Argenton, who had come up to the capital in company with Major Douglas. He did not make a good impression on the commander-in-chief, who wrote home that he had no doubt as to the reality of the plot against Soult, and the discontent of the French army, but thought it unlikely that any good would come from the plot[389]. He refused to promise compliance with Argenton’s two requests, that he would direct the Portuguese to fall in with Soult’s plans for assuming royal power, and that he would bring the British army forward to a position in which it would threaten the retreat of the 2nd Corps on Leon. The former savoured too much of Machiavellian treachery: as to the latter, he thought so little of the profit likely to result from the plot, that he would not alter his plans to oblige the conspirators. The only information of certain value that he had obtained from the emissary was that Soult had no idea of Victor’s position or projects. All that he granted to Argenton was passports to take him and his two friends, ‘Captains Dupont and Garis,’ to England, from whence they intended to cross into France, in order to set their friends in the interior on the move. Great care was taken that Argenton on his return journey to Oporto should see as little as possible of the British army, lest he should be able to tell too much about its numbers and dispositions. He was conducted back by Douglas to the Vouga, by a circuitous route, and safely repassed Franceschi’s outposts[390].

On the twenty-ninth Wellesley at last got clear of Lisbon, where the formal festivities and reception arranged in his honour had tried him even more than the incessant desk-work which had to be got through before the organization of his base for supplies was completed. On April 30 he pushed forward to Leiria, on May 1 to Pombal, on the second he reached Coimbra and found himself in the midst of his army, which had only concentrated itself at that city during the last five days.

All was quiet in the front: Trant, who was holding the line of the Vouga with 3,000 disorderly militia and some small fragments rallied from the line regiments which had been dispersed at Oporto, reported that Franceschi and the French light cavalry had remained quiescent for many days. The same news came in from Wilson, who, after pursuing Lapisse to Alcantara, had come back with part of his troops to the neighbourhood of Almeida, and had a detachment at Vizeu watching the flank of the French advance. Silveira reported from Amarante that he was still holding the line of the Tamega, and had at least 10,000 enemies in front of him. All therefore seemed propitious for the great stroke.

Wellesley’s plan, as finally worked out in detail, was to push forward his main body upon Oporto with all possible speed, while sending a flanking column under Beresford to cross the Douro near Lamego, join Silveira, and intercept Soult’s line of retreat upon the plains of Leon by way of the Tras-os-Montes. If he could move fast enough, he hoped to catch the Marshal with his army still unconcentrated. His design, as he wrote to Castlereagh, was ‘to beat or cripple Soult,’ to thrust him back into Galicia; he doubted whether it would be possible to accomplish more with the force that was at his disposal, but if any chance should occur for destroying or surrounding the enemy he would do his best. Rumours that the Marshal was preparing to evacuate Oporto were in the air: if they were true, and the French were already making ready to retreat, it was unlikely that they would stand long enough to run into danger.

The detailed arrangements for the distribution of the troops were as follows:—

It was first necessary to provide a ‘containing force’ to hold back Victor, in case he should make an unexpected move down the Tagus or the Guadiana. For this purpose Wellesley told off one of his brigades, that of Mackenzie, together with two regiments of heavy cavalry and one of infantry which had lately arrived at Lisbon, and were now on their march to Santarem. With these four battalions, one field battery, and eight squadrons, Mackenzie was to take post at Abrantes, and behind the line of the Zezere[391]. There he was to be joined by the larger half of Beresford’s reorganized Portuguese army—seven battalions of line troops, three of Cazadores, five squadrons of cavalry, and three batteries[392]. He would also have three regiments of militia at his disposal, to garrison the fortress of Abrantes. His whole force, excluding the militia, would amount to 1,400 British and 700 Portuguese cavalry, nearly 3,000 British infantry, 6,000 Portuguese infantry, and four batteries. These 12,000 men ought to be able to hold back any force that Victor could detach for a raid along the Tagus: for, having Cuesta’s army in his front, it was absolutely impossible that he could march with his whole corps into Portugal. If the Marshal moved forward south of the Tagus, that river should be held against him, and since it was in full flood it would be easy to keep him back, as all the boats and ferries could be destroyed, and it would be useless for him to present himself opposite Vella Velha, Abrantes, or Santarem. If he advanced north of the Tagus, the line of the Zezere was to be maintained against him as long as possible, then those of the Nabao and Rio Mayor. But the main army would be back from the north, to reinforce the ‘containing force,’ long ere the Marshal could push so far. As an outlying post on this front Wellesley ordered Colonel Mayne, with the part of Wilson’s Lusitanian Legion that had not returned to the north and a militia regiment, to occupy Alcantara. He was to break its bridge if forced out of the position.

Victor being thus provided for, Wellesley could turn the rest of his army against Soult at Oporto. For the main operation he could dispose of 17,000 British and 7,000 Portuguese troops present with the colours, after deducting the sick, the men on detached duty, and one single battalion left in garrison at Lisbon. He divided them, as we have already stated, into a larger force destined to execute the frontal attack upon Soult, and a smaller one which was to cut off his retreat into central Spain.

The flanking column, 5,800 men in all, was entrusted to Beresford: it was composed of one British brigade (that of Tilson) consisting of 1,500 bayonets[393], a single British squadron (the 4th of the 14th Light Dragoons) with five battalions[394], three squadrons[395], and two field-batteries of Portuguese. These troops were originally directed to join Silveira at Amarante, and co-operate with him in defending the line of the Tamega. But on May 3 there arrived at Coimbra the unwelcome news that Loison had forced the bridge of Amarante, and that Silveira in consequence had retired south of the Douro and was lying at Lamego with the wrecks of his army, some 4,000 men at most. This untoward event did not cause Wellesley to change the direction of Beresford’s column, but rendered him more cautious as to pushing it beyond the Douro. He ordered his lieutenant to pick up Sir Robert Wilson’s small force at Vizeu[396], to join Silveira at Lamego, and then to guide his further operations by the attitude of the French. If they tried to pass the Douro he was to oppose them strenuously; if they still clung to the northern bank and had not advanced far beyond Amarante, he might cross, and occupy Villa Real, if he thought the move safe and the position behind that town defensible. But he was to risk nothing; if the whole of Soult’s corps should retreat eastward he was not to attempt to stop them, ‘for,’ wrote Wellesley, ‘I should not like to see a single British brigade, supported by 6,000 or 8,000 Portuguese, exposed to be attacked by the French army in any but a very good post[397].’ If Loison alone were left on the Tamega, Beresford might take post at Villa Real and fight: if, however, Soult should appear at the head of his entire force, it would be madness to await him: the column must fall back and allow him to pass. ‘Remember,’ added Wellesley in another letter[398], ‘that you are a commander-in-chief and must not be beaten: therefore do not undertake anything with your troops if you have not some strong hope of success.’ Beresford’s column was sent off a day before the rest of the army, in order to allow the flanking movement time to develop before the frontal attack was pushed home. He left Coimbra on May 6, was at Vizeu on the eighth, and joined Silveira at Lamego on the tenth; all his movements passed completely unobserved by the enemy, owing to the wide sweep to the right which he had been ordered to make.

The infantry of Wellesley’s main force, with which the frontal attack on Oporto was to be made, consisted of six brigades of British, one of the King’s German Legion, and four picked battalions of Portuguese who were attached respectively to the brigades of A. Campbell, Sontag, Stewart, and Cameron. Of cavalry, in which he was comparatively weak, he had the whole of the 16th, three squadrons of the 14th, and two of the 20th Light Dragoons, with one squadron more from the 3rd Light Dragoons of the King’s German Legion. The artillery, twenty-four guns in all, was composed of two British and two German field-batteries. No horse artillery had yet been received from England, though Wellesley had been urging his need for it on the home authorities, at the same time that he made a similar demand for good light infantry, such as that which had formed the light brigade of Moore’s army[399], and for remounts to keep his cavalry up to full fighting strength. The army was not yet distributed into regular divisions, but the beginnings of the later divisional arrangement were indicated by the telling off the brigades of Richard Stewart and Murray to serve together under Edward Paget (who had commanded Moore’s reserve division with such splendid credit to himself during the Corunna retreat), while those of H. Campbell, A. Campbell, and Sontag were to take their orders from Sherbrooke, and those of Hill and Cameron to move under the charge of the former brigadier. The cavalry was under General Cotton, with Payne as brigadier; the senior officer of artillery was General E. Howorth[400].

It will be noted that of the total force with which Wellesley was about to assail the 2nd Corps, about 16,400 were British troops and 11,400 Portuguese. Considering that Soult had at least 23,000 sabres and bayonets, of whom not more than 2,200 were in his hospitals, and that over three-eighths of the allies were untried and newly-organized levies, it cannot be denied that the march on Oporto showed considerable self-confidence, and a very nice and accurate calculation of the chances of war on the part of the British Commander-in-chief.

On the very day on which the vanguard marched out from Coimbra upon the northern road, Wellesley received a second visit from the conspirator Argenton, who had returned from consulting his friends at Oporto and Amarante. He brought little news of importance: Soult had not yet proclaimed himself king, and therefore the plotters had taken no open steps against him. The French army had not begun to move, but it appeared that the Marshal was pondering over the relative advantages of the lines of retreat available to him, for Argenton brought a memorandum given him by (or purloined from) some staff-officer, which contained a long exposition of the various roads from Oporto, and stated a preference for that by Villa Real and the Tras-os-Montes[401]. He had a number of futile propositions to lay before Wellesley, and especially urged him to make sure of Villa Real and to cut off the Marshal’s retreat on Spain. The traitor was sent back, with no promises of compliance; and every endeavour was made to keep from him the fact that the allied army was already upon the move. Unfortunately he had passed many troops upon the road from Coimbra to the Vouga, and had guessed at what he had not seen. On the following day he passed through the French lines on his return journey, and by the way endeavoured to spread the propaganda of treason. One of the infantry brigades which lay in support of Franceschi’s cavalry was commanded by a general Lefebvre, with whom Argenton had long served as aide-de-camp. Knowing that his old chief was weak and discontented[402], the emissary of the malcontents paid a midnight visit to him, revealed to him the outlines of the conspiracy, and endeavoured to enroll him as a fellow plotter. He had misjudged his man: Lefebvre listened to everything without showing any signs of surprise or anger, but hastened to bear the tale to Soult, and arranged for Argenton’s arrest on his return to Oporto upon the following morning. Confronted with the Marshal, the traitor held his head high, and boasted that he was the agent of a powerful body of conspirators. He invited Soult to declare against the Emperor, and deliver France from servitude. He also warned him that Wellesley had arrived at Coimbra, and told him that 30,000 British troops of whom 3,000 at least were cavalry, would fall upon Franceschi that day. Thus, owing to his conference with Argenton, Wellesley lost the chance of surprising Soult, who was warned of the oncoming storm exactly at the moment when it was most important that he should still be kept in the dark as to the force that was marching against him [May 8].

Soult sent back Argenton to his prison, after threatening him with death: but uncertain as to the number of the conspirators, he was thrown for a moment into a state of doubt and alarm. He probably suspected Loison and Lahoussaye of being in the plot against him, as well as the real traitors—possibly Mermet also[403]. Feeling the ground, as it were, trembling beneath his feet, he began to make instant preparations for retreat: orders were sent to Franceschi to fall back on Oporto, and not to risk anything by an attempt to hold off Wellesley longer than was prudent. Loison was informed that he must clear the road beyond Amarante, as the army was about to retire by the Tras-os-Montes, and he would now form its advanced guard. Lorges at Braga was directed to gather in the small fractions of Heudelet’s division which had been left at Viana and other places in the north, and to march in their company upon Amarante by the way of Guimaraens. The Marshal saw, with some dismay, that these isolated detachments would not be able to join the main body till the fourteenth or fifteenth of May; it was necessary to hold Oporto as long as possible in order to give them time to come up.

Next day Soult contrived to extort some more information from the unstable Argenton. Receiving a promise of life for himself and pardon for his fellow conspirators (which the Marshal apparently granted because he thought that accurate information concerning the plot would be worth more to him than the right to shoot the plotters), the captain gave up the names of all the leaders. Much relieved to find that none of his generals were implicated, Soult did no more than arrest the two colonels, Lafitte and Donadieu, leaving the smaller fry untouched[404]. He kept his promise to Argenton by hushing up the whole matter. The colonels suffered no harm beyond their arrest: Argenton escaped from custody (probably by collusion with the officer placed in charge of his person)[405], and got back to the English lines the day after the capture of Oporto[406]. Some months later he secretly revisited France, was recognized, captured, and shot on the Plain of Grenelle[407].

At the very moment when Soult was cross-examining Argenton, issuing hurried orders for the concentration of his troops, and preparing for a retreat upon Amarante, Wellesley’s advanced guard was drawing near the Vouga and making ready to pounce upon Franceschi. Two roads lead northward from Coimbra, the main chaussée to Oporto which runs inland via Ponte de Vouga and Feira, and a minor route near the coast, which passes by Aveiro and Ovar. Five of Wellesley’s brigades and the whole of his cavalry marched by the former route. Moving forward under the screen of Trant’s militia, which still held the line of the Vouga, they were to fall on the enemy’s front at dawn on May 10. The five squadrons of the 14th and 16th Light Dragoons under Cotton led the advance: then followed the infantry of Edward Paget—the two brigades of Murray and Richard Stewart. Sherbrooke’s column marched in support, ten miles to the rear. It was intended that the whole mass should rush in upon Franceschi’s pickets, and roll them in upon his main body before the advance from Coimbra was suspected. Unhappily Soult had already warned his cavalry commander of the coming storm upon the ninth, and he was not caught unprepared.

Meanwhile the remaining two infantry brigades of Wellesley’s army, those of Hill and Cameron, were to execute a turning movement against Franceschi’s flank. Orders had been sent to the magistrates of the town of Aveiro, bidding them collect all the fishing-boats which were to be found in the great lagoon at the mouth of the Vouga—a broad sheet of shallow water and sandbanks which extends for fifteen miles parallel to the sea, only separated from it by a narrow spit of dry ground. At the northern end of this system of inland waterways is the town of Ovar, which lay far behind Franceschi’s rear. Hill was directed to ship his men upon the boats, and to throw them ashore at Ovar, where they were to fall upon the flank of the French, when they should be driven past them by the frontal advance of the main body.

If all had gone well, the French detachment might have been annihilated. Franceschi had with him no more than the four weak cavalry regiments of his own division[408], not more than 1,200 sabres, with one light battery, and a single regiment of infantry. But not far behind him was the rest of Mermet’s division, eleven battalions of infantry with a strength of some 3,500 men. One regiment, the 31st Léger, lay at Feira, near Ovar, while Ferrey’s brigade was five miles further back, at Grijon.

On the night of the ninth the British advanced guard reached the Vouga: after only a few hours’ repose the cavalry mounted again at 1 A.M., and pushed forward in order to fall upon the enemy at daybreak. The night march turned out a failure, as such enterprises often do in an unexplored country-side seamed with rocks and ravines. The rear of the cavalry column got astray and fell far behind the leading squadrons: much time was lost in marching and countermarching, and at dawn the brigade found itself still some way from Albergaria Nova, the village where Franceschi’s head quarters were established[409]. It was already five o’clock when they fell in with and drove back the French outlying pickets: shortly after they came upon the whole of Franceschi’s division, drawn out in battle array on a rough moor behind the village, with a few companies of infantry placed in a wood on their flank and their battery in front of their line. General Cotton saw that there was no chance of a surprise, and very wisely declined to attack a slightly superior force of all arms with the 1,000 sabres of his two regiments. He resolved to wait for the arrival of Richard Stewart’s infantry brigade, the leading part of the main column. When Franceschi advanced against him he refused to fight and drew back a little[410]. Thus some hours of the morning were wasted, till at last there arrived on the field Lane’s battery and a battalion of the 16th Portuguese, followed by the 29th and the 1st Battalion of Detachments. Like the cavalry, the infantry had been much delayed during the hours of darkness, mainly by the impossibility of getting the guns up the rocky defile beyond the Vouga, where several caissons had broken down in the roadway. It was only after daylight had come that they were extricated and got forward on to the upland where lies the village of Albergaria.

Wellesley himself came up along with Stewart’s brigade, and had the mortification of seeing all his scheme miscarry, owing to the tardiness of the arrival of his infantry. For at the very moment when Franceschi caught sight of the distant bayonets winding up the road, he hastily went to the rear, leaving the 1st Hussars alone in position as a rearguard. This regiment was charged by the 16th Light Dragoons, and driven in with some small loss. Under cover of this skirmish the French division got away in safety through the town of Oliveira de Azemis, which lay behind them, and after making two more ineffectual demonstrations of a desire to stand, fell back on the heights of Grijon, where Mermet’s infantry division was awaiting them.

The whole day’s fighting had been futile but spectacular. ‘I must note,’ says an eye-witness, ‘the beautiful effect of our engagement. It commenced about sunrise on one of the finest spring mornings possible, on an immense tract of heath, with a pine wood in rear of the enemy. So little was the slaughter, and so regular the manœuvring, that it all appeared more like a sham-fight on Wimbledon Common than an action in a foreign country[411].’ The picturesque side of the day’s work must have been small consolation to Wellesley, who thus saw the first stroke of his campaign foiled by the chances of a night march in a rugged country—a lesson which he took to heart, for he rarely, if ever again, attempted a surprise at dawn in an unexplored region.

An equal disappointment had taken place on the flank near the sea. Hill’s brigade had marched down to Aveiro, where the local authorities had worked with excellent zeal and collected a considerable number of boats, enough to carry 1,500 men at a trip. During the night of the ninth-tenth the flotilla was engaged in sailing up the long lagoon which leads to Ovar. It was quite early in the morning when the brigade came to land, and if Franceschi had been driven in at an early hour he would have found Hill in a most threatening position on his flank. But the French cavalry was still ten or twelve miles away, engaged in its bloodless demonstration against Cotton’s brigade. Finding from the peasants that there were French infantry encamped quite close to him, at Feira, and that the English main column was still at a distance, Hill kept his men within the walls of Ovar, instead of engaging in an attempt to intercept Franceschi’s retreat. He was probably quite right, as it would have been dangerous to thrust three battalions, without cavalry or guns, between Mermet’s troops at Feira and the retiring columns of the French horsemen. Hill therefore sent back his boats to bring up Cameron’s brigade from Aveiro, and remained quiet all the morning. At noon his pickets were driven in by French infantry: Mermet had at last heard of his arrival, and had sent out the three battalions of the 31st Léger from Feira to contain him and protect Franceschi’s flank. The voltigeur companies of this force pressed in upon Hill, but would not adventure themselves too far. The afternoon was spent in futile skirmishing, but at last the retreating French cavalry went by at a great pace, and the English Light Dragoons, following them in hot pursuit, came up with the 31st Léger. Hill, seeing himself once more in touch with his friends, now pushed out of Ovar in force, and pressed on the French voltigeur companies, which hastily retired, fell back on their regiment, and ultimately retired with it and rejoined Mermet’s main body on the heights above Grijon. The skirmishing had been almost bloodless—Hill lost not a single man, and the French infantry only half-a-dozen wounded[412].

On the morning of May 11, therefore, Hill’s troops on the left and Cotton’s and Paget’s on the right lay opposite the position which Mermet and Franceschi had taken up. Sherbrooke was still more than ten miles to the rear, having barely crossed the Vouga, while Cameron had not yet sailed up from Aveiro. Wellesley had therefore some 1,500 cavalry and 7,000 infantry under his hand, with which to assail the 1,200 horse and 4,200 foot of the two French divisions. The enemy were strongly posted: Grijon lies in a valley, with woods and orchards around it and a steep hillside at its back. The French tirailleurs held the village and the thickly-wooded slopes on each side of it: behind them the fifteen battalions of Mermet were partly visible among the trees on the sky-line of the heights.

Wellesley was anxious to see whether the enemy intended to hold his ground, or would retire before a demonstration: he therefore threw the light companies of Richard Stewart’s brigade into the woods on each side of Grijon. A furious fire at once broke out, and the advancing line of skirmishers could make no headway. Realizing that the French intended to fight a serious rearguard action, Wellesley refused to indulge them with a frontal attack and determined to turn both their flanks. While Cotton’s cavalry and the two English battalions of Stewart’s brigade drew up opposite their centre, Murray’s Germans marched off to the left, to get beyond Mermet’s flank, while Colonel Doyle, with the battalion of the 16th Portuguese which belonged to Stewart’s brigade, entered the woods on the extreme right. Hill’s brigade, a mile or two to the left of Murray, pushed forward on the Ovar-Oporto road, at a rate which would soon have brought them far beyond the enemy’s rear.

The meaning of these movements was not long hidden from the French: the 1st and 2nd battalions of the King’s German Legion, led by Brigadier Langwerth, were soon pressing upon their right flank, while the Portuguese battalion plunged into the woods on the other wing with great resolution. Wellesley himself was watching this part of the advance with much interest: it was the first time that he had sent his native allies into the firing line, and he was anxious to see how they would behave. They surpassed his expectations: the 16th was a good regiment, with a number of students of the University of Coimbra in its ranks. They plunged into the thickets without a moment’s hesitation, and in a few minutes the retiring sound of the musketry showed that they were making headway in the most promising style. This sight was an enormous relief to the Commander-in-chief: if the Portuguese could be trusted in line of battle, his task became immeasurably more easy. ‘You are in error in supposing that these troops will not fight,’ he wrote to a down-hearted correspondent: ‘one battalion has behaved remarkably well under my own eyes[413].’

Mermet and Franceschi did not hesitate for long, when they saw their flank guard beaten in upon either side, and heard that Hill was marching upon their rear. They gave orders for their whole line to retire without delay: the plateau behind them was so cut up with stone walls enclosing fields, that the cavalry could be of no use in covering the retreat, so Franceschi went to the rear first at a round trot. Mermet followed, leaving the three battalions of the 31st Léger to act as a rearguard[414].

The whole British line now pressed in as fast as was possible in the woods and lanes: the infantry could never overtake the enemy, but two squadrons of the 16th and 20th Light Dragoons, galloping along the high road, came up with Mermet’s rear a mile beyond the brow of the hill. Charles Stewart, who was leading them on, was one of those cavalry officers who thoroughly believe in their arm, and think that it can go anywhere and do anything. He at once ordered Major Blake of the 20th to charge the enemy, though the French were retiring along a narrow chaussée bordered with stone walls. Fortunately for the dragoons their opponents were already shaken in morale: the three battalions were not well together, isolated companies were still coming in from the flanks, and the colonel of the 31st had completely lost his head. On being charged, the rearguard fired a volley, which brought down the front files of the pursuing cavalry, but then wavered, broke, and began scrambling over the walls to escape out of the high road into the fields. There followed a confused mêlée, for the English dragoons also leaped the walls, and tried to follow the broken enemy among thickets and ploughland. Of those of the French who fled down the high road many were sabred, and a considerable number captured: indeed the eagle of the regiment was in considerable danger for some time. But the British had no supports at hand; they scattered in reckless pursuit of the men who had taken to the fields, and many were shot down when they had got entangled among trees and walls. However, the charge, if somewhat reckless, was on the whole successful: the dragoons lost no more than ten killed, one officer and thirty troopers wounded, with eight or ten missing, while the French regiment into which they had burst left behind it over 100 prisoners and nearly as many killed and wounded[415].

For the rest of the day Mermet and Franceschi continued to fall back before the advancing British, without making more than a momentary stand. At dusk they reached Villa Nova, the transpontine suburb of Oporto, which they evacuated during the night. The moment that they had crossed the bridge of boats Soult caused it to be blown up, and vainly believed himself secure, now that the broad and rapid Douro was rolling between him and his enemy. The total loss of the French in the day’s fighting had been about 250 men, of whom 100 were prisoners. That of the British was two officers and nineteen men killed, six officers and sixty-three men wounded, and sixteen men missing. Nearly half the casualties were in the ranks of the two squadrons of dragoons, the rest were divided between the light companies of the 1st Battalion of Detachments, the 1st and 2nd battalions of the German Legion, and the 16th Portuguese[416].

On the night of the eleventh-twelfth, when Mermet and Franceschi had joined him, Soult had collected in Oporto the main body of his army: he had in hand of cavalry Franceschi’s four regiments, and of infantry fifteen battalions of Mermet’s division, seven battalions of Merle’s (forming Reynaud’s brigade), and seven of Delaborde’s, a force in all of about 10,000 bayonets and 1,200 sabres. Only a few miles away, at Baltar, on the road to Amarante, were Caulaincourt’s dragoons and the remaining regiment of Delaborde’s division, an additional force of somewhat over 2,000 men. With 13,000 men at his disposal and a splendid position behind the Douro, he imagined that he might retreat at leisure, maintaining the line of the impassable river for some days more. He intended to hold Oporto long enough to enable Loison to clear the road to Villa Real, and to allow Lorges and the belated troops from the north time to march in to Amarante. He was somewhat vexed to have received no news from Loison for four days, but, when last heard of [on May 7], that general was moving forward into the Tras-os-Montes, with orders to push on and open a way for the army as far as the Spanish border. Silveira having retired to the south bank of the Douro, the Marshal had no doubt that Loison would easily brush away the Ordenanza, and open for the whole corps d’armée the passage to Zamora and the plains of Leon.

Meanwhile the only danger which the Marshal feared was that Wellesley might send forward the fleet of fishing-boats which had carried Hill to Ovar, bring them to the estuary of the Douro, and use them to pass troops across its lowest reach, just within the bar at its mouth. Accordingly he told Franceschi to patrol carefully the five miles of the river that lie between Oporto and the sea. The infantry was comfortably housed in the city, with pickets watching the quays: every boat on the river, as it was supposed, had either been destroyed or brought over to the north bank. Wellesley would, as Soult calculated, be compelled to spend several days in making his preparations for passing the Douro, since he had no means of pushing his army across the broad stream, save the fishing-smacks which he might bring round from the lagoon of Ovar.

The Marshal therefore was quite at his ease, even though he knew that Wellesley’s vanguard was at Villa Nova in force. He imagined that he could count on ample time for the evacuation of Oporto, and began to make arrangements for a leisurely retreat. His first care was to send off eastward all his convalescents, his reserve ammunition, and his wheeled vehicles, of which he had collected a fair supply during his seven weeks’ halt at Oporto. These were to march, under the convoy of Mermet’s division, during the course of the morning. The other troops from Merle’s and Delaborde’s divisions, together with Franceschi’s horse, were to watch the lower Douro and check any attempt of the British to cross. The Marshal was himself lodged at a villa on the high ground west of the city, from which he commanded a fine view of the whole valley from Oporto to the sea: the view up-stream was blocked by the hill crowned by the Serra Convent, where the river makes a slight bend in order to get round the projecting heights on the southern bank. So thoroughly were both Soult and his staff impressed with the idea that Wellesley would endeavour to operate below, and not above, the city, that while the lower reaches of the Douro were watched with the greatest care, a very inefficient look-out was kept on the banks above Oporto: there would seem to have been but a single battalion placed in that direction, and this small force was lying far back from the river, with no proper system of pickets thrown forward to the water’s edge. Yet the opposite bank was full of cover, of thickets, gardens and olive groves, screening several lanes and by-paths that had led down to ferries. Such of the boats as had not been scuttled had been brought over to the north bank, but they were not all protected by proper guards. All this was inexcusably careless—the main blame must fall on the Marshal for his parti pris in refusing to look up-stream: though some must also be reserved for General Quesnel, the governor of Oporto, and for Foy, the brigadier whose battalions were in charge of the eastern suburb of the city. But the fact was that none of the French officers dreamed of the possibility that Wellesley might make an attempt, on the very morning of his arrival, to cross the tremendous obstacle interposed in his way by the rolling stream of the Douro. That he would deliver a frontal attack on them in full daylight was beyond the limits of the probable. They had no conception of the enterprise of the man with whom they had to deal.

There was this amount of truth in their view, that the British General would not have made his daring stroke at Oporto, unless he had ascertained that the carelessness of his adversaries had placed an unexpected chance in his hands. By ten o’clock in the morning Wellesley had concentrated behind Villa Nova the whole of his force—the three columns of Paget, Hill, and Sherbrooke were now up in line. They were kept out of sight of the enemy, some in the lateral lanes of the suburb, but the majority hidden behind the back slope of the hills, where orchards and vineyards gave them complete cover from observers on the northern bank.

While the troops were coming up, Sir Arthur mounted the Serra height, and reconnoitred the whole country-side from the garden of the convent. He had with him Portuguese notables who were well acquainted with Oporto and its suburbs, including several persons who had come over the river on the preceding day, and could give him some notion of the general disposition and emplacement of the French army. Sweeping the valley with his glasses he could see Franceschi’s vedettes moving about on the heights down-stream, and heavy columns of infantry forming up outside the north-eastern gates of the city. At eleven o’clock this body moved off, escorting a long train of wagons—it was Mermet’s division starting for Amarante in charge of Soult’s convoy of sick and reserve artillery. On the quays, below the broken bridge, many French pickets were visible, ensconced at the openings of the streets which lead down to the water. But turning his glass to the right, Wellesley could note that up-stream matters looked very quiet, the rocky banks above the deep-sunk river were deserted, and nothing was visible among the gardens and scattered houses of the south-eastern suburb. It was possible that French troops might be ensconced there, but no sign of them was to be seen.

Many intelligence-officers had already been sent off, to scour the southern bank of the river, and to ascertain whether by any chance the enemy had overlooked some of the boats belonging to the riverside villages. In a short time two valuable pieces of news were brought up to the Commander-in-chief. The large ferry-boat at Barca d’Avintas, four miles above the city, had been scuttled, but not injured beyond the possibility of hasty repairs. It was already being baled out and mended by the villagers. Nearer at hand a still more important discovery was made. Colonel Waters, one of the best scouts in the army, had met, not far south of the suburban village of Cobranloes, an Oporto refugee, a barber by trade, who had crossed over from the north bank in a small skiff, which he had hidden in a thicket. The man reported that the opposite bank was for the moment unguarded by the French, and pointed to four large wine-barges lying stranded below the brink of the northern shore, with no signs of an enemy in charge. Yet the position was one which should have been well watched: here a massive building, the bishop’s Seminary, surrounded by a high garden wall, lies with its back to the water. It was an isolated structure, standing well outside the eastern suburb, in fairly open ground, which could be easily swept by artillery fire from the dominating position of the Serra heights. Waters had with him as guide the prior of Amarante, and by his aid collected three or four peasants from the neighbouring cottages. After some persuasion from the ecclesiastic, these men and the barber consented to join the British officer in a raid on the stranded barges on the further bank. It was a hazardous undertaking, for one French picket had lately been seen to pass by, and another might appear at any moment. But the necessary half-hour was obtained; Waters and his fellows entered the barber’s skiff, crossed the river unseen, got the four barges afloat, and returned with them to the southern bank. They turned out to be big clumsy vessels, capable of holding some thirty men apiece. The explorer had noted that the Seminary buildings above were perfectly empty.

On receiving this intelligence, Wellesley resolved to take the chance which the fates offered him. If the French had shown themselves alert and vigilant, he could not have dared to throw troops across the river into their midst. But they seemed asleep at high noon, and their manifest negligence encouraged him. His mind was soon made up: he ordered Murray with two battalions of his brigade[417], two guns, and two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons, to march hard for Barca d’Avintas, cross on the ferry, and seize a position on the opposite bank capable of being defended against superior numbers. But this (as the small force employed sufficiently demonstrates) was only intended as a diversion. The main blow was to be delivered nearer at hand. Wellesley had resolved to endeavour to seize the abandoned Seminary, and to throw his main body across the river at this point if possible. The local conditions made the scheme less rash in fact than it appears on the map. The east end of the Serra hill completely commands all the ground about the Seminary: three batteries[418] were quietly pushed into the convent garden and trained upon the roads leading to that isolated building—one along the shore, the other further inland. If the place could once be seized, it would be possible to protect its garrison by fire across the water. There were only two artillery positions on the French bank, from which the Seminary could be battered: one, close to the water’s edge, was completely under the guns of the Serra convent. The other, on the heights by the chapel of Bom Fin, was rather distant, and could not be used against boats crossing the river, as they would be invisible to gunners working on this emplacement. Cannon placed there might do some damage to the Seminary buildings, but could not prevent the garrison from being reinforced. Realizing all this at a glance, Wellesley hurried down Hill’s brigade to the water’s edge, and the moment that the leading company of the Buffs had got on board the barges, bade them push off. In a quarter of an hour the first vessel was over, and a subaltern and twenty-five men rushed up into the empty enclosure of the Seminary, and closed the big iron gate opening into the Vallongo road, which formed its only land-exit. The men from the other barges were just behind: they set themselves to lining the garden wall and to piling up wood and earth against it, in order to give themselves a standing-place from which they could fire over the coping. The barges went back with all speed, and were again loaded and sent off. Meanwhile Wellesley and his staff were looking down in breathless anxiety on the quiet bend of the river, the silent suburb, and the toiling vessels. At any moment the alarm might be given, and masses of the enemy might debouch from the city and dash in upon the Seminary before enough men were across to hold it. For the best part of an hour the Commander-in-chief must have been fully aware that his daring move might end only in the annihilation of two or three companies of a good old regiment, and a check that would appear as the righteous retribution for recklessness.

But no stir was seen in Oporto: the barges crossed for a second time unmolested: on their third trip they carried over General Edward Paget, whom Wellesley had placed in command of the whole movement. More than half the Buffs had passed, and the Seminary was beginning to be adequately manned, when at last some shots were heard outside the gates, and a few minutes later a line of French tirailleurs, supported by three battalions in column, came rushing down upon the enclosures. A full hour had passed between the moment when the first boatload of British soldiers had been thrown across the river, and the time when the French discovered them!

WELLESLEY’S PASSAGE OF THE DOURO.
N.B. The trees on the cliff to the right are close outside the enclosure of the Serra Convent: the roof of the Seminary is just visible over the crest of the hill on the other bank. In the background are the low slopes above Avintas.

The fact was that the enemy’s commander was in bed, and his staff breakfasting! The Duke of Dalmatia had sat up all night dictating dispatches, and making his arrangements for a leisurely flitting, for he intended to stay two days longer in Oporto, so as to cover the march of his other divisions towards Amarante and Villa Real. His desk-work finished, he went to bed at about nine o’clock[419], in full confidence that he was well protected by the river, and that Wellesley was probably engaged in the laborious task of bringing up boats to the mouth of the Douro, which would occupy him for at least twenty-four hours. The staff were taking their coffee, after a late déjeuner, when the hoof-beats of a furious rider startled them, and a moment later Brossard, the aide-de-camp of General Foy, burst into the Villa shouting that the English had got into the town. Led to the Marshal’s bedside, he hurriedly explained that Foy had just discovered the enemy passing by boats into the Seminary, and was massing his brigade for an attack upon them. The Marshal started up, sent his staff flying in all directions to warn the outlying troops, ordered all the remaining impedimenta to be sent off on the Vallongo road, and dispatched Brossard back to Foy to tell him to ‘push the English into the river.’ He was hardly dressed and on horseback, when the noise of a distant fusillade, followed by heavy artillery fire, gave the news that the attack on the Seminary had already begun.

It had been only at half-past ten that Foy, riding along the heights by the Chapel of Bom Fin, had been informed that there were boats on the river, filled with red-coated soldiery. It took him wellnigh three-quarters of an hour to bring up his nearest regiment, the 17th Léger, and only at 11.30 did the attack on the Seminary begin. The three battalions beset the northern and western sides of the Seminary, and made a vigorous attempt to break in, while some guns were hurried down to the river bank, just below the building, to fire upon the barges that were bringing up reinforcements.

Wellesley, from his eyrie on the Serra heights, had been watching for the long-expected outburst of the French. The moment that they came pressing forward, he gave orders for the eighteen guns in the convent garden to open upon them. The first shot fired, a round of shrapnel from the 5½-inch howitzer of Lane’s battery, burst just over the leading French gun on the further bank, as it was in the act of unlimbering, dismounted the piece, and by an extraordinary chance, killed or wounded every man and horse attached to it[420]. A moment later came the blast of the other seventeen guns, which swept the level ground to the west of the Seminary with awful effect. The French attack reeled back, and the survivors fled from the open ground into the houses of the suburb, leaving the disabled cannon behind them. Again and again they tried to creep forward, to flank the English stronghold, and to fire at the barges as they went and came, but on every occasion they were swept away by the hail of shrapnel. They could, therefore, only attack the Seminary on its northern front, where the buildings lay between them and the Serra height, and so screened them from the artillery. But in half an hour the 17th Léger was beaten off and terribly mauled; they had to cross an open space, the Prado do Bispo, in order to get near their adversaries, and the fire from the garden wall, the windows, and the flat roof of the edifice, swept them away before they could close.

Meanwhile the English suffered little: the only serious loss sustained was that of General Edward Paget, whose arm was shattered by a bullet. He was replaced in command by Hill, who (like him) had crossed in one of the earlier barges. The number of troops in the building was always growing larger, the Buffs were all across, and the 66th and 48th were beginning to follow.

After a short slackening in the engagement, General Delaborde came up, with the three battalions of the 70th of the line, to support his brigadier. This new force executed a far more sustained and desperate attack on the Seminary than had their predecessors. Hill in his letters home called it ‘the serious attack.’ But it had no better fortune than the last: a thousand English infantry, comfortably ensconced behind stone walls, and protected on their flanks by the storm of shot and shell from the opposite bank of the river, could not easily be moved. So well, indeed, were they covered, that in three hours’ fighting they only lost seventy-seven men[421], while the open ground outside was thickly strewn with the dead and wounded Frenchmen.

Soult was now growing desperate: he ordered up from the city Reynaud’s brigade, which had hitherto guarded the quays in the neighbourhood of the broken bridge. His intention was to make one more attack on the Seminary, and if that failed to draw off in the direction of Vallongo and Amarante. This move made an end of his chances; he had forgotten to reckon with the Portuguese. The moment that the quays were left unguarded, hundreds of citizens poured out of their houses and ran down to the water’s edge, where they launched all the boats that had been drawn ashore, and took them over to the English bank. Richard Stewart’s brigade and the Guards who had been waiting under cover of the houses of Villa Nova, immediately began to embark, and in a few moments the passage had begun. The 29th was first formed up on the northern bank, and dashed up the main street into the city, meeting little or no opposition; the 1st Battalion of Detachments and the Guards’ brigade soon followed. In half an hour they had come upon the flank of the French force which was attacking the Seminary, and had taken in the rear and captured one of Soult’s reserve batteries, whose horses were shot down before they could escape along a narrow lane. As the British went pouring through Oporto the whole population, half mad with joy, stood cheering at the windows and on the roofs, waving their handkerchiefs and shouting Viva. The rabble poured down into the streets, and began to attack the French wounded, so that Sherbrooke had to detach a company to protect them from assassination[422].

When Soult found himself thus attacked in the flank, he saw that there was no more to be done, and bade the whole army retreat at full speed along the road to Vallongo and Baltar. They went off in a confused mass, the regiments all mingled together, and the artillery jammed in the midst of the column. Hill came out of the Seminary and joined in the pursuit, which was urged for three miles. ‘They made no fight,’ writes an eye-witness, ‘every man seemed running for his life, throwing away their knapsacks and arms, so that we had only the trouble of making many prisoners every instant, all begging for quarter and surrendering with great good humour[423].’

The French army might have been still further mauled, and indeed almost destroyed, if Wellesley’s detached force under Murray had been well handled by its commander. The two battalions of the German Legion, with their attendant squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons, had crossed the Douro at the ferry of Barca d’ Avintas wholly unopposed. It was a slow business, but the detachment was over long ere Soult had abandoned his attack on the Seminary. Advancing cautiously along the river bank, Murray suddenly saw the whole French army come pouring past him in total disorder on the line of the Vallongo road. He might have made an attempt to throw himself across their path, or at least have fallen upon their flank and endeavoured to cut the column in two; but thinking them far too strong for his small force, and forgetting their demoralization, he halted and allowed them to go by. When all had passed, General Charles Stewart, who had been sent in search of Murray by the Commander-in-chief, came galloping up to the force, and took from it a squadron of the 14th[424], with which he made a dash at the enemy’s last troops. The French had now formed a sort of rearguard, but the dragoons rode into it without hesitation. The French generals were bringing up the rear, and trying to keep their men steady. Delaborde was unhorsed and for a moment was a prisoner, but escaped owing to his captor being killed. Foy received a sabre cut on the shoulder. The infantry broke, and nearly 300 of them were cut off and captured. But the dragoons also suffered heavily; of about 110 men who took part in the charge no less than thirty-five men were killed and wounded. Murray, who watched the whole skirmish from his position on a neighbouring hillside, gave no assistance to his cavalry, though the intervention of his two battalions would have led to the capture of the whole of Soult’s rearguard. It was to infantry of Sherbrooke’s division that the dragoons turned over their prisoners before rejoining their other squadron[425].

So ended the battle of Oporto, daring in its conception, splendidly successful in its execution, yet not so decisive as it might have been, had Murray but done his duty during the pursuit. The British loss was astoundingly small—only twenty-three killed, ninety-eight wounded, and two missing: among the dead there was not a single officer: the wounded included a general (Paget) and three majors. The casualties of the French were, as was natural, much greater: the attacks on the Seminary had cost them dear. They lost about 300 killed and wounded and nearly as many prisoners in the field, while more than 1,500 sick and wounded were captured in the hospitals of Oporto[426]. The trophies consisted of the six field-pieces taken during the fighting, a great number of baggage wagons, and fifty-two Portuguese guns, dismounted but fit for further service, which were found in the arsenal. Soult had destroyed, before retreating, the rest of the cannon which he had captured in the Portuguese lines on March 29.

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SECTION XIV: CHAPTER III

SOULT’S RETREAT FROM OPORTO

The headlong charge of Hervey’s squadron of the 14th Light Dragoons was the last molestation which fell to the lot of Soult’s retreating column on the afternoon of May 12. Marching till dark, the disordered infantry encamped at Baltar, ten miles from Oporto, where they fell in with the detached regiment of Delaborde’s division and with Caulaincourt’s dragoons, who had been guarding this half-way stage between Amarante and Oporto, ever since Loison had marched on into the Tras-os-Montes ten days before. Of the rest of the French army, Franceschi (always in the post of danger) covered the rear at Vallongo, just west of Baltar. Mermet, with the division that had marched from Oporto before Wellesley’s attack was developed, had encamped on the Souza river, four miles ahead of the main column. The Marshal had thus nearly 13,000 men concentrated, and proposed next day to push on for Amarante, in the wake of Loison, who (as he supposed) must now be well ahead in the Tras-os-Montes, clearing for him the way into Spain. It was disquieting, however, to find that no news from that general had yet come to hand—indeed he had not been heard of since May 7, when he was just starting out on his expedition. Wherever Loison might be, the Marshal was bound to follow him in haste, since it was certain that Wellesley would be close at his heels, and that no time was to be lost in lingering.

At half-past one in the morning Soult was roused from sleep, and informed that the long-expected messenger from Loison had at last arrived[427]. The news which he brought was nothing less than appalling: the French detached corps had been not only checked but beaten, the bridge of Amarante had been lost, and Loison was hastily retreating to the north-west at the moment that his chief was moving eastward to join him.

Beresford’s turning movement, in fact, had been completely successful—far more so than Wellesley had thought likely; he had not only succeeded in placing himself across the French line of retreat into Spain, but had beaten Loison and thrown him back into Soult’s arms.

What had happened was shortly this. On May 8 Beresford had picked up Wilson’s detachment at Vizeu: on the tenth he had met Silveira at Lamego. He had thus concentrated some 10,500 or 11,000 men, all Portuguese save Tilson’s brigade and the single squadron of the 14th Light Dragoons. Learning at Lamego that, as late as the ninth, Loison was still in the neighbourhood of Amarante, and had not yet penetrated far into the Tras-os-Montes, Beresford resolved to take the risk of passing the Douro and to throw his army directly across the path of the advancing French. On the tenth, the same day on which the force from Coimbra reached Lamego, he sent Silveira over the river by the bridge of Peso da Regoa, which had never passed out of the hands of the Portuguese and had a strong tête-de-pont on its northern side. Silveira had barely crossed when Loison, who had spent the previous day at Mezamfrio, ten miles away on the Amarante road, came up against him with Heudelet’s and Sarrut’s infantry and Marisy’s dragoons—about 6,500 sabres and bayonets. Emboldened by having entrenchments to help him, and by knowing that Beresford was close behind, Silveira stood firm at the tête-de-pont and accepted battle.

Loison was somewhat discouraged by his adversary’s confidence, and did not fail to note the masses of troops on the southern bank of the Douro, which were moving up to the bridge to support Silveira. However, late in the afternoon he attacked the Portuguese, but was steadily met and beaten off with some loss[428]. Thereupon he drew back and retired to Mezamfrio. On the following day (May 11) he continued his retreat to Amarante, closely pursued by Silveira, who kept driving in his rearguard wherever it attempted to make a stand.

Beresford meanwhile brought his own troops across the Douro on May 11, in the wake of Silveira’s division. On the twelfth he pushed forward to Amarante, intending to fight Loison if the latter should try to hold his ground beyond the bridge. But on his approach he found that the French rearguard (Sarrut’s brigade) had already been driven across the water by the Portuguese[429]. The bridge, however, still remained in Loison’s hands, and as it was no less defensible from the eastern than from the western bank, the army could get no further forward.

Matters were now at a deadlock, for if Beresford could not cross the Tamega, it was clear that Loison, even if heavily reinforced from Oporto, would not be able to force the imposing position on the heights commanding the bridge, which was now held by 11,000 men, including a British brigade. But he might, and should, have continued to hold the town and the bridge-head, till further orders reached him from Soult. Instead of doing so, he made up his mind to retreat at once, and marched off early on the evening of May 12 along the road to Guimaraens and Braga. Thus at the moment when Soult was retiring on Amarante, Loison abandoned the position which covered his chief’s chosen line of retreat. Moreover, he was so tardy in sending news of his intentions to head quarters, that the aide-de-camp who bore his dispatch only reached Baltar after midnight on the twelfth-thirteenth: this was the first report that Soult had received from him since May 8. It was a military crime of the highest magnitude that he had neither informed his chief of the check at Peso da Regoa on the tenth, nor of his retreat to Amarante on the eleventh. Knowledge of these facts would have been invaluable to the Marshal, since it would have shown him that the route through the Tras-os-Montes was blocked, and that he must not count upon an undisturbed retreat into Spain. If he had known of this, he would not have evacuated Oporto by the Baltar road, but would have been forced to march northward on Braga or Guimaraens, instead of due east. So strange, in fact, was Loison’s slackness, that Soult’s advocates have not hesitated to accuse him of deliberate treachery, and have hinted that he was engaged in Argenton’s plot—a hypothesis which would have explained his conduct clearly enough. But, as a matter of fact, Argenton’s revelations to Wellesley show that this was not the case, and that the conspirators looked upon Loison and Delaborde as the two officers who were most likely to give them trouble. It must therefore have been sheer military incapacity, and disgust at the whole Portuguese expedition, which lay at the bottom of Loison’s misbehaviour. Disbelieving in Soult’s plan of campaign, he was probably bent on compelling his chief to retire to Braga, and was (of course) quite ignorant of the fact that Wellesley’s capture of Oporto had changed the whole face of affairs, and that the retreat in that direction was no longer open.

Despondent, tired out by the work of the preceding day, and suffering physically from a heavy fall from his horse during the retreat, Soult was roused from his slumbers to read Loison’s disastrous dispatch. When he had made out its full meaning he was appalled. All his plans were shattered, and he was clearly in imminent danger, for Wellesley from Oporto and Beresford from Amarante might converge upon him in the morning, with nearly 30,000 men, if it should chance that they had made out his position. No help could come from Loison, who, having now reached Guimaraens, was separated from the main body by the roadless expanse of the rugged Serra de Santa Catalina. Eastward lay one hostile force, westward another, to the south was the impassable Douro, to the north the inhospitable mountains. It was useless to think of making a desperate dash at Beresford’s army: in open ground an attack on the Portuguese might have been practicable, but the bridge of Amarante was a post impossible to force in a hurry, and while the attack on it was in progress, it was certain that Wellesley would come up from the rear. The situation and the results of Baylen would inevitably be reproduced.

Realizing this, the Duke of Dalmatia came to the conclusion that the only course open to him was to abandon everything that could not be carried on his men’s backs, and to make a desperate attempt to cross the Serra de Santa Catalina before the news of his straits had reached the enemy. He imagined that there must be some sort of a footpath from Baltar or Penafiel to Guimaraens: in a thickly peopled country like Northern Portugal, the hill-folk have short cuts of their own—the only difficulty for the stranger is to discover them. Hasty inquiries in the bivouac of the army produced a Navarese camp-follower, who said that he knew the localities and could point out a bad mule-track, which climbed the hillside above the Souza torrent, and came down into the valley of the Avé, not far south of Guimaraens[430]. It was the kind of path in which the army would meet every sort of difficulty, and where the head of the column might be stopped by a couple of hundred Ordenanza, if it should chance that the Portuguese peasantry were on the alert. But it seemed the only practicable way out of the situation, and the Marshal resolved to try it.

At daybreak the army was warned of its danger; and wasting no time on councils of war or elaborate orders, Soult sent round word that the troops were to abandon everything that could not be carried on the backs of men or horses, and to take to the hills. An immense mass of baggage and plunder had to be left on the banks of the Souza, including the whole of the heavy convoy which Mermet had escorted out of Oporto on the previous day. The Marshal even decided that the infantry should turn out of their knapsacks everything except food and cartridges, an order which those who had in their possession gold plate and other valuable plunder of small bulk took care to disobey. The cannon were destroyed by being placed mouth to mouth and discharged simultaneously in pairs. As much of the reserve ammunition for infantry as could be packed in convenient bundles was laden on the backs of the artillery horses. The rest, with all the powder wagons, was collected in a mass, ready to be fired when the army should have absconded. One curious circumstance, which displays better than anything else the hurry of the retreat, is worth mentioning. The military chest of the 2nd Corps was well filled—it is said to have contained nearly £50,000 in Portuguese silver. The Marshal ordered the paymaster-in-chief to serve out all that he could to the regimental paymasters. Only two of these officials could be found, and they were unable to carry off more than a fraction of the money. Soult then ordered the treasure-chests to be broken open, and sent word that the men, as they passed, might help themselves. But hardly a soldier took advantage of the offer: they looked at the bulky bags of cruzados novos, shook their heads, and hurried on. Those who were tempted at first were seen, later in the day, tossing the weighty pieces into the ravine of the Souza. Perceiving that there was no way of getting rid of the mass of silver, Soult at last ordered the fourgons containing it to be dragged alongside of the powder wagons. When the train was exploded, after the rearguard had passed, the money was scattered to the winds. For years after the peasants of Penafiel were picking up stray coins on the hillside[431].

As the French army was beginning its weary climb over the Serra de Santa Catalina a heavy drenching rain commenced to fall. It lasted for three days, and added much to the miseries of the retreat; but it was not without its advantages to the fugitive host, for it kept the Portuguese peasantry indoors, and it would seem that no one in the mountain villages got wind of the movement for many hours. It was not till the French had crossed the ridge and descended, late in the dusk, on to the village of Pombeiro in the valley of the Avé that they began to be molested by the Ordenanza. After a few shots had been fired the peasants were driven off. Next morning [May 14] Soult got into communication with Loison, who was still lying at Guimaraens with all his troops. On the same day Lorges’ dragoons and the garrison of Viana came in from the north, and the whole army, still over 20,000 strong, was reconcentrated. The first danger, that of destruction piecemeal, had been avoided. But Soult’s desperate move had only warded off the peril for the moment: he had still to fear that Wellesley and Beresford might close in upon him before he could get clear of the mountains.

It remains to be seen how the two British generals had employed the day during which the French were scaling the heights of the Serra de Santa Catalina. Wellesley had crossed in person to Oporto long ere the fighting was over, and had established his head quarters in Soult’s villa on the heights, where he and his staff thought themselves fortunate in finding ready for their consumption the excellent dinner which had been prepared for the Marshal. As long as daylight lasted the British infantry continued to be ferried over to the city, but they were not all across when night fell. The artillery, the train, and all the regimental baggage were still on the wrong side of the river, and as the great bridge was destroyed beyond hope of repair, all the impedimenta had to be brought over in boats and barges. It was mainly this fact that delayed Wellesley from making an early move on the thirteenth. He could not advance without his guns and his reserve ammunition, and did not receive them till the day was far spent and the natural hour for marching was past. There were other circumstances which hindered him from pressing on as he would have liked to do. The infantry were tired out: they had marched more than eighty miles during the last four days, and had fought hard at Grijon and Oporto. Human nature could do no more without a halt, and Wellesley was forced to grant it. Moreover, there was the question of food to be taken into consideration. The troops had outrun their supplies, and the provision wagons were still trailing up from Coimbra. In Oporto no stores of any importance were discovered, for Soult had stopped collecting more than he could carry, the moment that he made up his mind to retreat, and had been living from hand to mouth during the last few days of his sojourn in the city. The only thing that abounded was port wine, and from that the soldiers had to be kept away, or results disastrous to discipline would have followed[432].

With great reluctance, therefore, Wellesley resolved to halt for a day, only sending forward Murray and the German Legion, with a couple of squadrons, along the Baltar road. This brigade did not come up with Soult’s rearguard, though they found ample traces of his passage in the shape of murdered stragglers and abandoned plunder. No doubt the Commander-in-chief would have directed them to push on further, and have supported them with every battalion that could still march ten miles, if only he had been aware of the fact that Beresford had got possession of the bridge of Amarante, and that the enemy was therefore in a trap. But he was only in communication with his lieutenant by the circuitous route of Lamego and Mezamfrio, and the last news that he had received of the turning column led him to believe that it was still in the neighbourhood of Villa Real, and that Loison continued to hold the passage of the Tamega. Writing to Beresford on the night of the capture of Oporto, he desired him to make every effort to hold on to Villa Real, and to keep Soult in check till he himself could overtake him[433].

It was not till the afternoon of the thirteenth that Wellesley obtained information that put him on the right track. The intelligence officer with Murray’s column[434] sent him back word that heavy explosions had been heard at Penafiel, and that the smoke of large fires was visible along the hillside above it. This gave a strong hint of what was probably taking place in that direction, but it was not till five in the afternoon that full information came to hand. This was brought by the Portuguese secretary of General Quesnel, who had deserted his employer and ridden back to Oporto, to give the valuable news which would save him from being tried for treason for serving the enemy. He gave an accurate and detailed account of all that had happened to Soult’s column, and had seen it start off on the break-neck path to Guimaraens. Only about Loison was he uncertain—that officer, he said, was probably still at Amarante, holding back Silveira and Beresford[435].

On receipt of this important intelligence Wellesley sent orders to Murray to press on his small force of cavalry, and some mounted rifles (if he could secure horses or mules) as far as Penafiel, to verify the secretary’s information[436]. A later dispatch bade him press on to Amarante, if Loison was still there, in order to take that officer in the rear; but if he were gone, the Legionary brigade was to follow Soult over the hills towards Guimaraens and Braga, and endeavour to catch up his rearguard[437]. The orders arrived too late: Murray, on the morning of the fourteenth, learnt that Loison had long ago departed, and that Soult was far on his way. He followed the Marshal across the Serra de Santa Catalina, but never got near him, though he picked up many French stragglers, and saw the bodies of many more, who had been assassinated by the peasantry[438].

Meanwhile Beresford had acted with great decision, and with an intelligence which he did not always display. When, on the morning of the thirteenth, he found that the French had disappeared, and that Amarante (after having been thoroughly sacked)[439] had been abandoned to him, he did not waste time in a fruitless pursuit of Loison in the direction of Guimaraens, but resolved to endeavour to cut off the retreat of the whole French army towards the north. If they had absconded by way of Braga, the chase would fall to Wellesley’s share, but if they had taken the other road by Chaves, all would depend on his own movements. Accordingly he resolved to march at once on the last named town, without waiting for orders from the Commander-in-chief. Having hastily collected three days’ provisions, he moved off himself by the high-road up the valley of the Tamega, detaching Silveira and his division to strike across country, and occupy the defiles of Ruivaens and Salamonde on the Braga-Chaves road, where it would be possible to detain, if not to stop, the retreating columns of Soult if they should take this way [May 14]. While on his march Beresford received Wellesley’s letters, which prescribed to him exactly the line of conduct that he had already determined to pursue[440]. After three difficult marches in drenching rain, which turned every rivulet into an almost impassable torrent, and spoilt the inadequate provision of bread which had been served out to the men, the division reached Chaves about 12 p.m. on the night of the sixteenth-seventeenth. The men were absolutely exhausted; though the distance covered had not exceeded some fourteen or fifteen miles per day, yet the rain, the starvation, and the bad road had much thinned the ranks, and those who had kept up with the colours were dropping with fatigue. The slowness of the column’s advance was certainly not Beresford’s fault; he had allowed only a six hours’ halt each day on the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, and had been pushing on as hard as was, humanly speaking, possible. Nevertheless he was too late: on the seventeenth, the all-important day of the campaign, he held Chaves, but his troops were too tired to start early or to march far. The bad weather which made the French retreat so miserable, had at least saved the flying army from its pursuers[441].

Soult meanwhile had gathered in Loison and Lorges, and his whole army was concentrated at Guimaraens on the morning of the fourteenth. From the point where he now lay, in the upper valley of the Avé, there are only two carriage roads, that to Amarante by which Loison had arrived, and that to Braga. There was a bare chance that if Wellesley had received his information late, and moved slowly, it might be possible to escape from him by the road to Braga. If, however, he had marched promptly from Oporto, he would be able to intercept the retreating army at that place. Soult refused to take this risk, and resolved instead to plunge once more into the mountains, and to cross the watershed between the Avé and the Cavado by a rugged hill-path, no better than that which had served him between Penafiel and Guimaraens. It was accordingly necessary to sacrifice all the guns, munitions, and baggage belonging to Loison and Lorges, just as those of Mermet and Delaborde had been destroyed on the banks of the Souza. The guns were burst, the ammunition exploded, the baggage piled in heaps and burned. After this second holocaust the army struck up a track by the Salto torrent, which ultimately brought them over the crest, and down upon the village of Lanhozo, eight miles from Braga, and just at the foot of the position which Eben had occupied during his unhappy battle on March 20. The weather had been abominable, and the rearguard had been forced to bivouac in misery on the hills, the darkness having come down upon them before the descent into the valley of the Cavado was completed.

Next morning Soult sent out Lahoussaye’s dragoons down the valley of the Cavado towards Braga, to see if that city was already in Wellesley’s hands or whether it was still possible to escape across his front and gain the high road to Galicia. As the Marshal had feared would be the case, they met British light cavalry pushing briskly up the road towards them; it was clear that the pursuers were already in Braga, and Soult at once ordered his columns to turn their faces to the north-east, and follow the road up the Cavado towards Salamonde and Ruivaens. The British were ere long visible in close pursuit.

Sir Arthur had quitted Oporto on the fourteenth with his whole force except the brigade of Murray, which had already gone forth on the eastern line of pursuit, and the 20th Light Dragoons, which he had been ordered to send back to Lisbon. On that day his army covered twenty-two miles of road in vile weather, and slept at Villa Nova de Famelicção. On the fifteenth the British started early, and their vanguard had already marched twelve miles and reached Braga when the French dragoons were descried. The latter, seeing themselves forestalled, retired on their main body, and when Wellesley’s men mounted the crest of the Monte Adaufé (Eben’s old position in the battle of March 20), they caught a glimpse of the whole French army retiring up the valley. Soult, immediately on hearing that the pursuers were in Braga, had commenced a new retreat. He had rearranged his order of march. Loison now led the column, with Heudelet’s division and Lorges’ dragoons: then came the droves of artillery horses and pack-mules, with the reserve ammunition and the little baggage that had been saved, followed by Delaborde and Mermet. Merle’s infantry and Franceschi’s horse were in the rear, under the Marshal’s own command. In this order the French remounted the stream of the Cavado as far as Salamonde, where the broad valley narrows down to a defile. They were followed by the British light dragoons, but the infantry of the pursuing column had not got far beyond Braga, where Wellesley’s head quarters were established that night. Murray’s German brigade, which had crossed the mountains from Guimaraens in Soult’s wake, joined the main body on this evening.

On reaching Salamonde Soult was informed by the cavalry in his front that they had been brought to stand at the bridge of Ponte Nova, a few miles up the defile, by a body of Ordenanza, who had taken up the wooden flooring of the bridge, torn down its balustrades, and barricaded themselves upon the further side. Unless they could be dislodged ruin stared the Marshal in the face: for the British were close in his rear, and there was no lateral line of escape from the precipitous defile. Surrender next morning must follow. In this crisis Soult saw no chance of safety before him save a dash at the half-demolished bridge. When darkness had fallen he sent for Major Dulong, an officer of the 31st Léger, who enjoyed the reputation of being the most daring man in the whole army, and told him that he must surprise the Portuguese by a sudden rush at midnight, and win the passage at all costs. He was allowed to pick 100 volunteers from his own regiment for the enterprise.

The safety of a whole army has seldom depended upon a more desperate venture than that which Dulong took in hand. Nothing remained of the bridge save the two large cross-beams, no more than three or four feet broad; they were slippery with continuous rain, and had to be passed in complete darkness under the driving sleet of a bitter north wind. Fortunately for the assailants the same cold and wet which made their enterprise so dangerous had driven the Ordenanza under cover: they had retired to some huts a little way beyond the bridge. If they left any one on guard, the sentinel had followed his friends, for when Dulong and his party crept up to the passage they found it absolutely deserted. They crossed in single file, and reached the further side unobserved, losing one man who slipped and fell into the fierce river below. A moment later they came on the Portuguese, who were surprised in their sleep: many were bayonetted, the rest fled in dismay—they were but a few score of peasants, and were helpless when once the passage had been won.

For six hours Soult’s sappers were working hard to replace the flooring of the ruined bridge with tree trunks, and boards torn from the houses of the neighbouring village. At eight it was practicable, and the troops began to cross. It was a long business: for 20,000 men with 4,000 cavalry horses and a great drove of pack-animals had to be passed over the narrow, rickety, and uneven structure, whose balustrades had not been replaced. All the day was spent in hurrying the troops across, but they got forward so slowly that Soult saw himself forced to place a strong rearguard in position, to hold back the pursuers till the main body was safe. He left behind a brigade of Merle’s division, and two of Franceschi’s cavalry regiments, ranged behind a lateral ravine which crosses the road some distance below the bridge. They were placed with their right on the rough river bank and their left on the cliffs which overhang the road; orders were given to the effect that they must hold on at all costs till the army had completed the passage of the Ponte Nova. At half-past one the British light dragoons arrived in front of the position, saw that they could not force it, and started a bickering fire with the French pickets, while they waited for the main body to come up.

Owing to the long distance which Wellesley’s infantry had to cover, the day wore on without any serious collision on this point. But meanwhile Soult found that another and more serious danger lay ahead of him. After crossing the Cavado at the Ponte Nova there were two paths available for the army—the main road leads eastward to Chaves by way of Ruivaens, a branch, however, turns off north to Montalegre and the sources of the Misarella, the main affluent of the Cavado. The former was the easier, but there was a grave doubt whether Chaves might not already be in the hands of Beresford and his turning column—as a matter of fact it only arrived there a few hours after Soult stood uncertain at the parting of the ways. Bearing this in mind, the Marshal resolved to take the more rugged and difficult path; but when Loison and the vanguard were engaged in it they found that the bridge over the Misarella, the Saltador as it was called from the bold leap which its single arch makes across the torrent, was held against them. Again it was only with Ordenanza that the army had to deal: Beresford had just reached Chaves, but his troops were some miles further back; Silveira, who ought to have been at Ruivaens that morning, had not appeared at all. But Major Warre, an officer of Beresford’s staff, had ridden ahead to rouse the peasantry, and had collected several hundred half-armed levies at the Saltador bridge, which he encouraged them to hold, promising that the regulars would be up to support them before nightfall. Unfortunately he could not persuade them to destroy the bridge, on which all the cross-communications of the Misarella valley depend. But they had thrown down its parapets, built an abattis across its head, and thrown up earthworks on each side of it so as to command the opposite bank. This, unhappily, was not enough to hold back 20,000 desperate men, who saw their only way of salvation on the opposite bank.

When Loison found his advance barred, he made an appeal to that same Major Dulong who had forced the Ponte Nova on the preceding night. Again that daring soldier volunteered to conduct the forlorn hope: he was given a company of voltigeurs to lead the column, and two battalions of Heudelet’s division to back them. Forming the whole in one continuous mass—there was only room for four men abreast—he dashed down towards the bridge amid a spluttering and ineffective fire from the Portuguese entrenchments on the opposite bank. The column reached the arch, passed it, was checked but a moment while tearing down the abattis, and then plunged in among the scared Ordenanza, who fled in every direction, leaving the passage free. Dulong was wounded, but no more than eighteen of his companions were hit, and at this small sacrifice the army was saved. Late in the afternoon the whole mass began to stream up the Montalegre road; they had no longer anything more to fear than stray shots from the scattered Ordenanza, who hung about on the hillsides, firing into the column from inaccessible rocks, but doing little damage.

If Dulong had failed at the Saltador Soult would have been lost, for just as the passage was forced the rumbling of cannon began to be heard from the rear. Merle was attacked by the British, and was being driven in. At five o’clock the Guards’ brigade, forming the head of Wellesley’s infantry, had come up with the French rearguard. It was formidably posted, but Sir Arthur thought that it might be dislodged. Accordingly he placed the two three-pounders, which accompanied the column, on the high road, and began to batter the French centre, while he sent off the three light companies of the brigade[442] to turn the French left flank on the cliffs to the south. When the crackling of their musketry was heard among the rocks, he silenced his guns and flung the Guards upon the enemy’s main body. They broke, turned, and fled in confusion, though the regiment on the road, the 4th Léger, was considered one of the best in the French army[443].

The chase continued as far as the Ponte Nova, which the broken troops crossed in a struggling mass, thrusting each other over the edge (where the balustrades were wanting) till the torrent below was choked with dead men and horses. The British guns were brought up and played upon the weltering crowd with dreadful effect. But the night was already coming on, and the darkness hid from the pursuers the full effect of their own fire. They halted and encamped, having slain many and taken about fifty prisoners, of whom one was an officer. It was only at daybreak that they realized the terrors through which the French had passed. ‘The rocky bed of the Cavado,’ says an eye-witness, ‘presented an extraordinary spectacle. Men and horses, sumpter animals and baggage, had been precipitated into the river, and literally choked its course. Here, with these fatal accompaniments of death and dismay, was disgorged the last of the plunder of Oporto. All kinds of valuable goods were left on the road, while above 300 horses, sunk in the water, and mules laden with baggage, fell into the hands of the grenadier and light companies of the Guards. These active-fingered gentry found that fishing for boxes and bodies out of the stream produced pieces of plate, and purses and belts full of gold money. Amid the scenes of death and desolation arose their shouts of the most noisy merriment[444].’

On the night of the 17th Soult’s army poured into Montalegre, a dilapidated old town on the edge of the frontier, from which all the inhabitants had fled. Little or no food could be procured, and the houses did not suffice to shelter more than a part of the troops. Next morning the 2nd Corps took to its heels once more, and climbed the Serra de Gerez, which lies just above the town. On descending its northern slope they had at last entered Spain, and had reached safety. But the country was absolutely desolate: for twenty miles beyond Montalegre there was hardly a single village on this rugged by-path. Still dreading pursuit, the Marshal urged on his men as fast as they could be driven forward, and in two long marches at last reached Orense.

Wellesley, however, had given up any hope of catching the 2nd Corps, when once it had passed the Saltador and reached the Spanish frontier. He had halted the British infantry at Ruivaens, and only sent on in chase of the flying host the 14th Light Dragoons and the division of Silveira, which had at last appeared on the scene late in the evening of the seventeenth. What this corps had been doing during the last forty-eight hours it is impossible to discover. It had started from Amarante on the same day that Beresford marched for Chaves, and ought to have been at Ruivaens on the sixteenth, when it would have found itself just in time to intercept Soult’s vanguard after it had passed the Ponte Nova. Apparently the same wild weather and constant rain which had delayed Beresford’s column had checked his subordinate. At any rate it is certain that Silveira, though he had a shorter route than his chief, only got to Ruivaens late on the seventeenth, while the other column had reached Chaves more than twelve hours earlier.

The French had disappeared, and it was only next morning that Silveira followed them up on the Montalegre road. He captured a few laggards by the way, but on reaching the little town found that Soult’s rearguard had quitted it two hours before his arrival[445]. By Wellesley’s orders he pushed on for one day more in pursuit, but found that the enemy was now so far ahead that he could do no more than pick up moribund stragglers. On the nineteenth, therefore, he turned back and retraced his steps to Montalegre[446].

Much the same fortune had befallen Beresford’s column. By Wellesley’s orders Tilson’s brigade and their Portuguese companions marched from Chaves by Monterey on the eighteenth, on the chance that Soult, after passing the Serra de Gerez, might drop into the Monterey-Orense road. But the Marshal had not taken this route: he had kept to by-paths, and marched by Porquera and Allariz, to the left of the line on which Beresford’s pursuit was directed. At Ginzo the cavalry of the pursuing column picked up fifty stragglers, and came into contact with a small party of Franceschi’s chasseurs, which Soult had thrown out to cover his flank. Learning from the peasantry that the French had gone off by a different route, Beresford halted and returned to Chaves. His men were so thoroughly worn out, and the strength of the column was so much reduced, that he could have done little more even if he had come upon the main body of the enemy[447].

On May 19 Soult’s dilapidated and starving host poured into Orense, where they could at last take a day’s rest and obtain a decent meal. The Marshal caused the troops to be numbered, and found that he had brought back 19,713 men. As he had started from the Spanish frontier with 22,000 sabres and bayonets, and had received 3,500 more from Tuy, when Lamartinière’s column joined him, it would appear that he had left in all some 5,700 men behind him. Of these, according to the French accounts[448], about 1,000 had fallen in the early fighting, or died of sickness, before Wellesley’s appearance on the Vouga. About 700, mostly convalescents, had been captured at Chaves by Silveira[449]. After the storm of Oporto the British army found 1,500 sick in the hospitals of that city, of Braga and of Viana[450]. They also took some 400 unwounded prisoners at Oporto and at Grijon[451]. It results therefore that the losses of the actual retreat from Baltar to Orense, between the thirteenth and the nineteenth of May, must have been rather more than 2,000 men. But all these had been able-bodied fighting-men—the sick, as we have seen, were abandoned before the break-neck march over the mountains began: adding them and the prisoners of the eleventh-twelfth, to the actual casualties of the retreat, on the same principle which we used when calculating the losses of Moore’s army in the Corunna campaign, we should get a total of 4,000 for the deficiency in the French ranks during the nine days which elapsed between Wellesley’s passage of the Vouga and Soult’s arrival at Orense. Thus it would seem that about one-sixth of the 2nd Corps had been destroyed in that short time—a proportion almost exactly corresponding to that which Moore’s force left behind it in the retreat from Sahagun to Corunna, wherein 6,000 men out of 33,000 were lost.

In other respects these two famous retreats afford some interesting points of comparison. Moore had an infinitely longer distance to cover: in mere mileage his men marched more than twice as far as Soult’s[452]: their journey occupied twenty days as against nine. On the other hand the French had to use far worse roads. From Benavente to Corunna there is a good chaussée for the whole distance: from Baltar to Orense the 2nd Corps had to follow impracticable mule-tracks for more than half the way. As to the weather, there was perhaps little to choose between the two retreats: the nine days of perpetual rain, during which Soult effected his passage of four successive mountain chains, was almost as trying as the cold and snow through which the British had to trudge. Moore’s men were not so hardly pressed by starvation as the 2nd Corps, and they were moving through a country-side which was not actively hostile, if it could scarcely be described as friendly. On the other hand they were pursued with far greater vigour than the French: their rearguard was beset every day, and had constantly to be fighting, while Soult’s troops were hard pressed only on two days—the sixteenth and seventeenth of May. This advantage the Marshal gained by choosing an unexpected line of retreat over obscure by-paths: if he had taken either of the high-roads by Braga and Chaves his fate would have been very different. On this same choice of roads depends another contrast between the two retreats: to gain speed and safety Soult sacrificed the whole of his artillery and his transport. When he arrived at Orense, as one of his officers wrote, ‘the infantry had brought off their bayonets and their eagles, the cavalry their horses and saddles—everything else had been left behind—the guns, the stores, the treasure, the sick.’ Moore, in spite of all the miseries of his march, carried down to Corunna the whole of his artillery, part of his transport, and the greater number of his sick and wounded. If he lost his military chest, it was not from necessity but from the mismanagement of the subordinates who had charge of it. His army was in condition to fight a successful battle at the end of its retreat, and so to win for itself a safe and honourable departure.

Both generals, it will be observed, were driven into danger by causes for which they did not regard themselves as responsible. Soult was placed in peril by attempting to carry out his master’s impracticable orders. Moore thought himself bound to run the risk, because he had realized that there was a political necessity that the English army should do something for the cause of Spain, for it could not with honour retire to Portugal before it had struck a blow. In their management of their respective campaigns both made mistakes. Moore hurried his men too much, and did not take full advantage of the many positions in which he could have held off the pursuer by judicious rearguard actions. Soult’s faults were even greater: nothing can excuse his stay at Oporto during the days when he should have been directing Loison’s movements at Amarante. That stay was undoubtedly due to his vain intrigues with the Portuguese malcontents; it was personal ambition, not any military necessity, which detained him from his proper place. Still more worthy of blame was his disposition of his forces at the moment when the British troops crossed the Vouga: they were scattered in a dangerous fashion, which made concentration difficult and uncertain. But the weakest feature of his whole conduct was that he allowed himself to be surprised in Oporto by Wellesley on May 12. When an army in close touch with the enemy is taken unawares at broad midday, by an irruption of its opponents into the middle of the cantonments, the general-in-chief cannot shift the blame on to the shoulders of subordinates. It was Soult’s duty to see that his officers were taking all reasonable precautions to watch the British, and he most certainly did not do so. Indeed, we have seen that he turned all his attention to the point of least danger—the lower reaches of the Douro—and neglected that on which the British attack was really delivered. It was only when he found himself on the verge of utter ruin, on May 13, that he rose to the occasion, and saved his army, by the daring march upon Guimaraens which foiled Wellesley’s plans for intercepting his retreat. To state that ‘his reputation as a general was nowise diminished by his Portuguese campaign’ is to do him more than justice[453]. It would be more true to assert that he showed that if he could commit faults, he could also do much towards repairing their consequences.

As to Wellesley, it is not too much to say that the Oporto campaign is one of his strongest titles to fame. He had, as we have already seen, only 16,400 British and 11,400 Portuguese troops[454], of whom the latter were either untried in the field or demoralized by their previous experiences beyond the Douro. His superiority in mere numbers to Soult’s corps of 23,000 men was therefore small, and he was lamentably destitute of cavalry and artillery. It was no small feat to expel the enemy from Northern Portugal in nine days, and to cast him into Galicia, stripped of his guns and baggage, and with a gap of more than 4,000 men in his ranks. This had been accomplished at the expense of no more than 500 casualties, even when the soldiers who fell by the way from sickness and fatigue are added to the 300 killed and wounded of the engagements of May 11, 12, and 17. There is hardly a campaign in history in which so much was accomplished at so small a cost. Wellesley had exactly carried out the programme which he had set before himself when he left Lisbon—the defeat of the enemy and the deliverance of the two provinces beyond the Douro. He had expressly disclaimed any intention or expectation of destroying or capturing the 2nd Corps[455], which some foreign critics have ascribed to him in their anxiety to make out that he failed to execute the whole project that he had taken in hand.

There was, it is true, one short moment at which he had it in his power to deal Soult a heavier blow than he had contemplated. On the night of May 12-13, when the Marshal in his bivouac at Baltar learnt of Loison’s evacuation of Amarante, the main body of the 2nd Corps was in a deplorable situation, and must have been destroyed, had the British been close at hand. If Wellesley had pursued the flying foe, on the afternoon of the victory of Oporto, with all his cavalry and the less fatigued regiments of his infantry, nothing could have saved the French. But the opportunity was one which could not have been foreseen: no rational officer could have guessed that Loison would evacuate Amarante, and so surrender his chief’s best line of retreat. It was impossible that Wellesley should dream of such a chance being thrown into his hands. He constructed his plans on the natural hypothesis that Soult had still open to him the route across the Tamega; and he was therefore more concerned with the idea that Beresford might be in danger from the approach of Soult, than with that of taking measures to capture the Marshal. His men were fatigued with the long march of eighty miles in four days which had taken them from the Mondego to Oporto: his guns and stores had not yet passed the bridgeless Douro. It was natural, therefore, that he should allow himself and his army a night’s rest before pressing on in pursuit of Soult. It will be remembered that he did push Murray’s brigade along the Baltar road in the tracks of the Marshal, but that officer never came up with the French. If blame has to be allotted to any one for the failure to discover the unhappy situation of the 2nd Corps upon the morning of the thirteenth, it would seem that Murray must bear the burden rather than the Commander-in-chief. He should have kept touch, at all costs, with the retreating French, and if he had done so would have been able to give Wellesley news of their desperate plight.

As to the pursuit of Soult, between the fourteenth and the eighteenth, it is hard to see that more could have been done than was actually accomplished. ‘It is obvious,’ as Wellesley wrote to Castlereagh, ‘that if an army throws away all its cannon, equipment, and baggage, and everything that can strengthen it and enable it to act together as a body; and if it abandons all those who are entitled to its protection, but add to its weight and impede its progress[456], it must be able to march by roads on which it can not be followed, with any prospect of being overtaken, by an army which has not made the same sacrifices[457].’ This puts the case in a nutshell: Soult, after he had abandoned his sick and destroyed his guns and wagons, could go much faster than his pursuers. The only chance of catching him was that Beresford or Silveira might be able to intercept him at the Misarella on the seventeenth. But the troops of the former were so exhausted by their long march in the rain from Amarante, that although they reached Chaves on the night of the sixteenth-seventeenth, they were not in a condition to march eighteen miles further on the following morning. Whether Silveira, who had taken a shorter but a more rugged route than Beresford, might not have reached Ruivaens ten or twelve hours earlier than he did is another matter. Had he done so, he might have held the cross-roads and blocked the way to Montalegre. We have no details of his march, though we know that he had a bad mountain-path to traverse in abominable weather. All military critics have joined in condemning him[458], but without a more accurate knowledge of the obstacles that he had to cross, and of the state of his troops, we can not be sure of the exact amount of blame that should fall upon him. It is at any rate clear that Wellesley was not responsible for the late arrival of the Portuguese division at Ruivaens and the consequent escape of the enemy.

[[Erratum from p. xii]: A dispatch of Beresford at Lisbon clears up my doubts as to Silveira’s culpability. Beresford complains that the latter lost a whole day by marching from Amarante to Villa Pouca without orders; the dispatch directing him to take the path by Mondim thus reached him only when he had gone many miles on the wrong road. The time lost could never be made up.]

Beyond Montalegre it would have been useless to follow the flying French. An advance into Galicia would have taken the British army too far from Lisbon, and have rendered it impossible to return in time to the Tagus if Victor should be on the move. That marshal, as we shall see, was showing signs of stirring from his long spell of torpidity, and it was a dispatch from Mackenzie, containing the news that the 1st Corps was on the move, that made Wellesley specially anxious to check the pursuit, and to draw back to Central Portugal before matters should come to a head in Estremadura. He could safely calculate that it would be months rather than weeks before Soult would be in a condition to cause any trouble on the northern frontier.

N.B.—There are admirable accounts of the horrors of Soult’s retreat in the works of Le Noble, St. Chamans, Fantin des Odoards, and Naylies. The pursuit of the main body of the English army is well described by four eye-witnesses—Lord Londonderry, Stothert, Hawker, and Lord Munster. For the march of Beresford’s corps I have only the details given by Lord Gough’s letter, cited heretofore.

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